that I make a split-second decision – and in a mad frenzy I thrust the damaged guitar up into the ceiling over and over again. What had been a clean break becomes a splintered mess. I hold the guitar up to the crowd triumphantly. I haven’t smashed it: I’ve sculpted it for them. I throw the shattered guitar carelessly to the ground, pick up my brand-new Rickenbacker twelve-string and continue the show.
That Tuesday night I stumbled upon something more powerful than words, far more emotive than my white-boy attempts to play the blues. And in response I received the full-throated salute of the crowd. A week or so later, at the same venue, I ran out of guitars and toppled the stack of Marshall amplifiers. Not one to be upstaged, our drummer Keith Moon joined in by kicking over his drumkit. Roger started to scrape his microphone on Keith’s cracked cymbals. Some people viewed the destruction as a gimmick, but I knew the world was changing, and a message was being conveyed. The old, conventional way of making music would never be the same.
I had no idea what the first smashing of my guitar would lead to, but I had a good idea where it all came from. As the son of a clarinettist and saxophonist in the Squadronaires, the prototypical British Swing band, I had been nourished by my love for that music, a love I would betray for a new passion: rock ’n’ roll, the music that came to destroy it.
I am British. I am a Londoner. I was born in West London just as the devastating Second World War came to a close. As a working artist I have been significantly shaped by these three facts, just as the lives of my grandparents and parents were shaped by the darkness of war. I was brought up in a period when war still cast shadows, though in my life the weather changed so rapidly it was impossible to know what was in store. War had been a real threat or a fact for three generations of my family.
In 1945 popular music had a serious purpose: to defy postwar depression and revitalise the romantic and hopeful aspirations of an exhausted people. My infancy was steeped in awareness of the mystery and romance of my father’s music, which was so important to him and Mum that it seemed the centre of the universe. There was laughter and optimism; the war was over. The music Dad played was called Swing. It was what people wanted to hear. I was there.
I have just been born, war is over, but not completely.
‘It’s a boy!’ someone shouts from the footlights. But my father keeps on playing.
I am a war baby though I have never known war, born into a family of musicians on 19 May 1945, two weeks after VE Day and four months before VJ Day bring the Second World War to an end. Yet war and its syncopated echoes – the klaxons and saxophones, the big bands and bomb shelters, V2s and violins, clarinets and Messerschmitts, mood-indigo lullabies and satin-doll serenades, the wails, strafes, sirens, booms and blasts – carouse, waltz and unsettle me while I am still in my mother’s womb.
Two memories linger for ever like dreams that, once remembered, are never forgotten.
I am two years old, riding on the top deck of an old tram that Mum and I have boarded at the top of Acton Hill in West London. The tram trundles past my future: the electrical shop where Dad’s first record will go on sale in 1955; the police station where I’ll go to retrieve my stolen bike; the hardware store that mesmerises me with its thousands of perfectly labelled drawers; the Odeon where I will attend riotous Saturday movie matinées with my pals; St Mary’s Church where years from now I sing Anglican hymns in the choir and watch hundreds of people take communion, but never do so myself; the White Hart pub where I first get properly drunk in 1962 after playing a regular weekly gig with a school rock band called The Detours, that will one day evolve into The Who.
I am a little older now, my second birthday three months past. It’s the summer of 1947 and I’m on a beach in bright sunshine. I’m still too young to run around, but I sit up on the blanket enjoying the smells and sounds: sea air, sand, a light wind, waves murmuring against the shore. My parents ride up like Arabs on horseback, spraying sand everywhere, wave happily, and then ride off again. They are young, glamorous, beautiful, and their disappearance is like the challenge of an elusive grail.
Dad’s father, Horace Townshend (known as Horry), was prematurely bald at thirty, but still striking with his aquiline profile and thick-rimmed glasses. Horry, a semi-professional musician/composer, wrote songs and performed in summer entertainments at seasides, parks and music halls during the 1920s. A trained flautist, he could read and write music, but he liked the easy life and never made much money.
Horry met Grandma Dorothy in 1908. They worked together as entertainers and married two years later, when Dot was eight months pregnant with their first child, Jack. As an infant, Uncle Jack remembered his parents busking on Brighton Pier while little Jack watched nearby. A grand lady walked up, admired their efforts and threw a shilling into their hat. ‘For which good cause are you collecting?’ she asked.
‘For ourselves,’ Dot said.
Dot was striking and elegant. A singer and dancer who could read music, she performed at concert parties, sometimes alongside her husband, and later contributed to Horry’s songwriting. She was cheerful and positive, though rather vain and a bit of a snob. Between performances Horry and Dot conceived my father, Clifford Blandford Townshend, who was born in 1917, a companion for his older brother Jack.
Mum’s parents, Denny and Maurice, lived in Paddington during Mum’s early childhood. Though obsessive about cleanliness, Denny was not a careful guardian. Mum remembers hanging out the upstairs window with her baby brother, Maurice, Jr, waving at her father driving past on his milk float. The little boy nearly slipped out.
Granddad Maurice was a sweet man who was cruelly jilted when Denny – after eleven years of marriage – abruptly ran off with a wealthy man, who kept her as his mistress. On that day Mum came home from school to an empty house. Denny had taken all the furniture except for a bed, leaving only a note with no address. It took Maurice several years to track the wayward woman down, but they were never reconciled.
Maurice and the two children moved in with his mother, Ellen. Mum, just ten, contributed to running the house, and fell directly under her Irish grandmother’s influence. Mum was ashamed of the mother who had abandoned her, but proud of her grandmother Ellen, who taught her to modulate her speaking voice to round out the Irish in it. Mum became adept at mimicking various accents, and showed an early aptitude for music.
Eventually, as a teenager, Mum moved in with her maternal Aunt Rose in North London. I remember Rose as an extraordinary woman, self-assured, intelligent, well read; she was a lesbian, living quietly but openly with her partner.
Like me, Dad was a teenage rebel. Before the war he and his best friend were members of Oswald Mosley’s fascist Blackshirts. He was ashamed of this later, of course, but forgave himself – they were young, and the uniforms were glamorous. Instead of staying with Prokofiev’s clarinet studies, through which he’d brilliantly stormed for two hours every morning, Dad at sixteen chose to play at bottle parties, an English variant on the speakeasy. The musicianship required of him at these gigs demanded little of his skill. Throughout his life he was over-qualified, technically, for the music he played.
Within a few years Dad was performing around London with Billy Wiltshire and his Piccadilly Band, playing music for dancing or lounging at bars – ‘bar-stooling’, as it was known. In the interval between two world wars, sophistication, glamour and light-heartedness obscured an underlying fear of extinction. The big issues were hidden in clouds of cigarette smoke and innovative popular music. Sex was, as ever, the ingredient that would calm the anxious heart. Yet in the music of my father’s era, sexual energy was implied rather than displayed, hidden behind the cultivated elegance of men and women in evening dress.
War and music brought my parents together. Dad enlisted in the RAF in 1940 and played saxophone and clarinet in small bands to entertain his colleagues as part of his duties. By 1945 he was playing in the RAF Dance Orchestra, one of the largest in any of the services. Recruited from enlisted men who had been members of well-known bands and directed by Sergeant Leslie Douglas, it has been described as the greatest dance orchestra