Shindig! Issue #181 – Pete Townshend

PETE TOWNSHEND tells MARK WILKERSON about how working with a band of misfits during the pressure-packed Tommyyears gave him immense satisfaction, a #1 hit and validation that his home studio sounded “fucking amazing”.

“I didn’t think for a second that it was going to work”

As 1968 progressed, it became increasingly unlikely that Townshend would have any time to work individually with his collection of musical misfits. In September, The Who began recording Townshend’s magnum opus Tommy at IBC Studios. He was still writing it. In between studio sessions, the cash-strapped group continued to perform live. Meanwhile, Karen was pregnant with their first child. Something had to give. “Kit Lambert, The Who’s manager, said, ‘Pete, you’re not going to be able to do this, you haven’t got the time, so put them all together’,” Pete told this writer, “and the only ones I could get my hands on were Jimmy, Speedy and Andy. And I didn’t think for a second that it was going to work.”

The unlikely trio first met in Townshend’s home in late ’68. The three had essentially nothing in common – backgrounds, personalities, interests – nothing. “But when they started to play,” says Townshend, “it was just extraordinary.”

“Something magical happened from the very first second,” Speedy Keen told Andy Childs for ZigZag in July ’75. Townshend recently used the same adjective when asked about this first meeting. “I just remember them playing together in my studio. It was sort of magical.”

The fledgling band’s individual incongruities somehow meshed into a cohesive whole. “The amazing thing about the way they work in the studio is that they’ve all definitely got completely different states of mind, but it’s a kind of a catalytic thing,” Townshend said on ’70 promo interview album A Special Record From Pete Townshend And Thunderclap Newman. “They each give way to one another as a concession to playing with the other – practically 90% of their own musical personality.”

Perhaps the intimate setting helped. The control room had been set up in a narrow space that was intended as a bathroom, and the studio was in an adjacent room. “The room was tiny,” Pete remembers. The drum kit faced the fireplace in this room, and the upright piano was squeezed into the control room amidst a mass of wires, tape boxes and recording equipment. And the guitarist? “Jimmy, I put in a broom cupboard,” Townshend says with a laugh, adding that he at least put some glass in the cupboard door. “It had an air fan in it, but you couldn’t run it of course because you would hear it on the recording,” he added. “He seemed quite happy in the cupboard!”

Keen’s familiarity with the room and his chatty, social manner helped too. “I hadn’t made any music in the studio that had ever been released,” says Townshend, “but I had done all my demos in there, and Speedy had heard all those demos, and he had played drums on a couple of my demos as well, so he knew the room. And he was an exceptionally gifted social musician. So it felt to me like Speedy was the one that was really running the sessions. I was playing the bass while I was engineering, so I was really preoccupied with the sound.”

After some additional sessions at IBC Studios (using leftover time from The Who’s Tommy sessions), the group’s first single was complete. The Beatles’ release of ‘Revolution’ in August ’68 necessitated a name change. ‘Something In The Air’ was born.

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