Pete Townshend: Who I Am

5 THE DETOURS

Ealing Art College was a revelation in so many ways: socially, creatively, sexually and musically. The first life-changing event that hit me was the sight of an especially pretty girl across a crowded classroom, and I soon discovered, to my delight, that she adored Ella Fitzgerald and also seemed to like me.

I had very clear musical taste that was more balanced than that of most of those around me. I was impressed by the new trends in commercial music, but not overcome. Elvis was OK, but he was no Sinatra. Connie Francis had an erotic kittenishness but was nothing compared to Ella. Ealing offered lunchtime clubs dedicated to Bebop, Dixieland, orchestral music and opera, played in the lecture theatre on a large, high-quality speaker system. Enthusiasts would make remarks or give short, unpretentious lectures. I attended all of them. But I didn’t just think about music. I also had the ability to create alpha-state music in my head, go into a creative trance, have musical visions, and after nearly six years of dormancy this gift was restored by hearing orchestral music again.

Back then I had no idea what all this music was, nor did I have a good working sense of different composers, but listening to Jerry Cass’s radio and growing up with my parents had fed my musical imagination.

I could play a little jazz on guitar, but I told the girl I had a crush on that I sometimes played in a jazz group. This was stretching the truth: I had performed some local sessions, but only with pop bands that played crude jazz to encourage the audience to go home at the end of a long evening.

At one point this girl and her older boyfriend had a tiff, and she sought me out for some intimate time together. When she tilted her head for me to kiss her, I didn’t know what to do. When it came to girls I was still living in a fog of insecurity. When she turned to someone else in our class for comfort, I was crushed. In my imagination she was perfect. Of course, that was the problem. I was living in my imagination, whereas she was real, with a young woman’s needs and desires.

In early 1962, after receiving the call I’d been waiting for, I approached Roger’s house to audition for The Detours. Before I got there, a blonde girl opened the front door and began slowly walking towards me. She was weeping, but when she saw my guitar case she stopped and pulled herself together.

‘Are you going to Roger’s?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, you can tell him this: it’s either me or that bloody guitar of his.’

I knocked on Roger’s door and delivered the message, fully expecting him to break down in tears himself and run after the divine creature, promising never to touch a guitar again.

‘Sod her,’ he said. ‘Come in.’

We went straight upstairs to Roger’s bedroom. He was distracted, and it later turned out that one of the criminals he hung around was hiding from the police under the bed where I sat down to play. The audition was very quick. ‘Can you play E? Can you play B? Can you play “Man of Mystery” by The Shadows? “Hava Nagila”? OK, then. See you for practice at Harry’s.’

***

The first show I played with The Detours was at a hall next to Chiswick Swimming Baths in early 1962. I was replacing Reg Bowen, a guitarist who wanted to become the band’s road manager. Roger was a sheet-metal worker by day, and had cut his fingers badly that morning, so he disappeared offstage almost as soon as I arrived. I was left to play fumbling lead guitar.

Most of the first gigs I played were arranged by our drummer, Harry Wilson, or his father. We liked Harry. When he made a mistake he’d blush, rage, apologise, analyse, then cheerfully carry on. We rehearsed in his West Acton home, and Harry’s father’s van carried us to our little shows.

I had a single-pickup Harmony solid-body Stratocruiser guitar that Roger had sprayed red for me. We executed fancy choreographed foot movements as we played songs by Cliff and The Shadows (John was especially good at this, Roger especially bad), and we travelled around Greater London and occasionally beyond, performing at weddings, company functions, birthdays and pubs. At one wedding a pianist hired for the intermission laughingly explained that when he was drunk – which was most of the time – he could only manage to control his left hand, the one looking after accompaniment. His right hand took off searching for the melody with a mind of its own. It was one of the funniest things I ever saw, and I worked hard to learn how to do it. At another wedding we received a £50 tip from the bride’s father, and with this astronomical sum we were able to think about buying our own van for the first time.

Although The Detours was Roger’s band, the singer then was Colin Dawson, a handsome young man with a strong conventional pop voice. At an engagement party the bride-to-be tipsily fell for Colin, and there was a moment when the prospective bridegroom threatened a fight. We saw fighting aplenty, and I have Roger to thank for the fact that no one ever laid a hand on me. Even a nasty drunk knew better than to provoke him.

Everyone around me in The Detours drank. Colin’s girlfriend Angela turned eighteen and threw the first teenage party I’d ever attended. People arrived, drank half a bottle of beer and pretended to be drunk so they could spend the rest of the evening snogging whoever they could lay their hands on. It didn’t work for me.

A girl in my class at Ealing took an interest, though, and one day I found myself holding hands with her as we walked through an art gallery. A few days later we went to a party, where she quickly got drunk and started kissing me. This was my first kiss, and I’m not sure it’s fair to say I enjoyed it. I felt more like being eaten alive. A few moments later she kissed another boy from our class, and then disappeared.

It was an excruciating journey home alone on the train; the girl in question was nice enough, but her betrayal didn’t begin to explain the astonishing pain I felt.

Towards the end of my first art-school year The Detours played our first club dance at the Paradise Club in Peckham. We brought in a new drummer, Doug Sandom, and though we were sorry to see Harry go, Doug focused us. He was about ten years older than we were, and he acted like a proper professional musician. One summer evening at Peckham we clustered the equipment closely around his drumkit, turned our overall sound down and achieved a decent balance for the first time. I began to feel we might really have a chance to make some money with The Detours.

Maurice Plaquet, a musician friend of Dad’s, set himself up as agent for our band and got us a date at Acton Town Hall on 1 September 1962, supporting the Ron Cavendish Orchestra. We were billed in the newspaper as The Detours Jazz Group. The accompanying photograph shows us standing close together in suits, ties and professional grins. It was the best photo of me I’d seen thus far and I quickly came to understand the importance of such images: Roger’s pretty younger sister Carol saw it and began to nag him to get us together.

On display in Ealing Art College’s corridors were interactive wooden collages created by our course leader, Roy Ascott, various parts of which the viewer could rearrange. We were to spend a year being disabused of our preconceptions about art, art schools, art teaching and all forms of design. I realised the holes in my education were spectacular.

The school included both the new guard and the old. The latter were tweedy draughtsmen, calligraphers, bookbinders and the like – who tended to be fastidious. The former were denim-clad, in their twenties and thirties, and bohemian. During our first lesson in draughtsmanship the man in charge was old guard. He instructed us how to sharpen our pencils, which hardness to select for which task, how to clip our paper to our boards, how to sit, hold our pencils and measure a set of distant relative scales.

‘Draw a line.’

We each drew a line and were subjected to the harshest possible criticism from the lecturer, who pointed out that the first line should be north-to-south, six inches long, of uniform thickness and drawn with a 3B pencil without a rule; any variation represented self-indulgence unworthy of Ealing Art College students.

The second lesson was conducted by a member of the new guard. It was quite simple, a test to assess the degree of our preconceptions.

‘Draw a line.’

No problem. As if choreographed we each drew a line, north-to-south, six inches long, of uniform thickness, etc. Our lecturer, young Anthony Benjamin, left the room and returned with sculptor Brian Wall. They started to rant around the room, shouting at us. At one point Benjamin produced a small penknife and pricked his finger, dragging blood across a white sheet of paper. ‘That’s a line. Do you understand?’ Of course we understood. We were the innocent victims of a struggle between the old and the new.

Another guest lecturer was Larry Rivers, the first gay American junkie sax-playing painter I’d ever met. I felt through him I’d come as close as I ever would to the late Jackson Pollock, some of whose stunning, profoundly chaotic work had actually been exhibited in the corridors of the fine art school for a few weeks. Later I discovered that Peter Blake – my favourite painter – had a studio in Bedford Park, close to my college, which deepened my sense of identification with him.

I experimented with colour and semiotics, and a group of us built a large structure in our classroom, in which we intended to create an Experience Shed. My first attempt at installation sculpture, it felt like a fairground ghost train.

In autumn 1962 none of the people in or around The Detours had much idea what I was up to at art school, and I found it difficult to say much about the band to my art-school friends. Despite starting to make good money with The Detours, I felt they were uncool. I was still living with my parents, but the time was approaching when I’d need to ‘come out’, in both areas of my life – to the band and to my art-school friends. I needed to get myself into perspective.

In the middle of the first term of my second year, the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted. On the critical day in October 1962 I walked to college absolutely certain that life was over; why was I even bothering to attend class? When the end didn’t come, I was glad not to have been one of those who had panicked, wept or chattered compulsively until the good news was announced.

Somehow the message I took from this near-apocalyptic event was that I should give the patiently persistent Carol Daltrey a chance. I took Carol for the occasional walk, tried to talk to her about what I was doing at art school, kissed her whenever and for as long as I could in the hallway of the Daltrey homestead, and – through chats with Roger’s older sister Gillian and her sharp boyfriend – heard about a new youth group emerging in West London, the working-class Mods. In the early Sixties in England the teenage Teddy Boy subculture was giving way to two new groups – Mods and Rockers. Mods were into fashion, R&B, motor scooters and showing off the latest dance moves, where Rockers tended towards machismo, exemplified by Marlon Brando’s motorcycle gang leader in The Wild One.

Gillian’s boyfriend had a black PVC coat and rode a Vespa scooter like a young Italian from Rome. Carol Daltrey said I had a real ‘Modernist’ look, and encouraged me to buy a PVC coat. Sitting with her and kissing her for hours was especially romantic as snow outside ushered in the Christmas holidays. This Mod conspiracy was happening virtually under Roger’s nose, he being more of a Rocker. As I walked home that night, fresh snow falling, I was as happy as I’d ever been, although I knew Carol wasn’t right for me. It wasn’t that she was too young (I was, at seventeen, just two years older), but I was aware that she wouldn’t fit into the art-school part of my life. I wasn’t even sure of my own ability to straddle the two distinctly different worlds of visual arts and music.

Meanwhile The Detours were busy. After Christmas, Leslie Douglas, in whose band Mum had sung in the late Forties, arranged for us to play a lucrative Sunday afternoon slot at the American Officers’ Club in Queensway in London. A number of good local bands played the circuit we were moving into: Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, The Beachcombers and The Bel Airs. I began to play lead guitar when Roger took the microphone to sing his favourite Johnny Cash medley – always a hit with homesick Yanks.

Roger bought a van that I decorated with my Detours logo, using an arrow on the ‘o’. In one photo the four of us are standing by the van looking like dustmen in our black leather collarless jackets. In January 1963 we played five or six shows, but in February the number jumped to eleven or twelve, including our first date at the Oldfield Hotel in Greenford, which became a mainstay for us. By March we were playing seventeen or eighteen shows per month, and we kept up that busy schedule for quite some time.

In a good week I was taking home nearly £30, which in 1963 was an absurd sum of money. By comparison my art-school grant for the whole year was £140, to be divided over three terms. With money in my pocket I was able to take a trip up to Selmer’s music shop in London’s Charing Cross Road and buy a Fender Pro Amp with a 15-inch speaker. It was loud, trebly and sexy. The salesman who talked me into it was John McLaughlin, who would become a jazz-fusion guitar legend.

Early in spring 1963 I got to know Richard Barnes, whom everyone called Barney. He became a lifelong friend, ally and The Who’s principal authorised biographer. We hit it off quickly and I loved his dry, barbed humour. My awkwardness and self-absorption made me slow to learn from those around me, but Barney was forgiving of this – and every other – defect. I also knew that Barney was aware of my very real musical talent, perhaps even more than I was.

I suffered my first desperate hangover after our drummer Doug introduced me to serial beer drinking at one of our regular gig nights at the White Hart pub. After this I began to show off a little at college, carrying a quarter bottle of whisky around in the back pocket of my Levi’s. Still, I knew that in almost every respect I was lagging behind my peers. The other boys in the band had steady girlfriends, even wives. I had occasional snogs in the back of the band’s van, but my attempts at more serious sexual experiments met with frustration.

My college friends Nick Bartlett and Barney came to see The Detours for the first time at a gig on 29 March at a college in London. They seemed impressed. Barney had a steady girlfriend, Jan, who was very pretty, her dark hair cut in a mid-length bob, her eyes made even more dramatic with Egyptian-style kohl eyeliner. It was she who first mentioned the success of a band called The Rolling Stones. On behalf of The Detours, who were too busy to watch other bands, Barney and Jan began to investigate the music scene beyond our insular pub circuit.

There was a lot to explore, although it turned out that the Stones were at the top of the local heap. Ealing had been the birthplace of British R&B a year before. Alexis Korner, father of the genre, had begun a regular gig at the basement Ealing Club, with the legendary Cyril Davies on blues harmonica. Brian Jones sat in from time to time, playing slide guitar. Jack Bruce played upright bass, while Mick Jagger sang Chuck Berry songs. By autumn 1962 The Rolling Stones had evolved into the band we know today, and had taken over the weekly Ealing Club R&B date. Occasionally we local art students would catch sight of them wandering around before the gig. By 1963 rumours about the Stones had become legend; there was no doubt in our minds that – The Beatles aside – this was the band to watch.

In the spring of 1963 two photography students started putting 7-inch R&B singles onto the jukebox in Sid’s café opposite the college. One stood out: ‘Green Onions’ by Booker T and the MGs. I must have played it fifty times, and I finally arranged a version for lead guitar rather than organ, which The Detours added to its repertoire. On 17 May 1963 the band played at the Carnival Ballroom at the Park Hotel in Hanwell, which was near Ealing, so all my college chums turned out. Some pretty girls from the fashion school stood at the front of the stage, pretending to scream at me like Beatles fans; they were teasing, but everyone was impressed, especially when we played the slightly funkier R&B tunes I’d managed to sneak into our otherwise catholic repertoire.

This was a formative moment for me. My friends from college could see the band I had been so reluctant to talk about; John, Roger and Doug could see my art-school friends, and how broad-based my fellowship was there. I was still uncomfortable that some of the songs we played were chart hits by The Beatles, Gerry and The Pacemakers, Johnny Kidd and Buddy Holly. But I also knew we played enough R&B material to attract interest from some of the more discerning college musos.

Sixty shows later, Commercial Entertainments booked us to play at St Mary’s Ballroom, Putney, several times. We supported Johnny Kidd and The Pirates once. They were a truly tight band, achieving a powerhouse sound with just lead and bass guitars and drums. We decided to go the same way, Roger allowing me to take over lead guitar so he could concentrate entirely on singing. He sold me his Epiphone solid-body guitar. Working from my Chet Atkins study pieces I began to master The Pirates’ rockabilly fingerpicking technique played by Mickey Green. I started playing a mix of rhythm and lead – what came to be called power chords – often with a jangling open string added to give the sound more colour.

We also met our future engineer and producer Glyn Johns. He sang with The Presidents, who were popular at the venue, and was very positive about our new stripped-down line-up. Roger met his first wife Jackie at that gig, and started seeing her regularly. I dated her shapely best friend for a while. When I first got my hands inside her blouse I thought I’d gone to heaven. One day we tried to have sex. She took me to her cousin’s house where her uncle had been doing some decorating. I was wearing my best Mod outfit, with a special new pair of suede desert boots. I lay on top of her as she fiddled with my trousers, but suddenly I felt my feet go cold – literally. I’d put both of my precious new boots into a bucket of wallpaper paste.

Jackie became pregnant in the winter, and Roger married her in March 1964, five months before their first son Simon was born. Nick was seeing Liz Reid, a pretty, blonde Scottish girl from fashion school. A few months before, he had gone out with a stunning Irish girl, also from fashion school. She had just ended a relationship so we went out as a foursome to eat Chinese food. On a tube train home that night she whispered in my ear that she wanted to sleep with me, and then, outside Ealing Common station, we smoked pot; for me it was the first time. I remember feeling I had discovered something quite important, but wasn’t precisely certain what it was.

At home in my bedroom, Nick and Liz lay together on my bed in the dark. I was on the floor with the Irish girl. This was my first genuine sexual encounter, so the rock ’n’ roll components of sex and drugs arrived simultaneously for me. My orgasm came in seconds. The next morning, in Sid’s café, I overheard the Irish girl a few tables away laughing good-naturedly about my sexual inexperience, but I didn’t care. Skill didn’t matter, there was plenty of time for that. I had arrived at last.

I wanted to be a sculptor, but Ealing Art College lost its diploma status for Fine Arts and Sculpture, and my parents were concerned I might emerge from college without any qualification. The band still felt like a side-project to me, so I considered moving to another college. I was particularly interested in kinetic sculpture: installations combining vibrant colour, lighting, TV screens and complex, coded music. All this, I imagined, would be interactive, brought to life by the computers that Roy Ascott talked about.1 However, I knew I would miss my friends if I left Ealing, and so, with Barney, I decided to switch to Graphic Design.

Everything changed when I met Tom Wright, the stepson of an American Air Force officer stationed nearby. It turned out that he and his best friend Cam had been the ones responsible for adding R&B singles to the café jukebox. They were notorious for having introduced marijuana in their circle, and for their enormous record collection. One of their buddies had heard me playing blues guitar in the classroom one day and ran to bring Tom to hear me.

I had already bought a number of blues albums of my own – by Leadbelly, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and Big Bill Broonzy. I had heard Chuck Berry, but only his pop-chart stuff. Tom and Cam had albums by Lightnin’ Hopkins, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, Little Walter, Snooks Eaglin and other blues artists entirely new to me. As long as I’d play my guitar sometimes, they’d let me come back. Every album was a revelation, but the real richness of their collection was on its fringes: Mose Allison sat alongside Joan Baez; Ray Charles alongside Bo Diddley; Jimmy Smith alongside Julie London.

The mainstay of the collection was Jimmy Reed. They had every recording he’d ever made, and ‘Big Boss Man’ and ‘Shame, Shame, Shame’, big R&B hits in the US in the late Fifties but unheard in the UK. Simple riffs supported basic lyrics provided by his wife. Steady low bass, chugging rhythms and shrill harmonica solos set the scene for Reed’s whining, wavering, old man’s voice. But there was something absolutely unforgettable about the music, especially when you listened to several albums in series, a little stoned.

I was also drawn to the jazzier side of R&B, especially at first. I had grown up with Ella, Frank, the Duke and the Count, so I liked Ray Charles, Jimmy Smith and Mose Allison. But I couldn’t play keyboards, had no access to one and was still a fairly rudimentary guitar player. But you didn’t have to be fast or clever to play R&B guitar blues. You had to be prepared to really listen, and ultimately really feel the music. This seemed less absurd for a young middle-class white boy in 1963 than it does today, so I proceeded without difficulty to learn to play the blues, especially rhythmic blues. I loved emulating Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker and Hubert Sumlin, Howlin’ Wolf’s guitarist, and I started to develop my own rhythmic style based on a fusion of theirs.

If I felt torn, I’m sure the other members of the band felt the same. They had regular jobs. Doug was a bricklayer and a father. Roger worked in a factory that cut tinplate for specialist equipment boxes and recording studio racks. John worked at the local tax office. I was an art student – and I was also becoming a recreational drug user, smoking several times a week. Lately Roger needed to bully me out of bed to get me to gigs. I was often very sarcastic about the music the band members wanted to play, and Doug had to come to my rescue a couple of times when Roger and I nearly came to blows over the musical direction of the group. I kept pushing because I felt that if we didn’t change we’d never appear cool to my art-school friends. On the other hand, the chart-type songs I was trying my hand at writing for us to perform were really quite corny.

We recorded my first song, ‘It Was You’, in late 1963 at the home studio of Barry Gray, who wrote music for children’s TV puppet series like Thunderbirds and Fireball XL5. Dick James, The Beatles’ co-publisher at the time, heard ‘It Was You’ and signed me to his company.

I was a guy who thought love would pass him by.

Then I met you and now I realise

It was you, who set my heart a-beating.

I never knew, love would come with our meeting.

The song was recorded by The Naturals, a Merseybeat-style band (actually from Essex), and a couple of other groups. It wasn’t a hit, but the fact that it was published at all gave me tremendous confidence. I felt I now had a right to speak up about the band’s musical direction, and even get bossy about it. Roger was definitely in charge, but there was a new tension between us. We were both really keen to make it and had our own ideas about how to do so. Still, we developed a grudging respect for one another that would last a lifetime.