The Who started as a band with four very different individuals
with very, very different needs.
Got a few hits,
managed to pull off Tommy,
managed to pull off some kind of amazing live stage energy.
'A special TUC conference in London has voted...'
'New challenges and burdens created by the oil crisis...'
'As the gas situation gets worse...'
'The miners need some inducement to come to talks...'
'I think the three-day week should be called off at once.'
'Ten years on from The Who's first successes comes the release
'this weekend of a new double album that could be a step on,
'even from Tommy, Quadrophenia.'
When we got to Quadrophenia, talking 1973,
something strange was happening to the internal politics of the band.
It was quite clear that Keith Moon was certifiably insane
and that if he hadn't had a drum kit to play with, he probably would have ended up in jail.
John Entwistle simply wasn't happy because he was a songwriter,
and it seemed as though for him, the band had come all about me and my ideas.
Roger wanted something which meant he could swing his hair and looked glamorous
and take his chest off and be a superstar.
I had difficulties as well. Lifehouse, which followed Tommy, failed.
The accusation was, "You failed with your big idea
"because you're an arty-farty pretentious twat."
It felt, to me, as though we were drifting apart.
So my first mission, my first part of the brief that
I gave myself was replace Tommy as a performing vehicle, that was it.
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So my story was, I'd bought this riverside property out...
It's actually in a place called Cleeve on the River Thames.
One day I got this call
about Eric who was wallowing
down in his house in the country,
and would I go down and see Eric?
Eric had done an album and ended up as a heroin user.
I remember going down and seeing him. He was very courteous, very kind, very dignified, very loving,
very friendly as he always was to me.
But I was affected by it.
I start to think about how we can...
Not rescue Eric, but just to kind of stimulate him.
I turned to a couple of my mates, Ronnie Wood, Stevie Winwood
I was nodding off and Rick the bass player said, "Try this." I said, "What is it?"
He said it is a kind of a popper thing,
he said, it wakes you up, and it was amyl nitrate.
And I took it and I went, "Oh, that's fun, a bit of a buzz,"
and then played. I did not get stuck on it but I used it quite a bit.
Once the concert with Eric in January 1973 was over, I suppose
I must have had some sort of come down from the lack of amyl nitrate.
On a dark, wet winter weekend at the cottage at Cleeve,
with the river running faster than usual,
I had a flashback to when I was 19 years old.
The Who had just played this amazing gig at the Aquarium Ballroom
in Brighton and I was with my art school friend Des Reed.
After the gig we missed the train home.
So we hung out and we went down under the pier
and there were all these boys in parkas
with the fucking tide coming up around their feet.
They didn't seem to understand that they were going to drown!
Under the pier, I was coming down from taking purple hearts,
the fashionable uppers of the period.
Sitting there at Cleeve, that day nine years later,
that same feeling came flooding back of feeling depressed,
lost and hopeless and I grabbed a notebook.
Quickly when I was still in this sad and lonely mood,
I scribbled out the story that is on the inside sleeve of the original album of Quadrophenia.
This was the story of a mod called Jimmy.
Jimmy was a normal boy, with normal needs, passing through the normal
things of childhood, but what made everything so much more complicated
for him was he had a bipolar problem, he was schizophrenic.
I think that Jimmy is meant to be, instead of schizophrenic,
he is meant to be quadrophrenic, and that is the original concept,
to have Jimmy have these four personalities.
So Quadrophenia was a double-album,
in the old days of vinyl that meant you had two 12 inch vinyl discs.
And it's that difficult, dodgy '70s thing, the concept album.
A sensitive story of a mod on a journey of self-discovery,
but played by The Who - tough, muscular, physical, a man's band.
What I know is that I'm going to be on a stage
with a bunch of yobbos with an electric guitar.
I'm going to have to turn it up, I'm going to have to jump up and down,
I'm going to have to tell them to fuck off and shut up.
This is Pete, the writer, trying to serve Keith and John and Roger,
giving them really stimulating, useful
fucking stuff that they can express their stage personalities through.
The Who's sound has got those warring elements in it.
On the one hand they are a street fighting band, doing all that physical,
visceral side on the one hand,
on the other hand that spiritual, whimsical,
melancholic lyrical side and banging them together, often in one song.
This bit of paper is kind of, on the top line you've got me,
Roger, John, Keith.
The next line is good, bad, romance.
They are joined together with the word sex, insanity.
The idea that each of these themes would produce songs.
In actual fact, this is just a musical blueprint for what
I wanted to do.
Pete, you know, is working very hard.
I don't know quite what on but...
You know, I think it'll be good.
The trouble is with Pete, working with him,
he had these wonderful little kernels of ideas
but then he would want to pitch them and make them into stories.
But we got the essence of it.
This guy's got all the personalities of every member in the band
and it's just one guy.
And that was enough for me to say, "Great idea, let's go for it."
This is how the album starts, OK.
No other Who album starts with ambient noise.
And it very specifically is putting you in a place,
it sets a scene, which none of the other Who albums did.
Once we had the sea noise going,
we just introduced each theme of the four themes.
The first thing you hear is I Am The Sea,
the breathy sound of, "I am the sea."
And do-dee-do-do-do, which is the Helpless Dancer.
Then you hear, is it me for a moment, which is the romantic side
and so on.
Instead of having a straight overture,
you get pieces of the songs and it comes back as memories.
You're automatically put on that rock.
And you hear the themes and then bang into the first track which is,
Can You See The Real Me?
He's at the doctor, he's going to the shrink,
he's going to the priest, he's going to his mother for advice,
and I wanted to establish very, very quickly
that this is not just a troubled boy, this is a boy that has mental illness.
He's bipolar or he's manic-depressive.
And this idea of him being, you know, doubly schizophrenic.
♪ I went back to my mother
♪ I said, I'm crazy, ma, help me
♪ She said, I know how it feels, son
♪ Cos it runs in the family
♪ Can you see the real me, mother, mother?
♪ Can you see the real me, mother
♪ Whoa, Mama... ♪
Once you hear that track,
you know that this is going to be the revelation of a condition.
Jimmy gets up in the morning, goes to see his shrink,
goes to see his priest because his mum is a deep, dark Catholic.
Goes to look up at this girl's bedroom that he's in love with
who won't shag him.
♪ The cracks between the paving stones
♪ Like rivers of flowing veins... ♪
You're going right inside the boy's head. You know where you are,
you've come from the peace of the sea,
and the idea that this is a little bit of this,
and a little bit of that and then, bang, you're into the action.
♪ Lives in this yellow house
♪ Yesterday she passed me by
♪ She doesn't want to know me now... ♪
When I first heard it, a friend of mine had it and they had
the gatefold sleeve and everything and I loved it, but it was
quite costly, so they recorded it for me on what was back then a C90.
I remember for ages thinking that he'd started on side two
because it begins with "I went back to the doctor."
It's like you've jumped right into the middle of the stream,
you've come right into the middle of the ride,
come right into the middle of a rush, and that is brilliant.
♪ Can you see the real me, mother?
♪ Can you see the real me, me, me, me, me,
me, me, me, me, me m-m-me... #
1, 2, 3, 4...
Pete decided that as part of the album, he'd have this lavish,
very generous big photo book to illustrate the story and also,
the other thing is I think he thought it would help explain
the story, particularly to the Americans who didn't understand it.
Ethan Russell's photos put you in that place.
As an American, you were able to understand
because you were able to see it, you were able to see his room,
you saw the life and it told you the story better than a movie,
better than a video. It's all there.
The first cover I did for The Who was the album Who's Next, here.
I was back in the United States. I got a call from Pete.
He was pretty stressed already because he'd been
working on this forever and you could feel this tremendous
energy of him sort of wanting to birth this thing, you know.
So he played me the material and he told me the story.
And we went out to try and sort of build that world.
We're here in Battersea in the Patmore Estate.
My sister Maxine and I used to live across the road here,
in this block of flats here.
Our foster sister Jane used to live in this block of flats here
and the three of us used to hang out,
generally around on that corner block there.
Along here, which used to be a church hall,
became Ramport Studios which was owned by The Who,
back in the early '70s.
This is myself here. I would have been just coming up to 15.
That was an original mod outfit.
I had my hair cut very short and cropped and black eyeliner,
which you can't see through the black and white picture.
That's me.
And I've got on a pencil skirt, a pinstripe pencil skirt,
Hush Puppy shoes and a navy blue twinset,
little jumper underneath, a cardigan and like Julie,
my hair cut very short, mod-style haircut.
The girls came up, too young to go in the pub
but they knew that I was looking for someone to play Jimmy.
Chad was one of the local guys that lived near the pub.
We thought he had the look for the main character of Quadrophenia
so we introduced him to Georgiana.
I saw the attitude.
I saw the class and the attitude and the sort of, you know..
His wheels were spinning a bit, you know.
And he was the real thing. He had love-hate tattooed on his hands.
Pretty early on in life for that, you know.
He was often in bed.
They would have to go and get him up at the flats, I remember that.
Because he'd had too much to drink, or maybe drugs,
I don't know what, I won't swear that either,
but he was often not on location when he was supposed to be.
About two thirds through the shoot Chad came up to me and says,
"I've got to go to court."
I said what have you got to go to court for? He said, "I stole a bus."
And I said, "You stole a bus?" And he said "Yes, I stole a bus."
I said, "OK."
He walks up to the judge and the judge says, "What did you do?"
He said, "I took her for a drive." I can't do the accent.
He said, "what are you doing now?" He says, "I'm a male model."
And I'm sitting in the back, and he says, "Who do work for?" "I work for The 'Oo."
And the judge turns to me and says, "Is this true?" And I said, "Yes."
He says, "You need him?" And I said, "Yes, absolutely I need him." So he let him off.
Pete always had this thing about mods, even before they were mods.
I like to be subsumed in a gang.
And so I love that feeling of being safe in the mod movement.
I felt safer in a gang of mods than I did in the band, I can tell you that!
There was this hierarchical structure.
At the top you would have these top faces.
These were the mods that really looked really smart
and seemed to be able to afford new suits a lot.
There were the numbers and there was tickets.
The tickets were the little kids.
The one that I came across was Seven And Sixers,
and I never knew why they were called Seven And Sixers and it was cos
the T-shirts they wore were seven and six in Woolworths.
What will the well-dressed mod be wearing this Whit weekend?
I will be wearing white hipster slacks or blue hipster slacks
with either a cycling shirt, a zip here and stripes across there,
mainly with white ground or a blue ground.
Or a T-shirt with a large emblem on the front or back.
Roger talks about the mod movement only happening
because in those days, '62, '63, '64, a young man could get a job.
We were the first generation to have money and creative energy because
previous to that everybody had been slaving to pay the bloody bills.
And living on the ration book.
To be a face, you had to go out to work. You couldn't be a face
if you're a school kid because you didn't have enough money to buy
the scooter, to pay for the petrol to pay for the girlfriends and the burgers and the drinks.
The mods were hard-working youngsters
and it was all about spending your money on clothes.
A new booming outfitting business both meets and creates
the mod demand for elegance in a young man.
This shop now has 18 branches in London
and a turnover of half a million a year.
They'd see Italian students and kids over here on holiday
in central London and were admiring their clothes
and saying, "Look at the cut on their clothes." Stuff that we didn't have.
I don't like red on you anyway.
From all these different elements emerged this sort of movement
with its strict rules that were never written down
but they seemed to understand them.
That's a very mod neck.
That rollneck's all right, a suede front, it's different.
That's true, yeah. This is great, I like this. It's fabulous.
If I left a deposit for that, John, can I come back next week?
Yeah, certainly. Is that OK?
That's not yours, my love.
If you saw a teddy boy, you'd know he was a teddy boy
but if you saw a mod, your mods could work in an advertising agency,
no-one would know they were mods. They just looked like a neat kid.
But to other mods, they gave all the signals.
Maybe a slightly effeminate kid
and that's where I thought the real courage came.
They used to do their own sewing and stuff.
These great big guys would say, "I'll take in those trousers!"
Roger made drainpipes and put the zips in himself!
He put zips in drainpipes!
It was perfect because for the first time in generations
you dressed as you wanted to
and at work you probably were a shipping clerk or a filing clerk.
You were management material.
And you got, "Oh, he's a very tidy young man,
"he's going up the ladder, mate."
Mods had real strict taste rules
and it was difficult to know what was in, and what was out.
I remember people talking about the way to stand outside
the Scene Club, you had to stand with your hand in your pocket...
All these sort of ways to maintain your cool.
My hair was a disaster. I hated it.
When I looked in the mirror,
I saw somebody like Art Garfunkel.
Roger had exactly the same problem.
He was constantly straightening his hair. Dippity-do.
Dippity-do. He found this American gel that would straighten your hair
long enough to get through a gig.
And I think the main driving force then was fashion.
But then it became the music and the other things.
And the other thing is you've to put it in context of the time,
it was like people identifying with this new, modern, clean world.
This is Cut My Hair, it's like the first proper song on the album.
The album should have started with Cut My Hair because that's where the story starts.
On Cut My Hair you've got a...
This piano part, very nursery,
gentle piano.
Against which you get the story of the boy complaining about why
he has to fuck around with his hair basically.
It's interesting because what it's about is a mixture of that
refrain when we were young
and the hair was long which was, "Get your hair cut!"
And suddenly all of that being turned on its head by the mod movement where a face
would turn to you and say, "Get your hair cut."
And you'd think, "Hold on a minute, you're only three or four
"years older than me, don't fucking tell me to get my haircut!"
If you were raised in a modern neighbourhood, you had to fit in with those people.
So, we sat down and had our hair cut. Which I hated.
It had taken me nearly a year
to grow my Beatle fringe down to here.
I was taken to this guy called Jack the barber,
more like Sweeney Todd!
I remember going back to my house with Keith Moon
and smashing the mirror in my room because I hated it. Horrible.
I kind of rebelled against it went out and bought myself a jacket
and trousers and I felt OK about it. Except for my hair.
My initial reaction to it was, "It's about me."
The essence of Townshend's writing is that he
writes about the adolescent problems and they never change
and that's why if you take away the mod tunic, the mod uniform,
what you're left with is the universal adolescent problem.
What's happening at the very end is he's thinking, "This is shit."
He can't deal with it. And at the end you get this abject self-pity which Jimmy is...
Falls into regularly. This sense of, "I can't do this."
So, it sets up this thing that starting at the beginning
of Quadrophenia that he's becoming disenchanted with
the burden of being a mod, of trying to fit in,
of having the right shoes, the right shirt.
He's not getting what he wants.
A gang of nearly 1,000 youths entered the Grand Hotel
in pursuit of two leather-clad rockers.
South Coast police have warned that if the fight between rival
gangs of mods and rockers continue strict security measures will be
in force at railway station both in London and on the south coast.
Brighton was just one of those places that was popping.
Say me and my friends went to a dance hall once,
there was a load of rockers there, they were taking the mick out of us.
You can't let a load of kids take the Mickey out of you, can you?
So, what do you do? Well, you have a punch-up about it.
What do you fight with? With fists!
The first trouble was in Clacton.
And afterwards I think Margate and then it was Brighton.
You had about 30 little mods
versus three big rockers.
They were all running up, "Come on, then!" And all this stuff.
We were posing and stuff like that.
It's the rockers that started. They screw you. What does screw mean?
You know, look you up and down and think, "That's a funny
"way of dressing." Think you're a poof or something like that.
The really cool mods hated the fact that there was this
violence on the beach. They hated it.
"Bunch of wankers! Going and fighting with rockers."
Ha! That kind of thing.
The beat they dance to is another difference between mods and rockers.
At this mod club, The Chez Don, in the East End of London the rhythm is blue
and strong enough to lean against.
The mod girls dance with each other and no-one bothers to talk
since you can't hear yourself speak.
Rockers don't show their faces here. It would only lead to trouble.
This is the famous Goldhawk club.
I'm opening the door to the dance hall.
Along here and on the other side
was a whole bunch of settees where a lot of necking went on!
And there was kissing and French kissing and tongues and stuff.
♪ Got a feeling inside Can't explain
♪ It's a certain kind Can't explain
♪ I feel hot and cold Can't explain
♪ Yeah, down in my soul, yeah Can't explain... ♪
We'd just done Ready Steady Go, they had been there in the audience,
we went to the Goldhawk Club and played Can't Explain,
we played it again and again and again.
♪ The things you've said, well, maybe they're true... ♪
And I thought, "God Almighty! What's going on?"
"The Who are playing probably my favourite song of all time."
They've played I Can't Explain three times, what's going on?
♪ When I feel blue
♪ But I can't explain Can't explain
"Play it again, play it again!" Dah, da-da, dah-da-da!
You know, fucking glorious night at the Goldhawk Club that their boys
had gone on Ready Steady Go which was the big mod programme of the day.
I sort of elected myself as some kind of delegate and I came here,
I knocked on this door, this very door we're looking at.
Irish Jack walks forward and says "There's something we want to tell you."
I said, "Look, this song is exactly what we're trying to say."
You've said it for us.
I can't explain because this is what mods were about.
They couldn't explain.
None of us could explain, we didn't have the articulation.
So, I said to him quite patronising, "Jack,
"you want to be to write more songs for you about the fact you
"can't explain what it is you want me to explain
"and I can't explain what it is you want to explain?"
Jack immediately goes, "That's it!"
So, in words, Pete Townshend became the song laureate of the mods
in Shepherd's Bush, Hammersmith, Acton, Ealing.
♪ You declared you'd be three inches taller
♪ You only became what we made you. ♪
There's a fabulous postcard, we're about 18/19,
we look like perfect little girly mods.
That's the band that Jimmy looked at and went, "That's me!"
Then he goes into that band and finds that these four people,
each one of them is a deeply eccentric and complex and difficult
and fucked up individual and they're each in their own way.
♪ I'm the guy in the sky
♪ Flying high, flashing eyes
♪ No surprise I told lies
♪ I'm the punk in the gutter. ♪
All of those youth movements are built on false idols.
They're all built on the idea of loving something and never meet your idols.
There's that crushing sense of disappointment.
They're not the people you think they are.
This was the only time The Who were in the entire book.
We shot about 4am in the morning so we wouldn't have any traffic
and it was the Hammersmith Odeon, that was the idea.
And in the story it's where Jimmy sees The Who otherwise
they don't intersect in the story.
He's feeling inferior, his hero's scooter is bust
and these guys have a limo.
♪ I have to be careful not to preach
♪ I can't pretend that I can teach
♪ And yet I've lived your future out
♪ By pounding stages like a clown
♪ And on the dance floor broken glass
♪ And bloody faces slowly pass
♪ The numbered seats in empty rows
♪ It all belongs to me you know. ♪
OK!
There's this idea of The Who, who had these kind of mod roots,
and they later became a great big bloated rock band.
The distance between them being almost '70s rock stars
and the '60s roots of what they were is played up in this photograph.
You get this image of Jimmy, the mod, from the 1960s, clearly,
down on one knee and out here's the band coming out of Hammersmith Odeon
but the band appear to be like a '70s rock band and the interesting
thing is it's the distance between him and them, that's the time shift.
This is when the album is recorded,
this is the distance between these two things.
It's important.
♪ I'm the guy in the sky
♪ Flying high, flashing eyes
♪ No surprise I told lies
♪ I'm the punk in the gutter. ♪
He just happens to pass his ex-heroes, The Who,
and says to them, "You bunch of... You fucking let me down." That's all it's about.
This one song, Punk And The Godfather, that was it.
♪ I don't mind
♪ Other guys dancing with my girl
♪ That's fine
♪ I know them all pretty well... ♪
♪ Is it me for a moment? ♪
Records traditionally have tracks with gaps in between.
What Quadrophenia has is a soundscape
and the thing it's closest to is it's a film soundtrack.
So, between the tracks you get the sound of Jimmy's life, losing his bike,
losing his dirty job,
living rough on the streets alone.
The sound of the train in the station, the whistle.
The boiling kettle and a fried egg.
In a sense, it's using sound as music.
For sea and sand, for example, I literally walked down a beach
with a stereo mic singing sea and sand.
♪ Here by the sea and sand. ♪
But Quadrophenia had a sound, it was one sound from start to finish,
and that sound was the sound of the backing track.
What had happened was the Who couldn't find a studio that they liked,
so they said, "Let's buy a place and build our own,"
because they had some money then,
so they found this church in Battersea, in Thessaly Road, Battersea.
Thessaly Road was really a storage facility.
Pete Townshend came down one day to see where all his guitars were.
Blimey.
I'm surprised how spacious it is.
He looked around, he gave a click of his fingers, and he said,
"This has got good resonance."
It had, you know, a bright...
It's still got quite a bright sound in here.
But it was brighter than this, it was quite a bright...
And that was unusual at the time.
Most studios in London were a little bit deader than this one.
He said, "This would make a bloody good studio."
So, I goes, "Right, turn it into a studio."
There's a window, you can see, here,
just there, which would have allowed you to see from this room...
If you are sitting down, you could see into the control room,
which would have been there, where the doctor's waiting room is.
The main intention was that the control room should be quadraphonic.
There were no rooms in the UK, or in America at the time,
that had for speakers, one in each corner. They just weren't any.
This is an acoustic ceiling, designed...
They're always designed like this, with this dish,
and you can see that that would have been one of the plinths
on which we hung one of the quadraphonic speakers,
another one there, another one there.
You can see that the room is designed in a quadraphonic shape.
The mixing desk would've been here, tape machines there.
I had the idea to do something in quadraphonic
before I was certain about the story of Quadrophenia.
And the band that were doing the most experimentation with it
were Pink Floyd, and they'd done a couple of shows where
they'd introduced quadraphonic sound into their live shows.
♪ Money... Dum, dum, dum, dum, tchk... ♪
would come out in the back right, this great big chink,
then it would come out there, and then it goes round and round and round. It was very exciting.
So, we had a test unit sent over, and Pete hated it.
The separation wasn't... It was like a big mono.
And Pete said, "You know, I am not going to make
"a quadraphonic album that sounds worse than the stereo."
These days, on a computer, you can do this kind of thing in 15 seconds.
Back then, it was much harder.
We actually never mixed anything in quadraphonic.
Quadrophenia is strictly a stereo album.
At the same time as trying to do that, everything was up in the air.
They were building the studio and trying to record this thing
in the studio, while there were builders in there.
There's people under the desk, undoing things.
He says, "Hold on a minute, another take,"
and then they start... It was utter chaos.
What was different about our studio to everybody else's,
that we had the bar IN the fucking studio.
You know, you'd kind of go, "Na, na, na, nee, na,"
and then pour yourself a pint of beer,
or a pint of brandy, whatever it was, right there.
You didn't have to reach out very far.
The average Who session, not for Roger, but for John, Keith and I,
would start, we'd roll up, it would be two o'clock.
By four o'clock, we would have had enough brandy
to start fiddling around. We would be telling stories.
Roger hated all that stuff, he just thought it was time-wasting.
We were building round the making of Quadrophenia,
and we didn't know our arse from our elbow.
We didn't know what we were doing.
When the desk got put in, Pete said, "Let's hear what it sounds like,"
and all of us in the control room,
our ears and noses started to bleed.
I have a ruptured eardrum to this day, because of it.
We measured it.
It was louder than standing by the four engines of Concorde at full throttle.
It was 140 decibels, and one guitar blast...
just projectile bleeding!
As well as the studio falling apart,
Townshend was in danger of losing his long-term creative ally and producer.
By the start of Quadrophenia, Townshend was still
under the illusion that Kit Lambert was going to be around to help him.
Kit Lambert and Chris Stone, their co-managers,
got into heroin and stuff.
So, they were kind of not looking after business,
or so Roger thought, because Roger found out that all the money
hadn't been accounted for, and there was some money missing.
That was a really sad period, actually.
Kit wanted to be THE producer, as such.
Kit Lambert, who had supposed to have been co-producing with me,
had stopped coming.
I took him out, and in the end I got so angry with Kit
over his behaviour, that I started to threaten him physically,
and funnily enough, Roger came out,
and calmed me down, and got Kit Lambert away,
and then we never really worked together again.
And daddy was long gone. Townshend was on his own.
It was pretty difficult, I didn't realise the extent of their drug use.
And I didn't realise
just how much destructive behaviour was going on.
And I guess that Pete felt incredible pressure.
The local community were really good to us.
They loved having the Who there,
and that was in the days when the power station was working.
You know, we had kids from the estate used to come in
and sit down in the front, sometimes.
5.15 was one of the songs that they let us listen to,
which was exciting.
Roger would say things like, "Girls, would you buy this song?" We would say yes or no.
"Do you think it would get to number one?"
The band now that haven't had a single out for two years.
They've taken a track off their forthcoming LP,
Quadrophenia, I think it's called,
and it's 5.15, and it's the Who!
The thing about 5.15 was that it was a sound check riff.
We were just getting the sound together,
and then we moved on to another song, but we were just riffing away.
♪ Why should I care?
♪ Why should I care...? ♪
This song is built around this riff coming up.
And then the horns complement that.
If I go back and play you what John plays,
you can hear that he plays an emulation of the guitar.
He's playing my guitar part for me...
With the droning, which I always had in the background.
♪ Girls of fifteen
♪ Sexually knowing
♪ The ushers are sniffing
♪ Eau de Cologne-ing... ♪
And the ushers are sniffing, eau de Cologne-ing,
was a reference to the young girls at the Beatles concert in Blackpool.
The whole of Blackpool... this Blackpool theatre
smelt of urine. I mean, it was just beyond belief.
Every single girl in the audience must have pissed themselves
in excitement, and they were sprinkling eau de Cologne
on all the seats, because it was apparently what you do,
was you sprinkle eau de Cologne.
♪ Girls of fifteen
♪ Sexually knowing
♪ The ushers are sniffing
♪ Eau de Cologne-ing
♪ The seats are seductive
♪ Celibate sitting
♪ Pretty girls digging
♪ Prettier women
♪ Magically bored
♪ On a quiet street corner
♪ Free frustration
♪ In our minds and our toes
♪ Quiet storm water
♪ M-M-My generation
♪ Uppers and downers
♪ Either way, blood flows... ♪
Jimmy's fallen out of love with his idols,
he's been thrown out of his home.
The scooter's been crashed.
Right, now what you do? This is the going off into the wilderness,
cos actually what he's doing, he's going off in search of Xanadu.
♪ ..lnside, outside
♪ Leave me alone... ♪
'He's going back to find the thing that makes sense to him,
'you know, being on the beach, being down in Brighton,
'being part of the whole mod culture thing.'
♪ ..Out of my brain on the 5.15... ♪
'And he's going off in search of something
'that he already knows is gone.
'That, I think, is why that song is so powerful,
'because it's the sense that something has all ready been lost.'
He goes back to Brighton,
but there's that lovely idea that Townshend captures,
a very English idea of going to a seaside town after the fair's left. You're off season.
But, actually, there's a strange beauty in it,
and the beauty is that he feels calm by the sea and the sand,
because everything else has passed away.
♪ Here by the sea and sand
♪ Nothing ever goes as planned
♪ I just couldn't face going home
♪ It was just a drag on my own... ♪
Jimmy is drawn to - and this is the reason
why he is not the same as everyone else...
is that he goes and talks to the sea.
The image of him looking out at something much bigger than all of this.
Brighton, the mod culture thing, is happening behind here,
on the promenade, on the pier, but actually what he's doing
is looking out at the vast expanse of the sea,
and the sea is speaking to him.
♪ Let me flow into the ocean
♪ Let me get back to the sea
♪ Let me be stormy and let me be calm
♪ Let the tide in and set me free... ♪
That was a song written about the spiritual journey.
♪ ..I want to drown... ♪
It's about, "Let me get back to the sea.
"Let me get back to the ocean," meaning, "Let me get back to God,"
which is brought on by walking on the beach, by the sea.
There's nobody there but him, he's on his own.
♪ ..Let me flow into the ocean
♪ Let me get back to the sea
♪ Let me be stormy and let me be calm
♪ Let the tide in, rush over me
♪ You know, I want to drown, drown
♪ Drown, drown, drown
♪ I want to drown, drown
♪ Drown, drown, drown
♪ I want to drown, drown
♪ Drown, drown, drown... ♪
It's interesting that out of that calm and peace
comes the story's whole turning point, where Jimmy meets up
with this key figure from his past,
the leader of the mods, the Ace Face.
The idea is that Jimmy goes back and he finds this character,
the Ace Face, who he really, really idolised,
but in fact, the guy who was smashing in the hotel doors with him
just recently is now working as a bellboy.
♪ The beach is a place where a man can feel
♪ He's the only soul in the world that's real... ♪
Jimmy sees his hero in the harsh midday sun being nobody.
♪ ..Well, I see a face coming through the haze
♪ I remember him from those crazy days... ♪
And if this person, who was so exalted, who was so perfect,
that he idolised, is nothing,
then Jimmy has nothing, he is nothing.
♪ ..Riding up in front of a hundred faces
♪ I don't suppose you would remember me
♪ But I used to follow you back in '63... ♪
Jimmy's rank disillusion at the idea that the person
he idolised is a fucking bellboy.
♪ ..I've got a good job
♪ And I'm newly born
♪ You should see me dressed up in my uniform
♪ I work in hotel All gilt and flash
♪ Remember the gaff where the doors we smashed?
♪ Bell boy
♪ I got to get running now... ♪
It was quite difficult working with Keith as a singer, because he acted, rather than sang.
♪ ..Carry the bloody baggage out
♪ Bell boy
♪ Always running at someone's heel... ♪
I loved the way he did that.
It's the kind of thing you could imagine a bellboy doing,
working at a posh hotel.
"Cor blimey," like this, with his mates,
and then when after a tip, it's, "Hello, sir."
I was uncomfortable with turning the bellboy into a comedy figure,
because I thought, "This is the only time that the Ace Face sings."
♪ ..Remembering when stars were in reach
♪ I wander in early to work... ♪
A couple of times, I said to him, "It's not a comedy."
♪ ..Spend my day licking boots for my perks... ♪
Whoosh! That would have gone...
♪ ..The beach is a place where a man can feel
♪ He's the only soul in the world that's real... ♪
What was Keith like in 1973?
Just a little bit more drunk than he was in 1972!
The extraordinary thing about Keith
was that whatever you felt about him as a drummer,
and I didn't think very much of him as a drummer...
It's kind of sacrilege, isn't it? But I didn't.
He listened.
People would call him a sloppy drummer, and he never was a sloppy drummer.
He had an extraordinary metronome. He made the music dramatic.
What he wouldn't do is play, "Boom, boom, bup, ba, boom, ba."
He'd be, "Blrr-plplrprl! Bing, bing, bing!
"Bing, bing, bing! Tiddle, bing, bing!
"Biddle, bing, bing," you know?
And I'd be going, "Boom, boom, bang, bang, boom,"
because somebody had to!
♪ ..People often change
♪ But when I look in your eyes
♪ You could learn a lot from a life like mine
♪ The secret to me
♪ It ain't flown like a flag
♪ I wear it behind this bloody little badge
♪ What says...
♪ Bell boy... ♪
He was at the top of his game in '73, '73-'74,
absolute top of his game.
He was magnificent, and funny as hell.
You know, I tell the funny stories about him showing up
and saying, "Come outside and look at my new car!"
We'd go out and there'd be a Rolls-Royce.
We'd say, "That's fabulous, Keith, great."
Then two hours later, we'd have somebody from Jack Barclay's...
"Where do I send the invoice for Keith Moon's new car?
"He said we've got to send it to the Who group. Is it the Who group?"
I said, "No, you send it to Keith Moon."
"No, no, no. We have to send it to the Who group."
"No, we're not fucking paying for it, OK?
"This is his car, let him pay for it."
"No, no, you don't understand..."
"No, you don't fucking understand. We're not paying for his car."
Ah! That's better!
Phil, what-what-what-what-what...
'I think today you'd say he had ADHD
'and he needed some Ritalin, or something.'
But taking cocaine and mandrix and brandy was exacerbating it.
It was always a mixture with Keith.
You know, fun one minute and a bit frightening the next.
Never felt afraid OF him, but frightened for him
and people around him.
And he wasn't at his best as a human being at that time.
I don't think any of us were, really.
I shouldn't really single him out.
There's a credit on the inside of the sleeve which says,
"Quadrophenia in its entirety by Pete Townshend."
Townshend writes, records the entire album himself in demo form
and then, when he brought it to the Who, they did it again.
Quadrophenia was definitely like a Pete Townshend solo project.
It was all Townshend from start to finish, his own...
They probably knew nothing about it till he came and said, "Here it is."
So, you could see how Roger and maybe the others would feel
a little bit resentful, because it could be construed
as being used like session musicians, you know.
I hear it said that Pete produced the album, which in a sense he did.
But the one thing he never, ever produced was the vocals.
He's never there when I record my vocals, ever. I won't have that.
Roger was always tough, assertive, masculine.
So there was always that sense that you had to be cheerful what you said around him, you really did.
Pete's a very complicated character,
incredibly complicated, as you can see by the songs he writes.
They had an addiction to friction.
It's almost like they're two jigsaw pieces,
and when you bring them together they fit together.
It's an absolute love-hate...
Not hate, but it's a love-anger relationship.
And I think if you take away the love-anger,
you take away the creative source.
You take away the driving dynamic.
So he steals a boat, in the story,
and goes out to sea and almost drowns.
It's clearly written as, is this going to be what happens
to this boy whose life's kind of fallen apart?
Who's twice schizophrenic, pilled out, lost, he's got nothing,
doesn't have a girl, doesn't have a bike,
doesn't have anything.
And that's kind of what we're shooting.
And then he's now really adrift.
And then this, which I just kind of love.
Love Reign O'er Me.
♪ Only love... ♪
What's interesting about...
the opening here is that what you hear from Roger
is incredible tenderness.
You don't hear the heartfelt bawling,
screaming bear that you hear later on.
♪ Only love
♪ Can make it rain
♪ The way the beach
♪ Is kissed by the sea
♪ Only love
♪ Can make it rain
♪ Like the set of lovers
♪ Laying in the fields... ♪
Then you get to this impassioned scream.
♪ ..Love!
♪ Reign o'er me... ♪
If nothing else, Love Reign O'er Me shows that Jimmy's a man.
♪ ..Love... ♪
A boy wants to be noticed at a club,
wants a jacket.
Here, at the end, Jimmy is finally becoming a man
and asking for things that men want.
♪ ..Reign o'er me
♪ Only love
♪ Can bring the rain... ♪
Jimmy is the hero, at last.
It's not about the Who, it's not about Roger,
it's not about Pete, not about John, not about the mods,
it's not about Ace Face, not about drugs, or any of that stuff.
It's just about Jimmy and what it is that he's finally got to,
is that he realises that he's been looking outside himself,
and what he has to do now is to try to ask the question internally,
and that what this song does.
♪ ..Love!
♪ Reign o'er me
♪ Reign o'er me, reign o'er me
♪ Love!
♪ Reign o'er me
♪ Reign o'er me, reign o'er me... ♪
The poignancy for me was that, as a composer, working with the Who
was so great because they used to give me this unbelievable licence.
They didn't share my spiritual beliefs - that's fine...
they didn't share my spiritual beliefs but they allowed me
to have them, and to express them through my work.
And when it came to a song like Love Reign O'er Me,
which is a spiritual prayer to nothing and everything,
Roger gave it his bollocks.
This is Roger coming in in a second.
'I did it as a scream from the street.'
I wanted it to be like the ultimate anger, the ultimate passion,
the ultimate orgasm, you know.
'I wanted it to be like every emotion we've ever had.'
♪ ..Lo-o-o-ove!
♪ Reign o'er me
♪ Reign over me, over me, over me
♪ Whoa! Love! ♪
Because then it's unconditional to the track.
And love should be always unconditional.
♪ O-o-o'er me... ♪
You get this sense of Roger
producing this deep scream from his heart,
from Jimmy's heart.
♪ ..Love... ♪
The end of Quadrophenia is left ambiguous.
The illusion of drowning and water
is throughout the album, and that can be death or rebirth.
The question of what happens to Jimmy next,
I really like the fact that it's in the hands of the listener.
We're going to go on the road again. We're doing a tour of Europe.
Then we do America
and we come back to Europe
and then we do America again.
We've got two American tours lined up.
The day that we finished the stereo mix,
our managers booked a fucking tour.
So I had two weeks to rehearse, to develop the stage's quadraphonic sound,
which was impossible.
We didn't have the time. So they overworked us.
I didn't take into account properly at that time
the load that Pete had,
what with the mixing and everything else.
I was trying to help them survive.
Speaking for myself, I was dead meat.
Actually completely exhausted. I'm sure Roger was exhausted too.
We had employed a bunch of people that were our friends
to film the rehearsal
and I think we got through to Doctor Jimmy
and they'd been sitting on their boxes with cameras
and I just said to them, "You can sit on your arses all fucking afternoon
"cos I'm not singing this again.
"I thought you were supposed to be filming this?"
I don't know why, but for some reason
this other side of Pete came over and started poking me.
"They do what I tell them to do!"
And doing this to me.
All the roadies jump on me and start holding my arms.
I started to scream at him
and I can't remember the details but we ended up in a physical grappling.
He pulled his guitar off and, as he brought it down,
he tried to hit me on the head with it.
And it glanced off my shoulder, like that.
Then he threw a punch and it went one way and I moved that way.
Then he threw the other punch, and as he was coming forward
with his right hand this way, I upper-cutted him.
And he hit me and I passed out.
Here they are... the Who!
At the shows, you could see they'd introduced our new work
and the audience were going, "Yeah", and it would start and they'd go...
We'd like to carry on our present act
with our new album,
or parts of it.
I don't know what they expected, but the audience, it was new to them.
'Then what started to happen is that Roger started to tell the story.'
This one's about his feelings when he gets down to the seaside.
Every time we played a song, he was stopping and saying,
"Now Jimmy has fucked off with his dad.
"He's going to go and get a job."
The next song is about a guy
who sees an old gang leader who's working as a bellhop.
When somebody's talking on stage, you can't hear it.
Half the time you're, "What did he say?"
So you had that confusion going on at these Quadrophenia shows.
So I probably gave Pete a load of problems he didn't need.
After that, things fell apart.
It was the first night of the Quadrophenia US shows
and Moon takes elephant tranquiliser and he starts off strong enough,
and a few songs in, he collapses.
He's out cold.
I think he's gone and eaten something he shouldn't have eaten.
It's your foreign food.
I'm afraid the horrible truth is,
that without him, we're not a group.
Yeah, he did that kind of thing all the time.
It's just that this time, the drugs were too powerful for him.
He's still a bit sort of dodgy.
But he'll be all right.
He is dragged off stage and they take a break
and they come back and he makes it through
and then by the end of Won't Get Fooled Again, he's dead.
He is lifeless, he's Jell-O.
Can anybody play the drums?
And then they had this fan, Scott Halpin, come play drums with them.
Scott!
And that's how they kicked off what already was a difficult tour.
We managed to kind of solider on. We could put a brave face on it.
I could tell funny stories about it
and we could all have a good laugh, but it was tragic.
It was really tragic, cos Keith was being a fool.
We got good reviews and the album sold well,
but when we came back to Europe the following year,
we weren't even playing it.
Went back to playing Tommy.
And what's interesting about this album is it kind of worked.
We never really ever made a truly great album again.
You pulled this letter out, it's a painful letter,
but this is the man I was at a point.
Ted Oldman was our lawyer at the time
and in this last week of recording here I think I just thought,
"I've had it with this.
"This is not going to happen. We're not going to get an album.
"We're screwed in some way."
I probably had a bad day, but it says,
"Dear Ted, I'm writing to you in strictest confidence to ask advice
"and to seek guidance on a matter I feel only you can help me with.
"I've spoken to my wife and very intimate friends about this,
"but I found the making of this current record a great strain.
"The studio building problems, the writing problems
"and, of course, Kit and Keith have been aggravations
"to an already difficult time.
"I've been building up to this for many years now
"and I feel that, as of now,
"the record we are making and the current tours we are undertaking
"will be the last I want to be involved with as the Who as a group.
"I'm losing any impetus either to write for the Who as a vehicle
"or play with its members as a musician."
You know we were done. We were definitely done.
And this letter is indicative of the fact that
I would have gone home in that week and taken my wife aside
and said, "You know, we haven't had a holiday for fucking two years.
"I've hardly seen you.
"We probably haven't made love for six weeks, six months,
"God knows what.
"I probably missed you at Christmas. I probably missed our anniversary.
"I'm sorry. It was all a fucking complete waste of time."
That's probably what I would have said to her.
And she probably would have said to me,
"Well, if that's how you feel you should stop, sweetheart."
And I write this letter and I didn't send it.
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