‘Arrogant, anarchistic – and we loved it!’

A biography of The Who’s wild bassist John Entwistle tries to lionise him, but Neil McCormick isn’t convinced

TTHE OX by Paul Rees 352pp, Constable, £20, ebook £9.99

he Who’s notorious rallying cry was “I hope I die before I get old!” Madcap drummer Keith Moon did just that, accidentally overdosing on sedatives in 1978, aged 32. His partner in the most explosive rhythm section in rock, bassist John Entwistle, followed him to an early grave, expiring in 2002 of a cocaine-induced heart attack while in a Las Vegas hotel room with an exotic dancer, one day before the start of a US tour. But Entwistle left it a little late to bag his place in the nihilistic mythos of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. He was 57 by then, attitudes towards reckless indulgence had changed, and it is hard to shake the notion that at his age he should have known better.

Arriving in a heady moment in the 1960s when rock was the chosen art form of rebellious youth, the Who became an archetypal quartet whose personalities created something greater than the sum of its individual parts. Guitarist Pete Townshend was the cerebral, art school genius; vocalist Roger Daltrey the macho sex god and Moon the volatile wild man whose madness drove them to ever further extremes.

Among such charismatic and competitive characters, Entwistle became known as “The Quiet One” for his restraint, and “The Ox” for his sturdy constitution. Technically their most gifted musician and arguably the boldest and most innovative bass guitarist of the rock era, he would stand stock still on stage, dressed in black, face expressionless, while his bandmates raged and roared around him. It was not a strategy designed to draw attention, resulting in a notion that he was least amongst equals, which evidently came to grate.

In 1990, Entwistle wrote in his notes that “only my fellow musicians have any idea of my contribution to the music”. He speculated that to be appreciated he might have to “die in some real bizarre, mysterious way”. Instead, Entwistle decided to write his autobiography, but as a man of many whims and short-lived indulgences, he never got far with it. Paul Rees, the former editor of music magazine Q, has been given access to those notes and other material by Entwistle’s first wife and his son. He has also conducted interviews with friends, colleagues and employees (though not the other members of the Who) and what results is a diligent account of a musical career. In another crucial respect, however, it fails. “The

Who was f------ FUN,” according to Entwistle’s surviving notes. “It was the best, loudest, most innovative rock band in the f------ world. We were arrogant, anarchistic a-------and we loved it!”

Rees’s book is not much fun at all, which, to be fair, is a problem shared with a lot of tomes about the Who, including Townshend’s 2012 autobiography, Who I Am, and Daltrey’s 2018 memoir Thanks a Lot, Mr Kibblewhite. I put this to Townshend last year, and he surprisingly concurred. “I’ve never really liked the Who,” he insisted. “I think that they undermined the craft, they undermined the ideas, they turned into a heavy, stupid band that could get a bigger reaction smashing a guitar than playing a beautiful solo.” The musical significance of the Who is undisputable but, with hindsight, their offstage behaviour seems less amusing than boorish, especially when you consider that two of the central characters ended up dead from their vices.

I lost count of the number of hotel rooms destroyed in the course of this narrative, and while Moon was usually the perpetrator, Entwistle was often the instigator, quietly encouraging his dangerously unhinged drummer to blow up lavatories with makeshift bombs, fire guns from balconies, and let piranhas loose in bathtubs and pythons into air-conditioning ducts. Profits from tours would be sucked up paying for the damage wreaked, with no thought given to

Was he ‘the last of the great rock stars’ or a half-deaf, indulgent, overweight alcoholic?

those left to clear up the mess.

This seems especially true of the women in Entwistle’s life. He gloried in the role of head of a family and lord of his own castle, the sprawling Victorian mansion of Quarwood in Gloucestershire, where he lived for 27 years. But on the road, he carried on affairs with impunity. Returning from tour, it is reported that Entwistle refrained from sex with his wife for two weeks “in case he picked something up”, a detail shared without comment. He cheated on his second wife, Maxine, on their wedding day in Las Vegas in 1991. His third long-term partner, Lisa Pritchett-Johnson, died aged 43 of the same vices that accounted for Entwistle himself, just a month after inheriting millions from his estate.

Yet we are constantly being told by those close to him what an upstanding, wise and moral character Entwistle was. Set against the litany of damage left in his wake, such remarks have the hollow ring of denial. “He was very generous, warm-hearted, a bit reckless,” asserts Alison, his first wife. “He was my boyfriend, my fiancé and then my husband. Then, he was horrible. But, you know, you forgive all that. Death is quite a closure.”

As much as this authorised biography might try to frame Entwistle’s behaviour in heroic terms as The Last of the Great

Rock Stars, by the end of his days, he was overweight, alcoholic, half deaf, twice divorced, trapped in a poisonous relationship and only touring because he owed money to the tax man, thanks to his grotesquely self-indulgent spendthrift lifestyle. It is not a particularly heroic image. After reading this fastidious yet perversely depressing book, you might be tempted to conclude that if Entwistle really was the last of that overblown breed, then good riddance to the lot of them.

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