A Band With Built-In Hate
Peter Stanfield Reaktion Books £15.99 ★★★★☆
In a recent interview, Pete Townshend said he sometimes feels like he ended up in the wrong band. The mythology of The Who tends to accentuate the craziness: the smashed guitars, inter-band feuds, chemical excess and Keith Moon as a constantly ticking time bomb. Meanwhile, Townshend has always striven to introduce more rarefied concepts from visual art, film, literature and technology into rock ’n’ roll.
If Roger Daltrey’s 2018 autobiography was a prosaic foot soldier’s telling of the Who story, here is the view from the high plains. It’s a cultural thesis in which the group sometimes appear as little more than bit-part players in a story covering Mods, Pop Art, French New Wave and, in particular, the writings of pioneering music journalist Nik Cohn.
Readers seeking tales of Moon in Nazi regalia should shop elsewhere. A professor of film, Stanfield specialises in pop culture and presents The Who as a band that ‘dissembled pop and made our understanding of the 1960s art scene more multifaceted’.
He’s good on the artifice of their beginnings. Auteurs Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp picked The Who (then called The High Numbers) as a vehicle for an anthropological study of the Mod ‘fad’. The band played the part as a Pop Art experiment, regarding Mod as a folk devil that served their antagonistic purposes.
The best parts of the book mirror the best of The Who, fizzing with ideas and connections. Trawling the mid-1960s London scene, Stanfield draws links between the Tate and the Marquee, the ‘tight and clean’ opening of I Can’t Explain and Robert Fraser’s vogueish art gallery. The Who were both high- and low-brow, ‘delinquent mischief-makers and radical aesthetes’.
For Stanfield, ‘their mutinous stance’ made them ‘recusants for the new pop age’. He notes the subversive intent of singing My Generation while ‘dressed in jackets made from flags and shirts with rows of medals worn without entitlement’. Their abrasive live performances verged on avant garde anti-music.
Like the band, Stanfield occasionally over-reaches, granting every casual flex cultural significance. When Townshend grumbles about The Who’s debut album shortly after its release, it’s not simply routine artistic dissatisfaction – ‘as with the guitars and amplifiers he trashed on stage, [he] was practising a form of auto-destruction’. The author is sometimes so preoccupied with the subtext he misses the obvious: Daltrey’s scream at the end of Won’t Get Fooled Again is as eloquent as any thesis.
The post-1971 period is given fairly cursory attention, as rock’s rebellion becomes commodified and Stanfield increasingly resorts to critiquing the critics. A nostalgic opus, Quadrophenia in 1973 marks the moment ‘The Who’s past became their present’ – as it has remained. Dutifully performing the old hits, they long ago became part of the establishment, but the first half of this book vividly reanimates the nasty, transgressive, scene-shaping thrill of their beginnings. Perhaps Townshend was in the right band all along.