I had bought two pieces of mahogany and now that I had handsaws and vices available, I could join those two pieces together. I also had a friend down at Burns Guitars of Acton Lane and, somehow or other, a few of their pickups and machine heads made their way from his shed to my shed. Wood shavings on the floor in a sheet-metal factory are rather difficult to explain but no one asked too many questions.
Within a week, I had my very own bright-red Fender. It was streets ahead of my patented folding plywood guitar but there was still one serious design flaw. I hadn’t realized, when I was measuring the thing through the window, that the glass was magnifying everything just that little bit. My “Fender” was just that bit bigger than Buddy’s Fender and that little difference meant the thing weighed a ton. It didn’t sound like a Fender either, but it didn’t sound bad.
One night in 1957, when I’d sung “Heartbreak Hotel” at the local youth club, people had come up to me afterward for a chat. Singing was like a magic friend maker, and some of those friends wanted to start a band. If you’re looking for formative moments, little events that made my life go one way rather than a thousand others, then this was probably one of them. On went the light. Singing is fun. Singing makes friends. I want to be in a band.
Harry Wilson, who had been my best friend since my first day at primary school, became the drummer in the lineup. Big Reggie volunteered to have a go at the tea chest bass. Ian Moody played … I can’t really remember what he played. The washboard, maybe? His principal job was to stand there looking cool. He was a face—a neighborhood face—and he gave our group an edge. Even then, it was about front. There he stood, tinkering away on whatever piece of kitchen apparatus he’d borrowed from his parents’ house, looking cool. His older brother was the king of the Shepherd’s Bush Teds and Ian got his hand-me-downs. When he’d grown out of them, I got them.
In those early years, our skiffle band was my life outside school. Then, when I got chucked out of school, it became my life outside the factory, and it became more serious. We’d progressed from skiffle to very basic versions of all the big hits. We did a Little Richard medley with “Lucille” and “Tutti Frutti.” That’s a good example of how rock and roll got sex past the censors. For bonking, read a-whop-bop-a-lu-bop-a-whop-bam-boom. Not exactly subtle but the men in suits at the BBC think you’re talking about ice cream. Every teenager on the planet knows you’re not. Rock and roll is about sex. The clue is in the name. Most of its creativity came from the songwriters coming up with euphemisms for a shag. It might all seem pretty obvious now but in those days the establishment, the men in suits, didn’t have a clue. Good golly, Miss Molly, sure like to ball.
Our two main preoccupations, besides practicing, were arguing over the name of the band and arguing over who called the shots. It was all about pecking order. Everything was decided on a push and shove. It was alpha-male volatile.
The slightest technological advancement could change the power balance. Our equipment was shoestring. If a string broke above the nut or below the bridge of the guitar, we used to tie it back together with a fisherman’s knot. Any money we scraped together went toward kit upgrades but it was very gradual. I still had my “Fender.” Reg Bowen had not only an electric guitar but also an amp. The amp. The only amp. So our rhythm guitar player at the time (his name escapes me) went out and bought a bass on hire purchase. Everything shifted constantly.
Mostly, we played weddings and local church hall teen clubs. We did a weekly spot at the Fuller, Smith & Turner brewery’s social club in Chiswick. And, after a few months, we were calling ourselves the Detours and we were doing all right. But after a few months our bass player said he was leaving. We weren’t earning enough and he was never going to pay off that never-never bass. So one night at Reg’s house he said he was off. Our only bass player with our only bass guitar. I chased him all the way to the bus stop, but even with my considerable skills of persuasion I couldn’t get him to change his mind.
A few days later, I was walking home from work and I saw this guy gamboling toward me with the biggest guitar I had seen in my life. I recognized him from school. It was a kid from the year below me called John. It was a kid who played bass.
I didn’t really know Pete Townshend or John Entwistle at school. I mean, I spotted them. You couldn’t help it. They were two people you couldn’t hide in a very large crowd. John never blended in anywhere. He was big and he was tall. He had a strange gait. He walked like a big, tall John Wayne. If you put him in a line of a thousand people, all the same height, all the same weight, all wearing balaclavas, I’d still be able to pick him out in a flash because of that walk.
Pete was also special in his own way. As a result, he had an equally tough time keeping a low profile when he arrived at Acton County Grammar. Like me, he was skinny, but where I had the funny jaw, he had the sizable nose. That’s not a criticism. It’s been taken as a criticism in the past and it sounds like a criticism, but it isn’t. I think he’s got the most fantastic head. If I were a sculptor, that’s the kind of head I’d want to sculpt all day long. And he’s really grown into it. Back then, though? Well, he and his impressive sneezer made a target for the bullies. Tall and skinny, he looked like a nose on a stick.
I hadn’t seen either of them since I’d left the year before, but now here was John, walking down the road with a bass guitar. I use the term “bass guitar” in the loosest possible way. He’d built it just like I’d built mine but his was not much better than my first foldable plywood effort. It was the shape of a football boot and it looked like it wouldn’t last the afternoon. But I needed a bass guitarist so we got chatting.
John told me he was already in a band—a trad jazz band, so he played bass and trumpet.
“You getting any work?” I asked.
“Local youth club in the church hall,” he replied.
“Getting paid?”
“No. You?”
“Of course we are,” I lied. “We’re getting bookings. Yeah, we’re going to start making some real money. Definitely. Soon.”
It was the summer of 1961 when John joined the Detours. We had a few more months to wait before Pete arrived.
* * *
The sixties didn’t start swinging until 1963. Before then, it was just the same as the fifties. More so, even. Elvis had stopped being cool and started doing his terrible movies. Bill Haley was old hat. Music was quite conservative, quite drab. Frank Ifield, a yodeling lounge singer from Australia, topped the charts for most of May and June of 1962. His next two singles also went straight to No. 1. That should tell you everything you need to know about the early sixties. But life was about to change.
From 1963, there was this energy. It was all happening. It was happening because of music. That great period of rock bands—the Beatles, the Stones, all those Birmingham bands, all those Scouser bands, and, yes, us, I’m sticking us in there, too. What are the chances of that kind of chemistry ever coming together again in music?
It came from little bands starting up, playing skiffle in the streets. Kids learned they could do something in music, even if it was nothing more than scrubbing a washboard with thimble-covered fingers or plucking on a string attached to a broomstick on top of a tea chest. Once you take part, you take an interest. So the music moved from the streets into the pubs and then the clubs. And then pirate radio spread the music. There was music before—of course there was—but it didn’t speak to a specific age group. There was no room for that teenage slot. There was no teenager. Before the sixties, you were a child and then you were a man. You went to school and then you went to work. That changed. Our generation changed it. Why us?
I think it was to do with the war. What happened in the sixties started in the forties. The generation born during the hostilities, right up to 1950, those were the magical years for musicians, artists, scientists, everything. That’s what happens when you start off with a fallow field. So much had been destroyed, there was only one thing that could happen. To build. We were a gene
ration of builders. There was no choice. We had grown up with very little and, for all their attempts to make the best of it, we had been brought up by parents who were struggling to recover from the war. They didn’t have anything left to give. You can’t blame them, really. After the victory parties were over and everyone had stopped kissing each other in fountains, what were they left with? Spiraling debt, housing shortages, unemployment. The men came back from war knackered. They were strangers in their own homes. A lot of them just caved in. That’s what we grew up with. I wasn’t the only one with a dad sitting in a taxi shedding a silent tear every Remembrance Sunday.
As children we just got on with it but when we became teenagers that channeled into adolescent anger. It began with the Teddy Boys. They were about five or six years older than us and their attire stood out from the drabness of everyday dress like headlamps. They wore long drape jackets and colored shirts with cutaway collars turned up at the back. Some of them went farther. They had their jackets made in bright blues and pinks and customized with black velvet collars. That was the start of the youth revolution. It might not have gone much farther, but once society recognized the commercial value of teenagers, that was it.
There was money to be made so everything changed very quickly. Look at it today. It’s interesting how much of the economy is now focused on youth. It’s a complete reverse. Back in the sixties there was no plan. It was just a feeling borne out of the arrogance and vigor of youth. When you’re young, you’re bulletproof. You’re full of energy and, in our case, it came out in the music. The anger and the energy, the demand to be heard, affected all these bands and it made the whole much greater than the sum of its parts.
I think that was true for us much more than the other bands we were coming up with. Pete used to say that, as individuals, we were three geniuses and “just the singer.” Thanks, Pete. Whatever he thought, what we added up to as a band was much more than what we were as individuals. As individuals, we were different. We came from different sides of the tracks. Pete was much more middle class than I realized. John was a trainee tax officer. Keith was working class like me, but if you’re going to try and pigeonhole him any more than that, good luck. A lot of the professional early sixties groups from the south of England were middle-class kids who came from middle-class backgrounds rebelling against middle-class values. We weren’t like that. We were different from all the other bands. We were different from each other.
chapter four
The Detours
Pete describes us as “four people who should never have been in a band together.” Given our differences, given all the fighting and the fallings-out, it’s a miracle we stuck it out through that first decade. Of course, there were many, many times when we almost didn’t, but I’m not as surprised as everyone else that we survived. Even in the darkest days, I was never going to give up. Not in a million years. Unlike Pete, it was all I really had.
Mr. Townshend auditioned for the band in January 1962. Until that point, it was me and Reg on guitars, John on bass, Harry on drums, and Colin Dawson on lead vocals. I was just finishing the second year of my apprenticeship at the factory. John was embarking on his career for life at the Inland Revenue, all pinstripe trousers, tie, waistcoat, and City boy umbrella. Pete had stuck it out at Acton long enough to pass his O-levels and now he was in his second term at Ealing Technical College and School of Art.
John had been saying for a while that Reg wasn’t good enough and that he knew someone who was much better, so one evening he brought Pete to my house for a tryout. Pete says he remembers two things about that night.
First, there was a “lovely blond girl” leaving the house in floods of tears, giving me an ultimatum: “It’s either me or the guitar.”
Second, there was a villain on the hop hiding under my bed while he played. Now, the lovely blond girl would have been Barbara and, it’s true, we were arguing a lot about the amount of time I spent practicing, and it’s possible she was storming out when Pete was walking in. But I don’t think the villain was under the bed. He was probably just sitting on it. Let’s call him Jack. He was a mate and he was in trouble with the Old Bill for something, so he was staying round my house just in case they knocked on his door.
He was part of one of the big criminal families in the area. There were always these families. It was just like The Godfather, if The Godfather had been set in Acton. You didn’t want to be out with them, so I harbored Jack while the heat blew over. You had to do stuff like that and you never grassed. But that’s as far as it went with me. I had a few mates who were robbing banks and they’d try to convince me it was the thing to do because it was so easy. It was their get-rich plan. That, and winning the Pools. They didn’t always get away with it, but enough of them did and a lot of people on the street admired them for it. I suppose robbing banks was their stage, their spotlight, and their adrenaline kick. But I was never tempted to do any of that stuff myself. I had to harbor Jack, but that was as far as it went.
I was getting my kick from being in a band. I’ve often wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t had music. Would I have been tempted into that world? It’s easy to say you’re an honest sort when you’re not desperate. We can only live life as we know it and, since the seventies, I’ve lived a life of privilege. If it hadn’t worked out like that, I might have been a prime candidate for a criminal enterprise. Expelled, stuck in the factory, skint. Pissed off. But I still reckon I would have stayed honest. I think that was the bit of my dad that kept me out of it.
I tried to get Jack on the straight. I got him a job in the Acton shed for a few weeks, but he couldn’t stick it. I don’t think he realized how hard we worked. He saw that we were a lot tougher than he was, so he didn’t try the hard-man thing with me after that. It didn’t stop him turning up at the Marquee Club on one of our Tuesday nights with a sawn-off shotgun, threatening to kill someone. I remember it clearly. It was a couple of years after he’d been hiding at my house. He marched into the dressing room and announced that he’d had a ruck with someone.
“I’m going to kill him,” he said, and brought out a sawn-off 410 from under his coat. I just took it straight off him. I grabbed it before he could say anything else or do anything else. I think he was quite surprised by that. He just stood there while I gave him a proper bollocking. I told him he’d ruin his whole life, and then I gave him his shotgun back, minus the cartridge, and went onstage. Nothing happened that night. Jack didn’t ruin his whole life that night. I’d like to tell you it was a turning point, that my intervention saved him from himself. But it only postponed the inevitable. He spent the rest of his life in and out of jail.
I was telling you about Pete’s audition. A small moment in rock history, even if we were just a bunch of teenagers messing about on guitars. He remembers the blond and the villain. I remember realizing we’d found our man. Pete was only sixteen but he just had ability. On a technical level, he was just better than us. He knew all these clever chords that were diminished, missing thirds here, adding sevenths there, all strange shapes. Majors with one note dropped or augmented to give a distinctive droning sound. They were flash chords and he knew it. Even then, he was confident.
It was his style that really made him special. He played banjo in the trad jazz band he was in with John so, when he moved to guitar, some of that banjo style came with him. The way his right hand moved, the rhythms he was playing—the overall effect was unique. The two of them playing together in that bedroom—that was the moment we went up another gear.
Up until that point, we were very, very straight. We were a covers band. We covered everything in the hit parade. And because Colin wanted to be Cliff Richard, we did everything like Cliff Richard did it. Nothing wrong with that. Cliff was what everyone was listening to, but when Pete came along it opened up a new road. He was in straightaway.
The problem was that Reg owned the only amp, and even though he still let us practice at his house after he was out of the band, it was s
till just one amp. We had to run all the guitars and mics through that one measly little box. It was never going to blow the bloody doors off.
It was Pete who suggested we could go up to Laskys, 42 Tottenham Court Road, and buy extra amps on hire purchase. Today, Tottenham Court Road is all coffee shops and boutique furniture stores, but back then it was the ultimate sweet shop for boys who dreamed of playing in a proper band. It was just full of electrical stores selling equipment very, very cheap. You could buy valve-driven amplifiers, speakers, everything you needed, and you could haggle. And it was just up the road from the best music shops in London. On Saturday afternoons you’d get loads of young bands up there and that week it was our turn.
We steamed off up there and steamed back again with a twenty-five-watt ex–War Department amp each. Imagine the excitement as we plugged them in. Imagine our disappointment when we realized they were just about loud enough to fill Pete’s mum’s front room. The speakers were worse. They were ten-inchers and they made this tinny little noise but, in a moment of marketing genius, I thought to myself, Well, it’s all about front. It’s all about image. We might have little amps, but we can make them look big. So I made these great boxes out of plywood and covered them with Fablon, that lovely, stuck-on, polished, wood-grained plastic.
Then I stuck them on legs. They looked like G Plan sideboards with a sort of painted gauze front. And although I’m laughing now just remembering it, trust me, people used to say, “Fuck me, they must be good. Look at the size of their kit.”
Of course, it helped when the gear wasn’t quite so shit, and that didn’t take long. Not long before I turned 18, I’d cobbled together enough money to buy a proper guitar. Me and Pete had twelve-inch speakers and John had the full fifteen-incher. Like most things in life, those extra inches made all the difference. We had the beginnings of a proper PA. We were loud. Ish.
Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite Page 4