I really did love Cleo. I loved her for her music and I loved her because she was prepared to live in a van with me. Thinking back now, I have nothing but fond memories of that summer.
* * *
On August 9, 1964, the High Numbers did quite a prestigious gig at the Brighton Hippodrome. We were supporting Gerry and the Pacemakers, Elkie Brooks, and (drumroll) Val McCullam. “Who the fuck is Val McCullam?” you ask. Which is exactly what we asked. The promoter was this bloke called Arthur Howes. He arranged package tours around Britain and he said, “Look, boys, you can come on board and do your bit but you also have to support Val.”
“Who?”
“Val. Val McCullam. She’s a big deal.”
“Righto.”
So that night in Brighton, Pete, John, and Keith were on in the first half with this Val bird, and then they were on in the second half with me. The following Sunday, we were in Blackpool with the Beatles and the Kinks. First half, Val and the boys. Second half, me and the boys. I can’t remember at which point we worked out that part of Arthur’s deal with Val was because he wanted to shag her, but it was pretty early on. No idea if his plan worked, but if it did I would say we got off relatively lightly compared to Val.
And that was the summer and autumn of 1964. We drove all over Britain together, me and Cleo, on the way to whichever gig was next. When it got dark, we parked up on the side of the road in that rusty old lorry, which was, increasingly, covered in lipstick messages from fans and which were, increasingly, very similar to Keith’s handwriting.
Life was just a wonderful adventure. We saw the Lake District for the first time. We got as far as Glasgow for a gig at the Kelvin Hall Arena with Lulu—sixteen years old and already a great soul singer—and joined her whole family for a party after the show. We traveled the length and breadth of the country without breaking down once, the odds of which must have been longer than the odds of me and Pete still stepping out onstage together fifty years later. And you know the amazing thing—and it never does cease to amaze me to this day—it was all done with just a map and an address scribbled on the back of an envelope. No satnav, no Google Maps, not even a postal code. How did we communicate with no mobile phones? How did we do all those shows, all that relentless touring with barely a landline between us? It was magic.
And this was happiness. I’d escaped school without becoming a bank robber. I’d left the factory. I’d left the council flat. I was twenty years old, and I was doing the job Mrs. Bowen, my music teacher, never thought I would do.
chapter six
The Who, Innit?
The first time a guitar died was an accident. It was September 1964 and we were playing our regular night at the Railway Hotel. The only difference was a new collapsible stage, which was a few inches higher than the upturned beer crates we usually performed on. Pete was in the middle of his repertoire of moves when he stuck the guitar through the ceiling. The place went quiet. Some girls sniggered.
So he covered up the mistake by smashing the guitar to pieces. This pissed me off. Pete will tell you it was art. That he was taking the work of Gustav Metzger to a new level. Gustav who? Bollocks. He’s journalizing. The hole in the ceiling had nothing to do with Metzger and everything to do with the sniggering girls. It was heartbreaking. When I remembered how much I’d struggled to get my first guitars, it was like watching an animal being slaughtered. An expensive animal that we’d have to replace with another expensive animal before the next gig. And we had to pay for the hole in the ceiling.
The following Tuesday, Keith kicked his drums over and that was it. From then on, the audience expected us to break our instruments. It was our thing.
Don’t get me wrong, I saw quickly what it was doing for us. And even though it started as an accident, it soon became much more than that. The press got excited about the idea of these youths smashing up their kit. With the aid of a few ex-army smoke bombs, it was a good visual. It had impact. But they were missing the real point. It was about the noise. What had started as a mistake fitted into the ritual of what we were doing.
Very quickly, Pete wasn’t just smashing his guitar. He used to stick the neck of it right up into the amps and through the speakers to make all kinds of surreal noises. It was animalistic. It was sacrificial. The guitar used to scream, and it used to go on for about five minutes until it was wrecked. The critics missed it, but the fans got it the first time; they understood through the energy it created. The critics were writing about what they were seeing, but they weren’t listening. That became the problem with the smashing of the guitars; I felt that in the end people had just come to see that; it stopped people listening.
And, you know, I’d love Pete to smash a guitar now just like he did, but he’d have to tell the crowd: don’t just watch, listen. And they wouldn’t, would they? The sight of a septuagenarian going to town on an amp stack would be all-consuming. But at least we could afford it now. Back in 1965, his artistic expression was very expensive.
I was already having to contend with Keith and his flying drumsticks. The first flash of recognition and he had become the pinup of The Who. Wherever we went, all the girls were screaming, “Keith! Keith! Keith!” He loved being loved, which you can’t blame him for at all. The problem was that I had to stand in front of him. I was the front man. It was my job. And Keith decided the drummer should be at the front.
To make his point, he would throw drumsticks at the back of my head all night, every night. The idea of having the drummer at the front of the stage with the rest of us tucked up round the back was ridiculous but he was serious about it. Completely serious. When the flying drumsticks didn’t work, he became the master of upstaging. He was fabulous at it. He’d do anything to steal the limelight. Most of all, he wanted to sing. He couldn’t sing. Well, he could, but not terribly well. But if you ever want to see a drummer with pure joy on his face watch Keith Moon singing “Bellboy.” He’s gone. He’s in pure heaven. Occasionally, when we were all in a good mood, we’d let him do “Barbara Ann.” And then we wouldn’t for the next few gigs. He’d sing anyway, as loud as he could. You can see it on the old tapes. Every song, Pete and John are doing the harmonies, I’m singing the lead. And so is Keith.
Apart from the drugs, the lack of money, and Keith’s big head, things had been going quite well. For starters, we’d worked out what we were going to be called, which is always important. We’d been the Detours until February 1963, when it became clear that we were getting confused with another band, called the American Detours. I can’t remember exactly who came up with “The Who” in the first place. We were round at Pete’s mate Barney’s flat chucking around all sorts of silly names. The Group. No One. The Hair. Pete liked that one. I think someone made a suggestion that Barney didn’t hear.
He said, “The Who?” Someone else said, “That’s good. The Who.” And that was that. Or it was for the next year or so. Then, for four months in 1964, we were the High Numbers. Then Kit arrived and said, “No, we’re going back to The Who. It’s a much better name. Much more graphic. You can do much more with three letters than you can with God knows how many there are in the High Numbers.”
It was a lot of toing and froing, a lot of confusion for anyone printing the gig posters, but it was worth it. Within a couple of months, Kit had come up with what I think was the greatest rock poster of all time. It wouldn’t have worked half as well with God knows how many letters there are in the High Numbers.
It was the end of 1964, and we’d got Tuesday nights at the Marquee. This shouldn’t have been that big a deal. It was the Marquee. Proper West End. We’d played in town before, but this was big. This was where the Stones played. But Tuesday nights? Dead. Tumbleweed. Nobody went out on a Tuesday. But Kit did his poster.
The Who. Maximum R & B. Tuesdays at the Marquee.
With an image of Pete, his arm stretched up, like a swan. Kit brought ballet to that poster, and that was half the battle won.
He had another trick up his sleeve.
“We’re going to go out,” he said, “and we’re going to find a hundred of the trendiest mods we can find, and we’re going to make them the nucleus of a fan club. We will have a hundred faces.”
So we went round Shepherd’s Bush and we gave out all these free tickets to the trendiest mods we could find. Then we did the same thing in the West End, except we couldn’t find a single bloody person on the street on a Tuesday to take them. No mods. No Teds. Nobody.
I was so anxious that night. I’d played empty rooms before but an empty Marquee would be a new level of emptiness. But the poster and Kit’s ruthless marketing skills saved us. That very first night, all our Shepherd’s Bush mob, loyal, wonderful people that they were, turned up. And then a few stragglers came in. A new crowd. The following week, there were a few more. Quite quickly, it spiraled. Word of mouth spread about this Tuesday night in the West End, where this band was playing all this stuff with feedback and wild rhythms and improvisation. The jungle drums in those days were so much better than the Internet these days.
Within three or four weeks, the line was round the block. It was the first real, tangible sign that we were a success. We were the mod band. We were the hot ticket at a hot club “up West.” Until the Small Faces came up and spoiled it, bless them. They were real East End mods, and Steve Marriott, in my opinion, was one of the greatest rock-soul singers we’ve ever had.
But in early 1965 it was us and that felt good. Kit had done his job as our manager. He’d found us a home. He found us the beginnings of a fan club. He knew how to sell us. If one of us did something new onstage, he’d spot it and tell us whether or not to keep it. Usually, he’d want us to keep it. He had a master plan—sometimes I wished he’d shared it with us, but we had complete trust in him. If he said jump, we’d jump. And he did say jump. He encouraged us to be wilder and wilder. Everyone in the pubs and clubs loved him, even though he came from a different walk of life. It might have had something to do with the fact that he always bought everyone a drink. But we loved him because he understood the show. He saw that it wasn’t just about the music. It was the whole package.
Each week, we would add a new song. During the day I would spend hours with Kit, going round the record shops, trying to find new styles of music. We used to have bets on which records would be hits and which would be misses. He had a nose for it and I did, too. Nine times out of ten we’d pick the same ones and we’d be right.
On January 15, 1965, we released our first proper Townshend-composed Who single. Pete said recently that “I Can’t Explain” was written by some eighteen-year-old kid who can’t tell his girlfriend he loves her because he’s taken too many Dexedrine tablets. He also said it can’t be beaten for straightforward Kinks copying. It still made the Top Ten and we still open with it today. It’s a great track. But the recording of it, a few months earlier, wasn’t straightforward at all.
We had turned up at Pye Records in Marble Arch in September 1964 for our big studio debut. We were ready to play our first homegrown track, in our new, unique, English style. But Shel Talmy, the hotshot American producer, landed us with these three-part-harmony Beach Boy backing vocals, which Pete still curses to this day. Worse, he’d brought in Jimmy Page to play lead guitar.
“Oh shit.” That was my reaction. Pete had a slightly more protracted one, but what could we do? I wanted Pete to play. I wanted us to be the band we were, not the band some Yank wanted us to be. If it was up to us we would have said no. But there was no option. In those days, it was a live recording. There were only three tracks. Putting Pete’s solo on afterward would have been enormously difficult and could have lost the whole texture of the record. He would have played a great solo like he did every night live, but it would have left the sound sparse. You can’t do rhythm and solo. You can get away with it live. Pete had a technique for that, but in the studio this was our first proper recording. Talmy had created huge hits with the Kinks and he was going to have his way. It was either that or nothing.
We did it in one take, and then Talmy said we had to do a B side. He threw this song at us called “Bald Headed Woman.” I scribbled out the lyrics, which didn’t take long.
Well, I don’t want no bald headed woman
It’ll make me mean, yeah, Lord, it’ll make me mean.
Yeah, I don’t want no sugar in my coffee.
And repeat. Job done. I didn’t realize what the song was about at the time, but it was bluesy and I was right at home with that. Two hours later, we were out. Jimmy sounded nothing like Pete, but it was enough to get us into the charts for the first time.
Our first appearance on Top of the Pops meant my first appearance on an airplane. In those days the show was filmed in a church hall in Manchester, so Kit booked us on a BAE flight up from London Airport. Look at me. Part of the jet set.
I found myself sitting next to Marianne Faithfull, who was also booked for TOTP.
“Are you all right?” she asked as the plane took off. I was fine but it was lovely to have Marianne there to hold my hand.
Our next single was a more harmonious experience. Pete had 95 percent of “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere” written by the time he brought it into the Marquee one afternoon that April, but he didn’t have the bridge worked out. We worked at it together onstage before the audience arrived. It started out as a song about a blissful free spirit because Pete was obsessed with Charlie Parker at the time. By the end of the day, it was about breaking through locked doors, not caring what was right or wrong.
That was my contribution. I gave it a bit more street, a bit more attitude. At that age, you think you’re right all the time. That lyric “Nothing gets in my way” was all about how we were going to make our own lives, and I think those words suited it really well.
And, of course, it had Pete’s feedback halfway through. It was new. It was revolutionary—so revolutionary that Decca sent the first pressing of the record back because they thought they had a faulty disc. But it was us. It was our stage act on vinyl.
We were in the charts. We were getting on television. The BBC had deigned to allow us on the radio. And then we had our first international tour. Two nights in Paris. It made a change from Shepherd’s Bush. It was very, very foreign. I don’t know what we must have looked like to the Parisians. They had great style, of course, and we must have looked like we were from outer space. The venue was the Club des Rockers, a small hall above a bar up by the Moulin Rouge, and there was no stage. We were crammed into a corner and the audience was right in front of us, at eye level, in our faces. Bon soir.
We started playing “Heatwave” and they all just stood there, staring at us, hardly showing any emotion. They were French. We were English. No English bands had an easy time in France. Perhaps they hated us? Perhaps this was their way of showing Gallic disdain? So we reacted like we always did in those situations. We put on a bit of attitude.
“Daddy Rolling Stone.” “Motoring.” “Jump Back.” Still nothing. We put on a bit more attitude. Is it going to go off? Is it going to go down? Are we going to walk off in abject silence?
This went on for the whole forty-five-minute set and then, as soon as we finished the angriest, snarliest, wildest version of “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere,” they went absolutely crazy. Our first gig abroad. Success. The local music magazine reviewed us. It said, “The audience understood that a new style of rock was being created.” I’m not sure that was true. I’m not sure they had such a philosophical response. They were just completely shell-shocked.
Of course, Kit didn’t have any money to get us home, but he spoke beautiful French so he talked our way onto the boat. Or he borrowed the money off Chris Parmenter, the A&R man from Fontana Records. Kit was all about blagging. He used his aristocratic accent and his Belgravia address to open all sorts of overdrafts. He had cards at Harrods and the Christopher Wine Company and accounts with several banks, all in the red. When things got really tight, he’d take a check to a casino. If he won, he’d have enough to pay off the bai
liffs. If he lost, the check bounced anyway. He was a gambler, but he could talk his way out of anything. That’s how we got back from France. But then, when he got home, he’d been evicted from Eaton Place. That should have been a big clue that finances at New Action, Kit and Chris’s management company, weren’t up to much.
Pete, on the other hand, was already going up in the world. He was sitting in his flat in Belgravia listening to opera, distanced and worried about the forthcoming album. He had the money. He had the publishing. The cash from the gigs was just pocket money for him. It changed us. We were becoming a group and its writer. That was always inevitable, I suppose, but it wasn’t a dictatorship and I was never just a foot soldier. I still put the shows together. I’ve always decided on the running order. I have an instinct for getting the songs in a sequence where the musical senses in the body are taken on a journey. If you put songs in the wrong place, you break that journey, and we never did that. In the early days, we knew so many songs, we didn’t have a set list. I just used to shout them out and they’d go into the next song. I’d get the feel for which song needed to follow the one we were doing while we were doing it. I’d think where was I in my head, what was I feeling, and then how could I take that feeling and emotion to another level without breaking the link. It was intense, a whole other level from just banging out one hit after another.
A lot of bands split up because of imbalance. Or, worse, they end up in front of a judge arguing who wrote what when. It didn’t make a huge difference to me. I have been a bit bothered over the years, not about the cash but about the acknowledgment. I made my contribution, I know what I added, and so it was hard reading criticisms of my vocals in the press. But that’s life. Why waste time worrying about it? Instead, I just accepted it.
I made the conscious decision that if my job was going to be the singer of Pete’s songs, and if Pete’s songs were genius, which they were, then I would be happy with my lot, thank you very much. I’d go whichever way he wanted. Of course, if there was something I didn’t like, I’d still tell him. I’ve always told him, which isn’t easy because, like most writers, he gets defensive. But that tension was important. It’s what made us who we are. It was never destructive. And, whatever happened, I knew that we were never going to split up because of money. Pete was in his flat in Belgravia and I was still in a van with Cleo. Honestly, I was happy with that. I was living the van-based dream.
Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite Page 7