“Divine music”: the band Pete Townshend hailed as 150 times better than Def Leppard
The Who’s Pete Townshend has never been one to mince his words to protect the feelings of his peers, with nothing standing in the way of him saying how he truly feels.
It doesn’t matter who you are, whether this be The Beatles or even Roger Daltrey, his right-hand man in The Who, nobody is immune from criticism if Townshend feels a certain way. One area of music that has found itself in the ire of Townshend multiple times over the years is hard rock, which, simply put, does nothing for the ‘My Generation’ hitmaker, who has never bought into the hype surrounding the genre.
With AC/DC, for example, it’s their repetitiveness and tendency to stick to a proven formula that Townshend, who views himself as an experimentalist that thrives outside of his comfort zone, can’t tolerate, once stating, “AC/DC made 50 albums, but all their albums were the same. It wasn’t the way The Who worked. We were an ideas band… We’re not making Coca-Cola, where every can has to taste the same.”
For Townshend, even though he made a name for himself as a hell-raising lunatic who smashed up guitars on a nightly basis, substance has always mattered ten times more than style, which is what particularly irked him about the glam metal scene. As much as he could admire the musical majesty that these groups possessed in their ranks, Townshend couldn’t abide by the larger-than-life personas they inhabited on-stage, which, for him, overshadowed their talent.
While speaking to Guitar Player in 1989, he said of the then-contemporary trend, “A lot of these guys in spandex trousers and hair like that are playing some of the most unbelievable guitar, and you can’t really argue with it. It’s just that sometimes the vehicles seem to leave a little bit to be desired.”
He went on to concede there was “some wonderful stuff happening there”, but admitted that he couldn’t look past “little tongue flashings and wagging fingers and legs astride”, conceding, “So in that sense, I suppose I do despise it.” Van Halen is one band from that era that Townshend couldn’t hide his admiration towards, describing Eddie Van Halen after his death as “a laidback virtuoso showman who just blew us all away every time”. However, Townshend didn’t have any of those same niceties for Def Leppard.
The Sheffield rock band were suddenly the name on everyone’s lips thanks to their album, Hysteria, in 1987, which confirmed them to be one of the biggest groups on the planet. They were no overnight success, either, and it took years of grinding to get to that position, but in Townshend’s mind, they couldn’t hold a candle to REM.
“I’d trade 150 Def Leppards for one REM. It’s as simple as that,” Townshend remarked in the same 1989 interview, before REM were yet to become the hugely successful band they would morph into within a matter of years. REM’s 1991 album, Out of Time, was the record that finally made them a mainstream phenomenon, yet Townshend was already a fully paid-up member of their fan club and knew they were different from the rest.
Recalling his earliest memories of listening to them, Townshend shared, “I heard REM, and my heart just soared. To me, that’s just divine music; I like the sound of it, I think the words are brilliant, I think it’s just perfection, and the fact that none of them can kinda go [he mimics shredding] just doesn’t interest me at all, because if they wanted to, they could go out and they could hire any one of those guys.”
Within a matter of years, Townshend’s opinion would become validated by the changing trends which saw bands with heart and soul at the front and centre of their work, like REM, win over the masses while hair metal acts became nothing more than a relic from a different era.
