The artists Pete Townshend said destroyed songwriting: “The form itself has been tampered with”
Rock and roll has always been about evolution. If everyone had tried to honour those who came before them every time they played, chances are we would still be listening to music that sounded like Chuck Berry and Little Richard to this day. Pete Townshend knew the power that came with someone changing the world of songwriting, and he was also acutely aware of when he saw his craft getting dismantled as well.
Granted, the whole point behind The Who was to leave a path of destruction in their wake every time they played. Whether that was seeing Keith Moon hurl his entire body into a drumkit at any given show or Townshend smashing his guitar into a thousand pieces, it was almost like they treated their entire gig as a spectacle rather than a proper concert half the time. But Townshend knew that beneath all of that chaos was actual music.
Even though they were treated as the kings of punk rock when they started, they could still manage to get away with something like Tommy and look like the almighty gods of rock. Townshend may have only begun writing rock and roll in the early 1960s, but by the time he was making massive orchestral overtures and crafting a story about a deaf, dumb and blind kid, he was no longer the mild-mannered art student who started everything.
So, naturally, that meant his brand of songwriting needed to be taken down a couple of notches. Despite a lot of punks having a great deal of respect for Townshend’s work, it didn’t take a rocket scientist for someone to realise that it had begun to get absolutely ridiculous to see rock and roll be looked at on the same level as classical music, and Sex Pistols and The Clash were more than happy to bring it back to the clubs.
But if punk was all about breaking things down, electronica was about doing away with guitars altogether. While there are still cries from manchildren to this day that people who play synthesisers aren’t “real musicians,” the likes of Bow Wow Wow started taking the crux of what punk rock was doing and tried to meld it into the world of electronic music, taking the same DIY approach with even less of a command of melody.
Townshend may have seen the innovation, but he was also excited about where his brand of songwriting was going, saying, “Anything that breaks down the traditional rules and regulations that exist between words and music … To me, when somebody like The Fun Boy Three or Bow Wow Wow just completely destroys the established principles of songwriting, and still get success, and still make good records, I find that very exciting. Cos I think, Ah, the form itself has been tampered with, has been allowed to grow and evolve.”
It’s not like Townshend was averse to that kind of change in The Who’s music, either. Ever since Keith Moon passed away, they kept things fairly elastic, but outside of ‘Eminence Front,’ most of their 1980s career feels like they are going for sounding the Human League but coming off like a dinosaur rock act that only recently discovered what the term ‘Casio’ meant.
Still, it was bold for Townshend to try something out of left field at the time. Most bands of his generation were either embarrassing, broken up, or fading from relevance, and seeing how much the industry was changing, he knew that the future of music was better without being shackled to his old band.
