The cheesy hit Pete Townshend hailed as the greatest “pop song ever written”
Pop music is infectious. Mathematicians and scientists have even proved this fact, so it’s no good playing the cool card and pretending you’re vaccinated from its appeal. Pete Townshend might have put on a brave face in public over the years and professed that, for him, music is a lot more than mere appeasement, but privately, he’s just as prone to the easy charm of pop as the rest of us sorry pretenders.
The famed Who guitarist was outed by his own daughter, Emma Townshend, when it came to his love of the cheesier side of pop. She let the cat out of the bag that their family home isn’t always filled with his beloved Sun Ra. A healthy host of pop records adorn his collection, too. “My father, on the other hand, would have some oddly un-rock ‘n’ roll musical enthusiasms,” Emma told the Independent, leaving her position in the family deeds perilous.
Townshend has never been all that complimentary about his peers, having stated that he hates the fact that he’s ”ever even slightly compared to” Led Zeppelin, and he even called some of The Beatles’ backing tracks ”flippin’ lousy”, which makes it all the more surprising that pop ruled the roost in the rocker’s house in the mid-1970s.
It was a time when, publicly, he was saying that punk was the rightful heir to Beatlemania. He was traipsing around London in search of Sex Pistols gigs, and inviting The Clash out on tour, but just shortly beforehand, his passions lay elsewhere. “In 1975, the house was filled with the sound of Abba. ‘SOS’ is the best pop song ever written’, he will still insist,” Emma said of her father.
Pete has never proclaimed a love of the band publicly, but clearly, they became a passion for the Chiswick musician while he was simultaneously expanding his tastes with British punk, a movement he described as ”absolutely unbelievable”. It was a time of great change as the ’70s looked for its own revolution once the death of the ’60s became patently apparent to even the most ardent hippie. The old acidhead idealists are suddenly succumbing to white goods, harder drugs, and dystopian financial decline.
Pop offered a sweet alternative to this grimness, and Pete found solace in the fact that Abba’s brand had smarts, too. They might have been all glitter and gleaming smiles, but there was compositional complexity despite the limited chordal vocabulary they dealt in. “It has all those Swedish folk elements that tap into whatever elemental musical self we have,” Emma would recall her father saying, somewhat intellectualising the self-explanatory appeal of ‘SOS’.
While she also says that he loved Rickie Lee Jones, Tom Waits, Talking Heads, Joni Mitchell, Ray Charles and Randy Newman during her childhood years, it was clear that the advent of pop’s most experimental and polished era moved him profoundly, in a way that The Rolling Stones had done a few years earlier. “He came back from Tower Records with 11 boxes of records,” Emma recalls of his pop phase.
She brashly continues: “In the boxes, there were no less than three copies of Off the Wall, Michael Jackson’s first solo album. ‘Exactly why did you buy three’, I asked him? ‘Well, it was so good! I just kept thinking I had to be sure to pick up a copy, and I was in a rush, I couldn’t remember what I had already got, but I thought, well, if I get more than one, I can give it to people as a gift.”
And so, we entered the strange period in history whereby Pete Townshend, the self-proclaimed inventory of heavy metal and destroyer of many guitars, was gifting sugary pop to pals. Previously, the pop-adjacent ‘God Only Knows’ had been a supreme passion of Pete’s, but now he was practically voting on Eurovision.
Alas, this simpler form of music was always in his blood. After all, his father had been a humble member of a community post-war dance band, so The Who guitarist was raised knowing that sometimes, people just need a bit of light and easy fun. At a time in his life when his own band was fraying and Keith Moon was faltering, ‘SOS’ was a soothing salve that staved off the hectic woes of his working life. And it was, vitally, a salve with enough musicality in the mix for him to pore over.
