The “natural genius” who taught Pete Townshend how to write songs
Whether it’s the sharp, youthful adrenaline of his early singles or the profound rock operas that he occupied himself with in later years, the songwriting credentials of Pete Townshend are impossible to put down. As far back as those early days, though, The Who’s windmilling mastermind kneeled at the altar of Ray Davies.
Reducing the entirety of The Who’s vast range of influences to one person would be needlessly reductive. After all, Townshend and the band drew upon everything from old-school American blues and R&B to Motown, rockabilly, and, particularly in the case of Keith Moon, The Beach Boys.
Nevertheless, it is fair to say that The Who might never have existed, and certainly wouldn’t have reached the dizzying heights of pop stardom that they experienced during the Sixties, without the trailblazing efforts of The Kinks.
When ‘You Really Got Me’ hit the airwaves for the first time in 1964, the rock world was forever changed. All of a sudden, there was a place in the mainstream for abrasive, distorted rock and roll rooted in youth rebellion and a subculture that was rapidly expanding across gloomy post-war Britain. Pete Townshend was instantly hooked.
At that time, The Who were still the young mods performing ramshackle gigs in pub backrooms and local nightclubs, but there was something within ‘You Really Got Me’ that spurred the guitarist on to new heights. In fact, it was only in an attempt to appeal to the song’s producer, Shel Talmy, that Townshend wrote ‘I Can’t Explain’, which would eventually become The Who’s very first single.
From that point on, the lineage of Townshend’s songwriting development tended to mirror that of Ray Davies, to some extent. When The Kinks switched those adrenaline rock anthems for concept records and profound musings on nationalism and phoney nostalgia, The Who also abandoned their mod rock beginnings in favour of constructing expansive overarching narratives on operatic efforts like Tommy or Quadrophenia – even if The Who’s records tended to be much more commercially successful than The Kinks’ at that time.
“I always think that Ray Davies should one day be Poet Laureate,” Townshend once said of The Kinks’ fearless leader. “He invented a new kind of poetry and a new kind of language for pop writing that influenced me from the very, very, very beginning.”
In fact, Townshend went so far as to declare, “In British rock, Ray Davies is our only true and natural genius.”
Indeed, Davies’ genius certainly made itself known during the late 1960s, when he seemed to pen a new masterpiece on a weekly basis, spanning the spectrum from the kitchen sink realism of ‘Dead End Street’ to the timeless romance of ‘Waterloo Sunset’, which might just be his greatest work of all.
Not only did Ray Davies establish himself as a songwriting genius during that time, he also paved the way for the next generation of songwriters, Pete Townshend included. It is near impossible to discuss the sound and impact of The Who without some reference to The Kinks and, similarly, Davies’ outfit has boasted a constant, uninterrupted presence within the realm of alternative rock ever since.
