How the Sex Pistols inspired a classic song by The Who
When breaking down rock history, The Who remain one of the few bands who could claim to be the original punks. As opposed to artists who tried to write the catchiest songs possible in an attempt to get on the radio, Pete Townshend was looking to go against every cookie-cutter band in existence, writing songs intended to ignite a fury in the listener whenever they turned on their stereo. By the time that the punk movement had begun, though, Townshend was in a very different place.
Having busted down the doors of volume control on songs like ‘My Generation’, Townshend wanted to take his songwriting a step further when working on tracks like ‘A Quick One While He’s Away’. As opposed to writing about the frustrations of adolescence, Townshend sculpted a miniature story across nine minutes, which would become the basis for what he would do later with his various rock operas.
Throughout the late 1960s and into the 1970s, Townshend would become a brilliant writer of fiction, creating songs that had to do with an overarching narrative like the deaf, dumb and blind kid in Tommy or the forgotten Mod rocker finding his way in the world throughout the album Quadrophenia.
As the band’s opera years started to wane, though, Sex Pistols had started demolishing everything the old guard of rock stood for. Clad in spiky hair and denim garb, John Lydon and Steve Jones were responsible for bringing rock back to street level, with songs that had more to do with self-destruction and raw aggression like ‘Anarchy in the UK’.
While Townshend may have seen the band and even reached out to Lydon about playing the titular role in the movie adaptation of Quadrophenia, he did end up finding himself out of step with the new kids in town. After a night of heavy drinking with Jones and drummer Paul Cook, Townshend found himself high and dry at the end of the night, not knowing what had hit him the night before.
Despite nursing what was sure to be a massive hangover the next day, Townshend was inspired to take his music in a new direction by writing the song ‘Who Are You’. Inspired by that night, Townshend’s lines about waking up in a doorway in Soho were precisely accurate to where he was the night before, eventually trying to walk away after being spotted by a police officer.
Regardless of the drunken night out, the song also might have a lot to do with the identity crisis that Townshend was having after being one of the greatest voices in rock. For all of the years that he had spent writing songs about music having a more significant social message, it must have been sobering for him to see acts like Sex Pistols speaking to their audience in a far more profound way than Townshend could muster anymore.
Even with a decade of rock debauchery under his belt, though, Townshend could still deliver a fierce rock song, creating a song that was just as biting as a punk track with a more musically sophisticated arrangement. While this iteration of The Who would last that much longer following the death of Keith Moon, Townshend was still just as hungry as he was when he had first started.
