The tour that made Pete Townshend jealous: “I want one of them!”
Pete Townshend has been one of the most famous, infamous and influential figures in rock music for a lot longer than he hasn’t. Roger Daltrey may be the de facto frontman of The Who due to singing lead for them, but it’s their guitarist who really calls the shots not simply because he writes the songs either. He’s the creative head of the band, whose mercurial mind never stops trying to formulate new and exciting avenues for the band to go down, whether they make a lick of sense or not.
However, despite all this, it’s never taken a whole lot to make Pete Townshend jealous. If I may put on my armchair psychiatrist’s hat briefly, Townshend is a man driven not only by his own artistic vision but also by a desire to match his rivals. There’s a competitive streak in that man a mile wide, and one needs only look at any interview given by him in the 1970s to see it. This is a man who takes being a rock musician extremely seriously and wants to be the best at it.
Which is a lost art, I think. The last 20 years of British rock music have been stuffed with polite, faintly aloof middle-class boys content just to make music for themselves “and if anyone else likes it that’s a bonus”. Sure, it may not be healthy to make the pursuit of artistic greatness into a competive sport but it makes it a whole lot more interesting than a bunch of backslapping Simons navel-gazing themselves into making the least vital music you’ve ever heard.
In Townshend’s prime, there were records coming out every month that made him want to step up his game. Sometimes, like in one memorable case they didn’t even have to be records. Although that said, if he was taking great music as a challenge one can only imagine the sheer panic that The Electric Light Orchestra’s Out Of The Blue must have sent the poor bastard into.
How did ELO make Pete Townshend jealous?
However, the record wasn’t what set Townshend off, according to an interview Jeff Lynne gave to Classic Rock. To set the scene, Out Of The Blue was ELO’s mainstream breakthrough, which is the least you can expect from the album that gave the world ‘Mr Blue Sky’. As a result, the kind of venues that ELO were playing suddenly went from concert halls and small arenas to some of the biggest venues in the world. Jeff Lynne and their manager, Don Arden (yes, ELO and Black Sabbath had the same manager), came up with a plan to make those shows as visually spectacular as they were musically spectacular.
Arden came up with the idea to take the spaceship that adorned the album cover and turn it into not only a prop to take on tour with them, but to make it the whole stage. In the interview, Lynne describes the test runs they had to take the prop through before taking it out on tour. He said “We first tried it out at The Who’s studios in Shepperton. Pete Townshend came in, saw it and said: ‘I want one of them!'” Which, y’know, you would, wouldn’t you?
Perhaps he saw a test run of the show’s finale, where the rocket would “take off”, dry ice spewing out of the engines and rising into the rafters. Lynne himself wasn’t immune to how cool this was either, saying in the interview, “The spaceship was amazing – the noise it made at the end of the show was incredible, like rocket engines. I used to dash out to the front and watch from the audience.”
I’m sure it takes a hell of a lot to make a member of The Who, of all bands, envious of your live shows. However, taking a rocket ship the size of a roundabout on the road and having it launch into the skies at the end of every show will do that. One to bear in mind for any budding rocker I think!
