‘Fire’: The ultimate one-hit wonder that features Pete Townshend as a secret producer
Not many people can claim to have had the same impact on rock and roll as Pete Townshend. As the guitarist and primary songwriter behind The Who, Townshend helped to define the sound of the swinging sixties, laying the foundations for countless future artists to follow in his footsteps, creating raw and rebellious rock music. However, Townshend’s influence on rock and popular music runs much deeper than you might expect, stretching into the world of music production and fostering smaller artists.
Townshend took on production duties through The Who’s career. In fact, it was the all-encompassing artistic vision that led the mod rockers to achieve such masterpieces as Tommy or Quadrophenia. On tracks like ‘Baba O’Riley’, from 1971’s Who’s Next, Townshend employed innovative and never-before-seen production techniques, such as tape splicing, to create an entirely new kind of sound, propelling The Who into the upper echelon of rock and roll history. However, his production mastery was certainly not limited to his own material.
The 1960s witnessed many one-hit wonders come and go, but few were as bizarre or interesting as Arthur Brown. A pioneer of shock psychedelia, Brown was unlike anything the British rock scene had ever witnessed prior.
As a result of the songwriter’s outlandish music and performance style, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown was rarely at risk of achieving mainstream success; he was simply too weird for the pop charts. However, one particular track, released in 1968, became an unlikely number-one single in the UK, thanks in part to Pete Townshend.
Although the production credits of the song were given to Kit Lambert, The Who’s manager, it was Townshend who actually carried out production work on the song. Despite never being credited for his work, the songwriter maintained a deep appreciation for Brown, once telling Rolling Stone in 1968, “Arthur Brown I think is an incredible show,” explaining, “What I dig in a performance, in an event, is essentially to be communicated to, to feel part of an audience.”
The “incredible show” that Townshend mentioned went on to cause a bit of a stir when ‘Fire’ shot up the charts. Earning the British psychedelic master a spot on the BBC’s ‘Top of the Pops’, Brown brought his bizarre sound to living rooms across the nation. However, the BBC was not pleased with the performance, as the singer wore an on-fire headdress, which was directly contradictory to the instructions.
Ultimately, Brown failed to recapture the success or acclaim of ‘Fire’, and he remains one of the most interesting one-hit wonders in British musical history. Years later, Brown was recruited by The Who to be one of multiple notable musicians and celebrities to feature on the cast of their 1975 rock opera film Tommy, based upon the album of the same name. Within the film, Brown played a suitably off-the-wall character, leading a cult based on the film star Marilyn Monroe.
For Townshend, his uncredited production work on ‘Fire’ remains something of a sore subject, having expressed his disappointment over the situation on various occasions throughout his career. There does not appear to be any bad blood between Brown and Townshend themselves, though. In fact, The Who even covered ‘Fire’ for Townshend’s solo project, The Iron Man: The Musical by Pete Townshend, for which Townshend inevitably took production credits.
