“I don’t think I’d go”: Pete Townshend on the band he would see over The Who
The biggest crime that any band can commit onstage is being boring. The entire process of a rock and roll show might have a lot of bells and whistles going on, but if there isn’t some sort of excitement vibrating off the stage, it’s not going to give many fans any incentive to care about the people making the music. Although Pete Townshend always understood the idea of spectacle when working with The Who, he knew that some artists had the potential to blow them out of the water on their best day.
Granted, anyone looking to upstage the classic Mod rockers wasn’t going to do so without a fight. Townshend always seemed at war with his instrument every time he played a show during his prime, and if anyone even attempted to upstage them in any way, there was a good chance that they would either leave the venue with a broken ego or meet the business end of one Townshend’s guitars if they got in his way.
In fact, the few bands who upstaged The Who in their prime usually did so by being the complete antithesis of what Townshend was aiming for. Nothing about Jimi Hendrix infringed on the British legends’ territory, and when he set his guitar alight after a gig, Townshend could do nothing except bow down to his majesty rather than try his hand at being the same kind of fretboard wizard.
If a band is playing that ferociously for so long, there comes a point where the next generation is going to want to top it. And once Townshend started working up grand designs for his rock operas like Quadrophenia, the punk explosion was about to get started, with John Lydon taking the stage with Sex Pistols and telling everyone about how bands like Yes and Genesis had overstayed their welcome in the album charts.
As ruthless as punks could be, though, most did manage to make an exception for Townshend. After all, he was the one pushing back against the mainstream in everything he did, and even if some of his new projects were more grandiose than usual, he managed to hold onto those same values that he used to. But as the band approached a world without Keith Moon in the 1980s, Townshend had shifted his focus to what bands like The Clash were doing.
Since the 1960s icons weren’t operating from a position of strength, Townshend felt that The Clash were beating them at their own game, to the point where he would have gladly picked them over his own band, saying, “It’s going to be different if you’re fucking 18 or 19-year-olds—I don’t think I’d go and watch the Who, even if I lived in America. I mean, I’d sit and wait until The Clash came: I’d go and see them. And hope I’d get one of their good nights!”
And even beyond the standards of punk, The Clash seemed to be one of the few bands that were exploding with energy when they got onstage. Townshend was ready to put himself through the wringer, but everything about Joe Strummer and Mick Jones playing together felt like a religious experience, especially when they started to write pointed material like ‘Complete Control’.
Although a lot of The Clash and The Who would be instilled in other bands like U2, Townshend could take comfort in knowing that his approach to music would be carried on throughout multiple generations. Anyone can put together a decent rock and roll tune, but Townshend and Strummer understood that it needed to say something more than a bunch of chord-bashing.
