Pete Townshend’s scathing assessment on 10 classic rock bands, artists and events
“I’ve always regarded the rock-star phenomenon with immense disdain,” Pete Townshend told the New York Times in 2019. “There are very few people truly authentic to the cause: David Byrne. Mick Jagger. Neil Young. Joni Mitchell. Deborah Harry,” the Who guitarist said without much in the way of hesitation. That certitude has often defined him; it permeates his music, and it certainly typifies his outlook.
While he has also cited a love for the likes of The Kinks, The Clash, David Bowie, Bob Dylan, and his favourite band The Rolling Stones, the chances are, if you’re a modern act outside of the five he flippantly deemed authentic, then you might be in for a bit of a bashing from the rocker. As he said of his hero Howlin’ Wolf, he likes artists who have got ”real teeth”, and a hint of insincerity might set you up for a scathing attack from the spiritual six-string wizard.
The importance of music went beyond mere melodies for Townshend, even when he was a kid. “I was the child of the guy who played saxophone in a post-war dance band,” he said. “He knew what his music was for – it was for post-war, and it was for dancing with a woman that you might end up marrying. It was about romance, dreams, fantasy”.
With riots running rampant, Presidents being assassinated, and the world looking for direction amid an explosion of pop culture, he set about a new type of song. “Music, even today, is about much more than that. It has a function, which is to help us understand what is going on in the world and to help us understand what is going on inside us, so the purpose and the duty of somebody who makes music is very different to the way it used to be. […] And I think I was the first to articulate that and try to explain it,” he told Apple Music.
Seemingly, there have been a few acts who failed to pass that test as you can see from his cutting comments below. From his fury at Led Zeppelin comparisons to the sham of Woodstock and the band he calls an “imitation“, these are ten classic rock fixtures that have met with Townshend’s wrath.
10 classic rock bands, artists and events that Pete Townshend hates:
The Beatles
Townshend sat down for a television interview where he was asked about his peers as The Who were roaring the counterculture revolution to new heights with ‘My Generation’ in 1966. The Beatles might have been deemed untouchable at this stage, but he actually labelled them “flipping lousy” and the world took note of the new anarchists.
He continued: “When you actually hear the backing tracks of The Beatles without their voices, they’re flipping lousy.” Was he just making a name for himself? Well, in a 1982 interview with Rolling Stone, Townshend rhetorically asked whether Paul McCartney “ever really had anything to do with rock?” He answered his own question: “No, he never did. You know, I could sit down and have a conversation with Paul about rock and roll, and we’d be talking about two different things.”
Led Zeppelin
The explosive nature of The Who has long been cited as a huge influence on the musical developments that unfurled in the aftermath. However, Townshend hated that explosive side of his creation. Speaking to the Toronto Sun in the mid-1970s, he twisted a question about his changing sound into an opportunity to bash his mates in Led Zeppelin.
“It doesn’t sound like The Who from those early heavy metal years,“ he said. “We sort of invented heavy metal with (our first live album) Live at Leeds (1970). We were copied by so many bands, principally by Led Zeppelin, you know heavy drums, heavy bass, heavy lead guitar.” In 1995, he made it clear that he wasn’t pleased with the impetus he may have given them. “I don’t like a single thing that they have done, I hate the fact that I’m ever even slightly compared to them,” he said.
Comically continuing through gritted teeth: “I just never ever liked them. It’s a real problem to me cause, as people I think they are really, really great guys. Just never liked the band. And I don’t know if I have a problem, block too, because they, well that became so much bigger than The Who in so many ways, in their chosen field, I’ve never liked them.”
The Police
Keith Richards, the guitarist in Townshend’s favourite band, once said, ”I’ve never had a problem with drugs. I’ve had problems with the police.” Pete had a problem with both. When New York’s WAXQ-FM claimed The Police were a classic rock act, Townshend stepped in to protect the sanctity of the genre: “They’re now calling The Police ‘classic rock.’ I don’t think so. The Police are punk. They’re a punk band. They’re not classic rock,” he sneered.
“You know, you’ve got the (Rolling) Stones and The Who. Classic rock – finished. It’s all over after that…this is just music. It’s not classic anything,” he continued. However, he wasn’t averse to punk either. It is just that The Police were not one of the acts from the movement that he gave credit to. He just simply couldn’t size up their strange halfway house.
Deep Purple & Ten Years After
“Just after Woodstock, The Who had a big revival of interest in Tommy,“ Townshend told Sound International in 1980. “A lot of people used to come and see us. In Britain, it was, ‘You are our favourite group with Deep Purple.’ I used to go, ‘Huh?’ And over here it used to be, ‘You are our favourite group with Ten Years After.’ And both groups I hate!”
“I admit that all the people in the bands are very good friends of mine. But I hated their music. It was very hard to live with in a way that we were being lumped in with these very heavy metal bands. I think it was because Ritchie Blackmore used to sort of bash his guitar on his head. (Also) smoke a cigarette through his teeth and play a mouth organ back to front. And of course, with The Who it was smashing up, pyrotechnics,” he said, once again regretting the decision his band made to put literal explosives in their drum kit.
Woodstock
It has gone down in history as a mythical moment; Hendrix transfigured into some sort of angel, Jefferson Airplane captured the meaning of life in a manner that Carl Jung could never grasp, and 500,000 stood around in cow shit. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and it was beset by bastards. The Who had the worst of it. They arrived and were delayed for hours owing to the logistical nightmare of the festival, and in the interim, Townshend was spiked.
So, when he was later asked about what Woodstock changed in the world, he explained: “Well, it changed me, I hated it. I took my six-month-old child, and it was very weird. I didn’t like it all. They dumped us out of a limousine into six feet of mud, and we stood there for five hours waiting to go on.” Continuing: “I drank a cup of coffee, and five minutes later, I’m on an LSD trip, unwillingly. They put LSD in the coffee, LSD in the mud, if you fell over and accidentally drank some muddy water, you were on a trip.”
And thereafter, the equipment was so shoddy that poor old Roger Daltrey couldn’t hear a word he was singing and later said: “Woodstock wasn’t peace and love. There was an awful lot of shouting and screaming going on. By the time it all ended, the worst sides of our nature had come out. People were screaming at the promoters. People were screaming to get paid. We had to get paid, or we couldn’t get back home.”
Kurt Cobain
When Kurt Cobain wrote, ”I hope I die before I become Pete Townshend,” the guitarist was never going to take it lightly… even if Cobain was now dead and he was reading it in the publication of his Journals. So, he reviewed the collection of drawings and diaries for The Observer. His take on Journals was far from five star, and the late Cobain copped some of the brunt of it.
”The scribblings of a crazed and depressed drug addict in the midst of what those of us who have been through drug rehab describe as ‘stinking thinking’,” he wrote. However, his main gripe was with the fact that Journals was published in the first place, labelling it ”a despicable exercise in sensationalist rock necrophilia.”
Kiss
For Townshend, there was a stark difference between the showmanship of someone like Jimi Hendrix and the make-up and posturing of Kiss. Speaking to Hazy Rock in 2014, Townshend aired his gripe against the rock cats, ghouls and whatever else. He explained: “One thing that Kiss are absolutely, unquestionably not — in any sense, whatsoever — is European or English. They are straight out of Creem magazine meets Las Vegas. Or New Orleans, even. There is a bit of New Orleans in it, a very American kind of Mardi Gras thing.”
“They couldn’t have happened here,“ he added with a notable degree of pride. “They could maybe have happened in Berlin — in which case their music wouldn’t have been like their music. They would have looked like they looked. But they would have made a different kind of music. They’re a very American phenomenon.”
But finally, he made it very clear that he means a phenomenon in the destructive weather sense. He said: “The early years of Kiss were difficult because there was sort of a parody of rock inherent in what they were doing. Also, that business of wearing disguises. Not quite sure about it. You know, I think I’d have to do an academic study to try and work out what’s really going on there.” But he found it easier to conclude that they weren’t sincere rock in the same spiritual sense that he likes.
Glastonbury Festival
Townshend has said that ”I’ve never really liked performing”, but that took on new proportions when they played at Glastonbury in 2015. Following their performance, a road crew member wrote on his website that they discovered shortly before the show that ”someone had sabotaged the carefully tested audio connections for much of our gear. We’ve never seen that before, but we’re good at plugging things in, so all damage was repaired in time.”
“There’s a famous saying ‘A festival is nobody’s best show!’ – which basically means that no one gets to use their own lighting rig, sound system, no sound checks, many things different to normal touring operation. Our lighting guys have to programme a whole show with different lights than usual, run the rig from the stage … They had to think “out of the box” and make a new set just for our one show here – and try to be different than everyone else while supporting the music tastefully,” they continued.
This is a sentiment that Townshend has often agreed with, and it soon became clear he was publicly sharing it on stage. “Within a few songs, we knew something was wrong. The band were playing more than a little loose … Pete [Townshend] was growing angry right away.” As he later put it himself: “It was one of the very worst [shows] the band had ever played.”
The Who
”There’s a lot of hatred in The Who,” Townshend has proclaimed. And for all the highs he has enjoyed with the band, he’s proud of much of the work but naturally has more than his fair share of gripes and regrets. The in-fighting was ever-present as they rose through the ranks, and it has never gone away. “I’m a Remainer, he [Roger Daltrey] is a Brexiteer. I believe in God, he doesn’t,” he told The Telegraph.
But the trouble is, they still struggle to put their differences aside even on stage. “Roger comes over to me,“ he said of the troubled live experiences, “stands next to me and makes some kind of soppy smile, which is supposed to communicate some kind of Everly Brothers relationship we have for the audience, which isn’t actually there.”
The guitarist continues, “It’s supposed to be an act where I’m supposed to collude like ‘we know each other very well we look like enemies, but we are friends really’ kind of look. Often that will be the moment where I look him in the face and go, ‘you fucking wanker’ and he gets angry when I do that,” he says, laughing with maniacal indifference. Talking 2014 after their tour, he simply said: “It seemed like a good idea about six months ago, but I hate performing, and The Who, and touring. But I’m innately good at it. I don’t find it hard.”
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