Pop Perfection: the song Pete Townshend called his “favourite of all time”
Pete Townshend has always marched to the beat of his own drum whenever he played music. He may have loved the sounds coming out of the London Mod scene when he first started The Who, but he was also fairly stern in telling you when he thought something was crap as well. Nothing the band did was meant to be traditional pop music, but Townshend knew he had found the way forward when he heard The Beatles embrace their own weirdness.
Then again, anyone in their right mind looking to put a band together in England in the 1960s was going to be taking some cues from The Beatles. Compared to the other acts that seemed to have a certain charisma whenever they played, Mick Jagger wasn’t far off in calling them “the four-headed monster”.
While most fans spend their whole lives trying to be that famous, the Fab Four had their fill after the third year of girls screaming at them wherever they went. As much as the crowd loved them, they weren’t kids anymore. They were true artists, and John Lennon adopted the band’s studio environment with ease on ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.
The band might have tried more than a few experimental songs in their career, but ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ is still one of the strangest records known to man. Taking place in between two different keys and put together from completely different takes, Lennon crafted the kind of masterpiece that could go toe-to-toe with his other masterstrokes like ‘A Day in the Life’, bringing his Alice in Wonderland-style imagination to life.
Since Townshend was already pushing The Who forward on A Quick One, he was always a bit standoffish when it came to The Beatles. He may have thought that a handful of their songs sounded lousy in the beginning, but as soon as he heard ‘Strawberry Fields’, he knew the gauntlet had been thrown down.
Discussing his love of the band, Townshend still claimed that Lennon never recaptured that kind of energy again, telling Rolling Stone, “One of my favourite records of all time is ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. But I’ve always had very strange feelings about The Beatles because, for me, they were too remote, as stars, and possibly always will be.”
Although Townshend may have tried his best to capture the zeitgeist of the time with his albums, there’s probably no better encapsulation of the’ Summer of Love’ than ‘Strawberry Fields’. The whole point of the song feels more like a mission statement than a pop track half the time. When Lennon starts singing about living better with eyes closed, he’s practically daring the rest of the world to follow him down this rabbit hole, either through LSD or just for the rest of the track.
That was only the teaser of what The Beatles had up their sleeve, making the lavish concept album Sgt Pepper and ushering in the Flower Power generation, all while indirectly inspiring Townshend to make his own conceptual pieces like Tommy. The Beatles already had the world at their fingertips, but when you heard ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ for the first time, the air seemed to taste a bit different afterwards.
