Andy Summers on why Pete Townshend is “the original punk”
By the end of the 1970s, rock and roll had become much more passé than intended. Even though the progressive rock renaissance took the genre into bold new directions, the punk invasion stomped out the more pretentious set of performers, with artists like Ramones and The Clash laying waste to what had come before them. Although Andy Summers grew up in the same era as punk, he thought the genre was a rehash of what this music legend had already done.
Granted, Summers was not looking to play the same rudimentary chords as the punks in the London clubs. Throughout his work with The Police, Summers was known to put different spins on the usual punk and new wave formulas, either arpeggiating chords on tracks like ‘Message in a Bottle’ or making intricate chord leaps on songs like ‘Synchronicity II.’
As far as Summers was concerned, punk was never about playing songs because they were as essential as possible. Punk was about the freedom of expression in music, and The Who had already been pioneering that for years.
Before punk became a part of the cultural zeitgeist, The Who stood out as the ultimate example of going up against the grain. Compared to the British Invasion acts of the time like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, Pete Townshend wanted to make songs that were more artistic than his contemporaries, using distortion to its fullest extent when making songs like ‘My Generation’.
When the sheer noise didn’t satisfy him anymore, Townshend would later make lavish rock operas, destroying the concept of the three-minute single by making vivid character portraits across songs like ‘Pinball Wizard’ and ‘Go To The Mirror’. Even though the punk wave came in to stomp out such pretentious exercises, The Who always seemed to be in the clear among acts like Sex Pistols, whom Townshend would write the song ‘Who Are You’ about later.
As Summers was starting to hone his craft on the guitar, he could see the importance of where Townshend was coming from when making his first steps. When talking to Rolling Stone, Summers would maintain that Townshend had the first punk credentials, saying, “He’s like the original punk, the first one to destroy a guitar onstage. He was using feedback early, which I think was influenced by European avant-garde music like Stockhausen.”
Townshend wasn’t alone in pioneering the punk movement, either. From behind the drumkit, Keith Moon was delivering the kind of manic energy that came out of all good punk rock, playing the drums with such fury that he would often have headphones taped to his head to keep up with what the rest of the band were doing.
Although Summers would bring those strange sounds into his work with The Police, he credits Townshend for opening the door for other musicians, explaining, “He more or less invented the power chord, and you can hear a sort of pre-Zeppelin thing in the Who’s 1960s work. So much of this stuff came from him”. Even though Townshend may have come a bit too early for the first wave of punk, the idea of playing every note like it’s the last thing you will ever play could practically be his mantra.
