The Beat song that almost broke Pete Townshend
By and large, ‘Save It For Later’ was a massive departure for The Beat. The band had always had a bit of sprightly new wave in their sound, but The Beat’s earliest material was fully within the 2-Tone Ska revival that was popular in Britain during the late 1970s. They flirted with more mainstream pop sounds on songs like ‘Mirror in the Bathroom’ and ‘Too Nice To Talk To’, but the band were dedicated to their rocksteady-heavy roots.
At least up to a point. By 1982, songwriter Dave Wakeling had been sitting on a sure-fire pop hit since he was a teenager. “‘Save It For Later’ is funny because it’s not really about anything – I wrote it when I was a teenager,” Wakeling told SongFacts. “I wrote it before The Beat started. And it was about turning from a teenager to someone in their 20s, and realising that the effortless promise for your teenage years was not necessarily going to show that life was so simple as you started to grow up.”
“So it was about being lost, about not really knowing your role in the world, trying to find your place in the world,” Wakeling added. “The actual hook line itself was just a dirty joke, I just thought it was hilarious that you could get in a song: save it – comma – for later – F-E-double L-A-T-O-R.”
“I thought it’d be really neat to get that in a song, and everybody would be singing it. I didn’t know it was going to be a joke that lasted for 30 years,” Wakeling explained. “So, you couldn’t find your own way in the world, and you’d have all sorts of people telling you this, that, and the other, and advising you, and it didn’t actually seem like they knew any better. So it was like, keep your advice to yourself. Save it – for later.”
The obvious pop appeal of ‘Save It For Later’ had its dissenters within the band. Specifically, bassist David Steele was against playing the song. ”’Save It For Later’ was written before I was even in The Beat, but it was banned by David Steele for being too ‘rock,’ too ‘old wave,'” Wakeling told The A.V. Club in 2012. “The record company had liked it all along, but they didn’t have any say in what songs went on the album.”
“With the third record, though, David Steele really wanted a rest. He’d stopped writing hits on the third album—not the major ones, as it turned out,” Wakeling added. “And the record company sort of had a hissy fit and said, ‘Well, fuck this, we’ve had this for long enough. This song’s been a potential hit for the last three years, and you haven’t written any hits this time out, David.’ At the same time, we’d managed to work some financial renegotiation with the label because something had not done as well as we’d thought, and in return, ‘Save It For Later’ went on the record.”
“I never expected it would do so well, though I always liked the song before I was in the group,” Wakeling explained. “It’s actually ended up earning about a third of our catalogue’s publishing money nowadays. Over the last ten years or so, it counts for a full third of the catalogue. Very odd for a song that nearly never came out at all. It was only really when the record company insisted, and I got a bit of courage and said, ‘Well, look, if it’s not on our record, I’d just rather go and record it myself and bring it out.’ At that point, David acquiesced.”
‘Save It For Later’ was only a moderate success for The Beat in their home country, peaking at number 47 on the UK Singles Chart. However, the song became the band’s most endearing track, helping to point the way to the future after the ska revival began to fade. When The Beat broke up in 1983, Wakeling took the pop sounds of ‘Save It For Later’ and formed General Public with Beat toaster Ranking Roger. Late convert Steele, along with guitarist Andy Cox, would also go in a pop direction with their next group, Fine Young Cannibals.
For Wakeling, the endearing success of ‘Save It For Later’ was confirmed when The Who guitarist Pete Townshend wanted to learn the song. “I got a phone call at 11 in the morning, and somebody gave me the phone and said, ‘It’s Pete Townshend for you,'” Wakeling also told The A.V. Club. “And I said, ‘Of course it is, he phones about this time every Saturday, doesn’t he?’ [Laughs.]”
“I thought it was somebody making a joke. I picked up very sarcastically, ‘Oh, hello, Pete.’ And he said, ‘Oh, hello Dave, this is Peter Townshend here, and I’m sitting with David Gilmour [of Pink Floyd], and we’re trying to work out your song ‘Save It for Later,’ but we can’t work out the tuning,'” Wakeling revealed. “They presumed it was DADGAD as well and couldn’t make it work, and so I had to explain that I’d made a mistake and it was not DADGAD, it was DADAAD. And he laughed and said, ‘Oh, thank heavens for that! We’ve been breaking our fingers trying to get our hands around these chords.'”
Check out Townshend’s live version of ‘Save It For Later’ down below.
