The member of The Who Keith Richards called “all flash”
It’s fair to say that The Rolling Stones guitarist, Keith Richards, has earned his right to give his opinion on rock and roll. The guitarist behind such iconic riffs as ‘Satisfaction’ and ‘Start Me Up’ is dutifully gained the necessary stripes to deliver a fervent critique of any band who comes before him. And, always knowing his place in music history, Richards hasn’t been afraid to do so.
As the chugging rhythm and swagger of The Rolling Stones, Richards gained his seat at the top table of rock and roll, among the great and the good of the genre, long ago. But while the guitarist has always paid homage to the founding fathers of blues and rock ‘n’ roll – noting that, without them, he would be nothing – he has also never been shy about throwing the odd poison-tipped barb or two at his contemporaries from the music business.
On more than one occasion, Richards delivered a scathing assessment of his contemporaries. He once famously denounced David Bowie before calling the enigmatic Prince, “An overrated midget. Prince has to find out what it means to be a prince,” he continued. “That’s the trouble with conferring a title on yourself before you’ve proved it. His attitude when he opened for us… was insulting to our audience. You don’t try to knock off the headline like that when you’re playing a Stones crowd. He’s a prince who thinks he’s a king already. Good luck to him.”
Oasis, Elton John and Led Zeppelin have all felt a similar scathing attack from the riff master. But, there was one band for which Richards saved a special kind of insult, picking out only one of the band members to criticise, the British invasion kings, The Who.
Comprised of landmark guitarist and songwriter Pete Townshend, perhaps the finest drummer of all time, Keith Moon and John ‘The Ox’ Entwistle, Richards took aim at the group’s swaggering frontman, Roger Daltrey. Providing a simple yet cutting review, Richards noted, “I always thought Daltrey was all flash,” during a conversation with Rolling Stone in 2015.
While later professing his appreciation for the group’s individual parts, Richards later conceded that the band were a force unto themselves. “I love Pete Townshend, but I always thought The Who were a crazy band anyway,” he continued. “You would say to Moon if you were in a session with him, ‘Just give me a swing,’ and he [couldn’t] … He was an incredible drummer, but only with Pete Townshend. He could play to Pete like nobody else in the world. But if somebody threw him into a session with somebody else, it was a disaster. There’s nothing wrong with that; sometimes you’ve got that one paintbrush, and you rock it.”
“I just was never really interested in that many English rock and roll bands, actually, at all,” he elaborated. “I mean, I usually like guys like Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, and that was before I was even recording. But there was something [about] the Yeses and the Journeys and all them that just left me a bit cold.”
Roger Daltrey wasn’t afraid to send his own shots back to Richards and The Rolling Stones, though, “You can not take away the fact that Mick Jagger is still the number one rock ‘n’ roll showman up front,” Daltrey told the Coda Collection. “But as a band, if you were outside a pub and you heard that music coming out of a pub some night, you’d think, ‘Well, that’s a mediocre pub band! No disrespect.”
Watch The Who perform on The Rolling Stones’ epic Rock and Roll Circus night.
