The reason why Pete Townshend hated Deep Purple
It’s almost strange to comprehend that The Who’s Pete Townshend didn’t go in for showmanship. While his band seemed content smashing up every hotel within a 50-mile radius during their heyday, Townshend often sat on the sidelines fretting about the damage. Well, far from a totally innocent bystander, he caused his fair share of carnage, but always insisted the music was the most important thing.
The rock and roll proclivity to showboat, on and off stage, seemed to be what put Townshend off of Deep Purple. “I hated their music,” he once admitted to Sound International. Although he mentioned that a lot of its members were good friends, Townshend seemed to baulk when fans compared his band with theirs.
“It was very hard to live with in a way that we were being lumped in with these very heavy metal bands,” he said. “I think it was because Ritchie Blackmore used to sort of bash his guitar on his head [and] smoke a cigarette through his teeth and play a mouth organ back to front,” he mused. “And of course, with The Who, it was smashing up pyrotechnics.”
Blackmore, who was also prone to a bit of guitar smashing in his time, once reflected on the reputation Townshend touched on, saying quite sincerely he didn’t mind it. “Sometimes I feel like I own the stage completely on my own for an hour,” he told The Guardian.
“I’m just going crazy, the adrenaline is so much that all my musical upbringing is thrown into intensity on stage rather than being a musician. After 22 years of playing, it goes instead into a mood and comes out as an aggressive bulldozer,” he explained. “I don’t know why. I often wonder why. I’m not an aggressive person offstage; I don’t know why I am on.”
Whether it was that aggression or Deep Purples sound, Townshend always resisted the idea they were similar. In 1980, he recalled a period just after Woodstock, when The Who had a big revival after the release of the bizarre operetta, Tommy. “A lot of people used to come and see us,” he said. “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!”
In an interesting turn, Townshend also freely admitted to The Big Issue that the Blackmore move of smashing guitars was often how he captured people’s attention. “People still say that I should never have smashed instruments. Fuck off. It’s how I got you to listen to me,” he said before seemingly backtracking.
“I was in it for the art,” he professed. “I felt we should confine our antics to the stage.”
