John ‘Speedy’ Keen: The Who roadie who scored a 1967 number one hit the band never had
When people consider the 1960’s, they think of bands like the Grateful Dead, peace and love, the hippy movement, and those out there advocating for peace as the Vietnam War raged on and political leaders were assassinated.
As such, there were plenty of musicians who put out music calling for the bloodshed to end, but the hippy movement wasn’t the only thing that dominated the charts or the counterculture, as there were different opinions held by a range of people, reflected in how haphazard so much of the music being released was.
When The Who headlined Woodstock, that felt like a turning point for a lot of people, as a huge number of like-minded folk got together to listen to music and collectively dream of a better world, and maybe that was in vain, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that if enough people put their voices together, they’d be able to shout loud enough to truly attempt to incite change.
The only people at that festival who didn’t think that they might be able to change the world were The Who, as they thought that the mindset of a lot of people at Woodstock was misguided. They hated the ideology so much that they decided to write the song ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, which was an ode to speaking out against the hippy movement.
“All those hippies wandering about thinking the world was going to be different from that day. As a cynical English arsehole, I walked through it all and felt like spitting on the lot of them, and shaking them and trying to make them realise that nothing had changed and nothing was going to change.”
It wasn’t just The Who that were feeling disdain towards a lot of the mindsets of people who surrounded the band, but their roadies were also growing frustrated, so much so that one of them decided to write their own protest song. John ‘Speedy’ Keen, who was on the road with The Who at the time, opted to write the song ‘Something in the Air’, a protest track with edge that he released with a hastily put together band, Thunderclap Newman.
The song highlighted just how strange the mindsets of people had become towards the end of the ‘60s. You had Pete Townshend saying that he wanted to spit on hippies while at Woodstock, meanwhile, Thunderclap Newman are singing “hand out the arms and ammo”. Neither of these tracks subscribed to the peace and love attitude that a lot of people assign to counterculture from around this period.
The Who never managed to bag a number one song, but Thunderclap Newman did with ‘Something in the Air’. This is odd because it came from one of the band’s roadies, but it was even odder because protest tracks struggled to top the charts. They’re divisive by their very nature, and as a result, the public doesn’t tend to flock out and buy them. It was the first step on the road to what could become a prosperous career for the band, but that didn’t happen, as they crumbled when the pressure was on to produce more music. ‘Something in the Air’ was written quickly, on a whim, but once there were expectations surrounding the band, they simply couldn’t deliver, and that number one remained an anomaly.
“‘Something in the Air’ was very hard to live up to,” said songwriter Keen, “Because it wasn’t done under any pressure and it was very hard to get that same feel when we knew we had to produce another single”.
