The film Kit and Chris had made at the Railway Hotel screened to a full audience, and The Who played on Beat Room, a BBC show, and, best of all, Ready, Steady, Go! This was special because Kit had befriended the producer, Vicky Wickham, who allowed a number of our Marquee boy fans – the so-called ‘100 Faces’ – to make up the audience. They went wild when we came on, waving colourful college scarves, the Mod fashion of the week.
When we sang ‘I Can’t Explain’ on Top of the Pops, it immediately climbed into the Top 10. All the pirate radio stations picked up the track, and it was an incredible buzz to drive through my own neighbourhood hearing the first song I’d written for The Who, imagining the airwaves emanating from ships anchored at sea. Driving along, hearing myself on the radio, my art-school ideas started to seem overcooked. When the band started I had taken solace in the notion that we wouldn’t last long, and I could claim that in our downfall I had demonstrated my auto-destructive plan. Now I was being tested. Did I really need to be so po-faced and serious? Maybe it wasn’t so bad to just be a successful pop star. Maybe I didn’t really need to blow everything to smithereens in the name of art. Anyway, wasn’t what I was doing truly creative? Denying denial didn’t seem quite such an urgent matter any more.
On Friday 12 March The Who triumphantly returned to the Goldhawk, our musical home away from home. For Roger and me it had special resonance because we had both been pre-teen members of the Sulgrave Boys Club just down the road. Many of the club’s old members – now teenagers – came to the Goldhawk to show off their new Mod threads, drink beer, take pep pills, fight and pull girls. We played ‘I Can’t Explain’ over and over. The crowd went berserk.
Afterwards a delegation asked if they could come backstage and speak to me. Led by a gangly Irish boy called Jack Lyons, they paraded in and told me they really liked the song. I thanked them, asking them what they particularly liked about it. Jack stuttered that he couldn’t really explain. I tried to help: the song’s about being unable to find the words.
‘That’s it!’ Jack shouted; the others all nodded.
Without my art-school training I doubt that this moment would have touched me the way it did. But it changed my life. I had been set up at college, especially in my last days doing graphics, to look for a patron, to obtain a brief, to find someone to pay for my artistic excesses and experiments. My new patrons stood before me.
Their brief was simple: we need you to explain that we can’t explain; we need you to say what we are unable to say. It would be wrong to say that I floated home on a cloud that night, but I felt vindicated. I was still hooked on sudden fame and notoriety, being on the TV and radio, having written a hit song. But now I knew The Who had a greater mission than just being rich and famous.
And – pretentious as it might still seem, even today – I knew, with absolute certainty, that after all what we were doing was going to be Art.
Anya and I had sex again once or twice when Kit was out and I wasn’t working. I adored her; she was witty and sharp – the first person I ever heard use the term ‘slag’ towards a man. But we never talked very seriously, or went out for dinner; if we had I might have felt less like her toy boy. Kit eventually intervened in what he saw as Anya’s sexual vampirism, and as penance he tasked her with finding me a flat close enough to his own so he could make sure I kept it tidy. In April she found the top flat in a Georgian house at Chesham Place, in Belgravia. The rent was £12 a week, well within my means.
This was the first place I ever lived on my own: I had it carpeted, simply furnished, kept it clean and tidy, and devoted one of the rooms to a recording studio. This was one of the busiest periods of my life. When I felt isolated among the diplomats and aristocrats of Belgravia, that loneliness became the engine of my creative drive. I worked mainly at night, when I could play records loudly through two partly rebuilt four-by-twelve speaker cabinets, casualties of my destructive stage act. The other apartments in the building were still vacant, and the building on the other side of my studio wall was being developed as a new embassy building for the Lesotho High Commission. I felt entirely free to make music for the first time in my life.
Kit often came to my flat to listen to the demos I was recording, and became a real mentor in my songwriting. His system was always the same. He would smoke several Senior Service cigarettes and pace around, listening and blowing smoke in the air. If I’d written several songs he would listen to them all before making any comment, then pick his favourite. He was incisive, and astutely never said anything I did was bad, or could be better, or would be better when it was finished. When he didn’t like something, he found something about it to praise.
It turned out that Kit was an expert at keeping the artist in me properly stroked. He was essentially kind, but I also took pleasure in the sense of his investment in me, expressed in a creative partnership. He treated me like a serious composer. If he laughed, it would always be a joke he knew I could share.
Roger sold our van and purchased a lorry to carry our gear. He always wanted to drive one. It was like a furniture hauling van, with no windows or seats in the back, except for a bench that wasn’t bolted down. It was far too big and our equipment crashed around us as Keith, John, Mike and I tried to avoid vomiting. It was also very slow, managing only 55 mph on the motorway, so it took ten hours to drive to Blackpool. Roger had installed his girlfriend in the front seat so we were confined to the rear, travelling in the dark. He wanted to keep the rest of us out of his hair when driving long distances. He was a nervous passenger, and rarely allowed himself to be driven anywhere.
On 30 July we played at the Fender Club in Kenton. Karen Astley, a college friend from Ealing, came to the gig, and even handsome Chris commented on how cool she looked, calling her a ‘dolly bird’, a great compliment at the time. She had brought her best friend, who was keen on John Entwistle. It was fun to speak to someone from the old gang, and we all went out drinking together. Outside the hall after the show, as we waited for a taxi, Karen suddenly threw her arms around my neck and kissed me.
The essence of the song ‘My Generation’ had probably been contained in the first, abandoned lyric for ‘I Can’t Explain’, which only Barney ever heard. That first version was a kind of talking blues. The title came from Generations, the collected plays of David Mercer, a dramatist who had impressed me at Ealing. Mercer was a socialist, like Arnold Wesker, verging on Marxist, and his rallying on behalf of his plays’ working-class anti-heroes later offered me a way to connect with the West London fans of the band.
At that time Kit Lambert had loaned me a record that changed my life as a composer. It was what I had played during my Scotch-fuelled listening experiment – a Czech recording called Masters of the Baroque including the principal movements of Purcell’s Gordian Knot Untied, a baroque chamber suite, the most powerful part of which was the Chaconne. The performance is passionate, tragic and deeply moving. I was struck by Purcell’s unique, luxurious use of suspensions, a staple part of baroque decoration at the harpsichord, but in Purcell’s hands the suspensions were elongated into heartrending, tortuous musical modes, especially in the minor keys. I began to experiment, and the first time I used suspensions successfully, in ‘The Kids Are Alright’, it was mostly to suggest a baroque mood.
Belgravia, a rich neighbourhood where women in fur coats shoved me out of line as if I didn’t exist, only made more starkly apparent the generational divide I was trying to describe. I worked on ‘My Generation’ all through the summer of 1965, while touring in Holland and Scandinavia (we caused a street riot in Denmark). I produced several sets of lyrics and three very different demos. The feeling that began to settle in me was not so much resentment towards those Establishment types all around my flat in Belgravia as fear that their disease might be contagious.
What was their disease? It was actually more a matter of class than of age. Most of the young people around me in this affluent area of London were working on transforming themselves into the ruling class, the Establishment of the future. I felt that