I wanted a Tommy replacement for our stage act. “We were all bored with playing Tommy, and only played three songs from Who’s Next on stage. “I was worried about the band at the time,” he tells Classic Rock. Rewind to the summer of 1972 and Townshend was in a dilemma. It’s like porcelain and reinforced concrete side by side.” It’s a heavy, hard rock album but there are such delicate bits with violins and synthesisers. You can imagine these big, fat ladies in helmets, riding Vespas. “Which was apt because it does sound really Wagnerian with those horns. “At the time, Pete and I were writing to each other and I used to call him Tannhäuser because of Quadrophenia,” says Barnes. Surging guitars and big vocals are tempered by brass arrangements, semi-orchestral strings and intricate layers of synths and piano. It’s a complex, vaultingly ambitious work that is echoed in the music itself. It’s as much about The Who as it is about Jimmy. It is, in fact, the idealism of 60s youth culture refracted through the lens of the cynical 70s, by big, rich rock stars who’d lived through it. Quadrophenia the album is a record awash with metaphor – particularly the sea as both a destructive and redemptive force – and sprinkled with allusion to The Who’s own past. Consumed by despair, he rows out to sea to end it all, but has a sudden epiphany.
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The mod scene sours quickly, his best mate runs off with his girl, he trashes his beloved scooter and makes a break for Brighton in a desperate attempt to reconnect with the thrill and camaraderie of the mods-versus-rockers skirmishes. Ostensibly about a young 60s mod at the crossroads of his adolescent life, it charts the spiritual yearning of main protagonist Jimmy Cooper through drugs, unrequited love, beachfront barneys, a string of useless jobs and unsympathetic parents. Quadrophenia, likened by Townshend in 1973 to “a sort of musical Clockwork Orange”, was a deeply personal endeavour. It would be 22 years before they attempted it again. “The whole thing was a disaster,” griped Townshend. I think Pete moved The Who to another level with that record.”īut by the end of February ’74 The Who had stopped playing it entirely. “If Tommy is tabloid, Quadrophenia is broadsheet. “If Tommy is rock opera, Quadrophenia is grand rock opera,” says lifelong Townshend associate and Who biographer Richard Barnes. Quadrophenia, arriving hard-at-heel after his aborted Lifehouse project, was supposed to be his defining moment of the 70s, a rock opera to out- Tommy anything that had gone before. Townshend’s tipping point was the result of sustained pressure and frustration.
The Who’s formidable reputation was partly based on such wanton acts of violence against unsuspecting hardware, though the sudden assault on Pridden was altogether more extreme. It was, in fairness, hardly unique behaviour. Smash it up, Townshend about to reach the end of his tether on the Quadrophenia tour (Image credit: Getty Images)
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