Switched on Pop - Writing The Who’s ‘My Generation' With Pete Townshend

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

The Who's "My Generation" wasn't born from inspiration—it was commissioned. In a rare interview, Pete Townshend reveals how six fans at London's Goldhawk Club in 1965 directly asked him to write an anthem for their post-war generation. This conversation uncovers how a simple request transformed into rock's definitive youth statement, complete with its rebellious stutter and blues foundations. As Townshend releases his solo anthology during our own era of generational flux, the story behind rock's most famous declaration of youth proves more relevant than ever. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive your own bingo card! Songs Referenced "My Generation" by The Who "Can't Explain" by The Who "Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere" by The Who "Smokestack Lightning" by Howlin' Wolf "For Your Love" by The Yardbirds "Pinball Wizard" by The Who "I'm a Boy" by The Who "Pictures of Lily" by The Who "I Can See for Miles" by The Who "Stuttering Blues" by John Lee Hooker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Your business will be a super-exiton with Shopify. Empezae. PEOPLE. It's a euro-mess in Shopify.es bar records. Welcome to Switchton Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. A few years ago, I was asked to write an essay

on the song My Generation by The Who. Honestly, I considered it a near-impostable assignment. My Generation is a legendary song. I thought, how on earth can I do this song justice? Few songs speak to an entire generation and sit at the intersection between multiple music histories, in this case, rock, punk, blues, and folk. But then I couldn't get the song out of my head, and I thought, I got to talk to Pete Townsend about the creation of this song.

Pete Townsend is the band's guitarist, songwriter, and singer, who penned the original My Generation. Pete was surprisingly, immediately interested by the idea, but he had a number of ongoing conflicts, and after two years of emailing, we finally were able to connect. I'm not sure that he's ever spoken at such length about the creation of just this one song. I learned that unlike many hit songs that are often a product of a sudden bird, of inspiration, my generation instead came from a sort of creative brief from his fans. Back in 1965, when the Who were just teenagers starting out, Pete had played a very consequential show with a band at the Goldhock Club in Shepherds Bush, London.

At the end, six fans came up and told him that they felt like the Who's song, I Can't Explain, was their anthem. And they told Pete that they needed him to write another song that would represent their generation. A generation trying to find itself after the Great War that they didn't win. A generation looking for change and for new identities. Pete and I spoke roughly a year ago now, and I was waiting for the right time to share this story. This week, Pete Townsend is releasing a box set of all his solo albums, so that's a good reason. But I also feel like this is a time of massive generational change and upheaval,

and so I thought it apt to revisit the anthem, My Generation. Here's my conversation with Pete Townsend. If you don't mind, take me back to the very beginning. I'd like to walk step by step through the inspiration, creation, and recording of my generation. Where does the story start for you? Well, I suppose it starts with a degree of sort of societal disaffection. I was brought up in West London, and I went to Ealing Art School, which is a West London art school. And I was sharing an apartment with my best friend, Barney.

And I had a little studio there, and I wrote the first couple of demos that I did for the Who. in that studio. And my manager, Kit Lambert, came to see me in my apartment, was very, very upset about the conditions in which we lived and brought me to live in Belgravia, which is a bit like taking a kid from Long Island to the east side. It's very, very posh. It's very, very rich. I had a top floor apartment in a place called Chesham Place, and I set myself up a studio, and I was making demos for The Who and going and doing it. during gigs. This would have been between 1964 and 1965. So the Christmas period and then through most of 1965 when in the summer I got thrown out because I was making too much noise. I spent about

three or four months in that apartment and it was kind of blissful. Two incidents happened. I'd written Can't explain. And any way, anyhow, anywhere. which were both hits for The Who in the UK. And our stage act was getting more and more sort of violent, I suppose you would call it, but it had all sprung from my guitar smashing routine. And Keith Moon started to smash drums up, and Roger started to use his microphone on the symbols.

And this became a big trademark of what we were doing in public. Ironically, the mod movement, which we'd kind of used to launch our career, was a fairly grey fashion. It was suits and woolen shirts with collars or polo necks. And quite a smart look with neat cut hair. This is all pre-hipy. And our take on it was very colourful, very Carnaby Street, very pop art. So we were regarded as quite a gimmicky band.

And nonetheless, there was a familiar. me a tremendous seriousness in what I was doing as a songwriter for The Who and what I was doing on stage was because after our first record, Can't Explain, was released, we were playing in an Irish club in Hammersmith, Shepherds Bush, that area, so West London again. And after the show, a group of Irish boys and one girl came up and asked if they could speak to me and they took me aside and they said, listen, Pete, we want you to do more songs. like this, can't explain. And I said, why? And they said, well, because we really think it's important. And I said, in what way is it important? This is a song about some kid who doesn't have

the courage to say that he's in love with this girl. And they said, well, that's not the way we hear it. And I said, well, okay, tell me how do you hear it? And they said, well, we hear it as a song about the fact that none of us can really explain how we feel about anything. This is our standard. Now, this is the flag we're going to wave. We can't explain. And you are our spokesman. That was how it was delivered to me precisely, and I'm not exaggerating. I was still at art college. I was still doing some graphic design, and I left shortly after that. But I remember thinking, you know, wow, I've got a brief here. I've got a commission. I've got an audience. And how do I serve that audience? So I wrote Anywhere, Anyhow, Anywhere, which is a song about anarchic

youthful behavior. And then when it came time to work on the Who's very critical third single, we were moving into 1965 and we needed a new single. These singles came very, very quickly one after another. I started to think about it and two things happened to me. One was that I went down to the local shop to get some milk and I was at the counter and a woman in a fur coat came in and literally interrupted me and said, give me a 20 senior service young man to the bloke behind the counter. And I said, well, hold on a minute. I'm just getting my mind.

She said, just move aside. Move aside. Like now. She was very posh in a big fur coat, diamonds, you know, haircut like the queen. Anyway, she got her cigarettes and she went out, and I said, the guy behind the counter, I said, fucking hell, I can't believe that just happened.

and he said, well, this is Belgravia. You know, who knows? She probably owns the place. Anyway, the next day I took a train to Swindon, way, way out of London, and bought myself an old hearse, a Packard hearse, big 12-cylinder engine and a hearse, and I was going to chop it and turn it into a hot rod. I parked it outside the house.

It wouldn't start the next day, did a gig, came back, and it was gone. and I called the police and they said, no, it hasn't been stolen, and it's been towed away. And I said, on what basis? You know, I'm allowed to park my car outside my house. And they said, yeah, but we've had a complaint. And I said, well, who's from? Who cares? You know, it's just an old hearse.

And they said, well, that's exactly the complaint. Anyway, I put in an official complaint about being complained about. It turned out that it was the queen mother, the queen's mother, had complained because she drove past every year. day from Clarence's house to a friend's place where they used to have tea together. And it was distressing her because it reminded her very much of the hearse in which her dear husband, the late king, had been taken to his burial place. And it obviously just said to her driver, oh my God, that awful thing, have it removed, or maybe just complained and they had it removed.

Seems like a real abuse of royal power. And I sat down and I looked through my lyrics and I found this song, which was an attempt in a way to emulate two of my heroes at the time. One was Mos Allison, the jazz singer. Oh, well, a young man ain't nothing in this world these days. The other was Bob Dylan, who was then an almost unknown folk singer. I'm your masters of war. So I started to kind of riff on this song with this sense that, you know, I was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I shouldn't be living in Belgravia. I should be back in my West London place, surrounded by friends and by the people that had elected me to be their champion and their spokesman and started to riff on this my generation thing. People try to put us down, do, do, do, do, do, do, just because we get around, then jangling it a bit. then jangling it a bit with a bit of Bob Dylan in it.

Because I didn't have a piano in my studio at the time, otherwise I would have tried to do it on the piano like Moes. Anyway, the next day, Kit Lambert came, listened to it, he said, oh, Pete, this is very nice, but maybe you could rock it up a little bit, so I rocked it up a little bit. And then I decided to pretend that I was taking amphetamins. So I started to burble a little bit,

somebody that was piled up. But people try to put her down. I was a big fan of John Lee Hooker as well, you know, who actually had a stutter. He had a real stutter. He had a song Stuttering Blues. That's right.

Excuse me, baby. I can't get my voice out just like I want to zah, zah, zah, zah, to get him out. So he did. So he did. And then I did another version with some

key changes. So I did three or four demos in this little studio and that was the way that the song came together. And once it was finished, I just knew this thing was a big hit. I felt it hadn't come from a very good place in me. I felt it hadn't come from a particularly positive space. It came from a place of resentment and a feeling of class consciousness, which was something that was very out of tune with the way that I'd been brought up. My parents were musicians and they had friends who were poor, who were destitute, but they also had very wealthy friends, some journalists and some radio people, music agents, and a couple of people who were really quite aristocratic. So it felt ill at ease about it, but it definitely spoke for that little gang of kids. It felt this is

the true follow-up to Can't Explain. This is the true follow-up to that request to write more songs about the fact that we are not understood. And that line, I hope I die before I get old, was a shout against the establishment, against the way that people were living, the way that they assumed that anybody without money and without status should be ignored. And I never wanted to live that way. And I don't want to try to make something out of nothing here. There was a sense, too, that I was a young kid. I was only 20, coming up to 21. And thought, fuck it, I don't want to be old.

You know, I would prefer to be dead than to be like these people. Quite a few punk journalists have said, you know, oh, poor Pete, the Queen Mother complains about his car, so he writes my generation, oh, big, punk, rock, hard man. I'm afraid that's the story. And, you know, I was and still I'm very sensitive. So I think I felt it very, very deeply. But I knew once I'd written the song, that the whole exercise was worth it, as it often is.

You get this brief from these students, from these young people, who were basically saying, help me explain why I can't get these feelings out. I feel like there's a certain way in which the beginning of my generation almost, begins even before you're born. And I was wondering if you could unpack a little bit of, what is it about this moment in 1965? Why is it that your generation at that moment is feeling so misunderstood? I think because of the behavior of the status quo, the behavior of the politicians, the school teachers, the doctors, the medical people that one came across, the behavior of one's grandparents, maybe not always parents, but sometimes parents too, the behaviour of the police, the behaviour of the slightly older generation, the people that were

five or six years older than we were, because they had done national service. They'd prepared to fight for their country and been taught how to fight for their country. And we hadn't. And not only had we not, we were expected to be very, very grateful that we didn't have to do that, because when we heard their stories, it was no fun to go and do that stuff. We were young kids. We hadn't been asked to do anything. We had no remit.

We had no agenda. We had no responsibilities. We were expected to quietly accept that anybody that was older than us was necessarily far more valuable, had been through more than we had or ever would. And yet there was tremendous denial because they wouldn't talk about it. And of course, now as an older man, I realize, why? Because some of them had been through the most terrifying, traumatic experiences that they just wanted to forget about. And also, dare I say it, some of them may have done some terrible

things that they didn't really want to bring up. The victors in any war are always responsible for is how they treat the people that they've beaten. You know, after the last war, it was the behavior of the Russians sweeping into East Germany and raping and pillaging that brought up this incredible sense that, you know, this is not the way the British would ever have behaved. And yet, there were examples of the most terrible behavior, but also examples of men being incredibly traumatized. And there was no language, no conversation. So we felt disenfranchised. Absolutely. The word fits perfectly. And our conversations were all about what can we do to make ourselves count. What can we do to make our lives joyful? What can we do to make ourselves feel that we matter as much as these previous generations? The experience of music and the British invasion that was happening there is so built in living in the collective trauma of this earlier generation and this real fissure where there literally is no capacity for.

for emotional connection because of the, you have one completely traumatized generation and these young people who want to have some kind of relationship that they can't reach that. Is this sort of the sense of what these young people are talking about in that brief that you describe? You're just saying what I said in a different way. I think, you know, one of the things that we also realized is that we were like winging brats. You know, we knew that what we wanted was something that we really weren't entitled to. we weren't entitled to the respect and the status that the previous generations had earned.

And I think around the time of my generation, the whole of the British art scene, the music scene, you can certainly see it with fashion and photography and perhaps with some film as well, but certainly with rock music and pop music, we drew a line and we started again. we started to rebuild our traditions and our history. We already had jazz. We already had all of the fabulous music of Europe, the classical music, the Baroque music, the folk music. We had the great blues music and the R&B music from America. We poured it all into a pot.

We boiled it up. We took some drugs and we made it our own. And that was our history. And in a sense, we sort of leapfrogged the war years, completely. As much as your generation is growing up in a response to this collective war trauma, and you're born right at the close of the war, you wrote in your biography that you were still growing up in the Cold War, extremely conscious of the existential threat of nuclear war and the fear that everything could fall apart at any given moment. Is that captured in the music as well? No, because I think that was something that I thought more as a young teenager. I was in a tragic. band and we used to do the Order Master March and go and with, you know, with our duffel coats and

our socialist band-the-bomb buttons are anti-apartheid badges and stuff. But I was 12, 13, 14 years old. And I dreamed every night about bombers coming overhead, ready to drop bombs. And I think the reality of the UK situation was that we knew that America and Russia had the same. level of armaments, but we also knew that in the UK we fucking didn't. They could wipe us out. I think that's the situation today, to be honest. So I think we were very aware of that. But by the time I became 16, 17, 17 or 18, it wasn't that I didn't care about it. It just couldn't be a part of my reality anymore. It couldn't be a part of the reality of the kids I was growing up with. We could not ascribe to this. We couldn't be a part of it,

because we weren't allowed to be. If you want to really sneer at who I was, you can. Because I could, of course, have gone and joined the Army or the RAF like my father had or the Navy and done my national service. And I could have done that, but I didn't. My mission was to try to function as an artist. And the way that I saw my role as an artist was not as an agitator, but as somebody that was useful to society.

I think for me, art has always been about words and conversation, more than about physical painting or sculpture or drawing or making music or putting on plays. It's about conversation. In other words, if I write a song, I hope that there will be a conversation that follows. I remember my story about playing psychederellic, my last rock opera thing, solo rock opera in Berkeley. And Eddie Vedder was introduced to me, and he came in to the dressing room. room after the show and said, Pete, I need to talk to you. I don't want to be a rock star. I love being in a band, but I really want to be a surfer. I want a quiet life. I love the sea. I love surfing. That's what I want to do. And I said, it's too late. You have been elected and you now have nowhere to go. If you go back to your surfboard, guess what's going to happen? They're going to find you on the

beach. You know, you've been elected. And in a sense, when that happens, because we're black swans, any of us that are musicians that get recognized, we don't do it, the audience do it, they take you and they make you their own. And this happened in such a risible way with this group of kids for me as a writer, songwriter. This is outside the Who as a rock band, you know, just being elected literally write some more songs like this. You know, it was a commission. I knew what to do. I was very clear about it. And it became something that invigorated the way that I approached all of my songwriting and still does to this day. You know, my audience is older, of course, but it's not as old as I am.

I appreciate the call to conversation that art creates. And I entirely agree. I see your job is to elicit some kind of emotional experience for people to be able to get some conversation going. But in order to get there, you have to have work. and music. I want to go back to the demos briefly. You have so many different sounds that you pursue in the creation of my generation. And the final recording is kind of like a bomb goes off. The sound is unlike anything that people had heard. Could you tell me about how you arrived at all of these choices from you tune your guitar a whole step down with these wild modulations,

the chaotic bass solo, the explosive drum ending? What was the the son of? The sonic song? space you were aiming for. How did you find it? Well, it wasn't just me, of course. It was the band and also the direction of our two managers who realized that the Who had a stage act, a musical performance that had elements to it, which were

connected with the frustration, the outward outpouring of rage and disenfranchisement. We allowed our rage, as it were, to show. And I think each one of us in the band had a different kind of rage and a different way of expressing it. But on stage, the band was

really, really powerful and scarcely. And yet in the background, there was this sense, particularly between John Eintwistle and me, who were the first two to play together. We started playing together when we were 12 in a traditional jazz band, was that the music was really important. The sound of the music, the sound of the instruments, the way that we performed the music, the fact that the music should be interesting structurally, if possible, but also not so much that it alienated the audience. You know, so pre-Prog Rock, we were avoiding drifting into over-complicated music. We wanted to produce accessible music.

I remember a early yard birds hit called For Your Love. And I remember saying to their manager at the time, I don't like it. It's too complicated. Listening to it now, it's not really complicated at all. but at the time it felt to me like a little bit, I suppose it felt a bit pretentious, you know, if I'm going to be honest, this was me as a sort of a 20-year-old kid.

So the two things jive together. And when we went into the studio to record my generation, we did a track based on a rehearsal that we'd done and a little coffee shop in Soho, which had been guided by our manager, Kit Lambert. The record was produced by Cheryl Taume, but he was delivered with this Finnish thing. which was me with my rick and back, a feeding back, making switching noises,

which I'd done previously too on Anywhere Anyhow Anywhere. But the idea of a bass solo was because it was quite clear that John was a far better shredder, if you like, than I was. Plus, we were a three-piece band with a singer. One didn't play guitar solos if you're playing rhythm, if you're driving the band. And so it felt natural to do what we did with it. And I think we were all shocked at how well it all worked. I think we did it in one take. The anger and frustration obviously comes across so well and connects with countless generations and still does.

But this song, you end up naming the album after the single. The rest of the album is much more R&B blues. There's some Baudi Diddly covers on there. This song really stood out. Why did it become the album title and carry that whole record? It was just epochal, obviously. You know, and you can see by looking at the rest of the music that, you know, that although I was trying to write lots of songs for The Who,

I was still trying to find my feet with them. You know, Roger just wanted to sound like, oh God, who's the guy that did Smokestack Lightning? Howling Wolf. Yeah, Howling Wolf. He wanted to sound like, oh God. that hell of war. So the idea of writing

Kinks inspired or Beatles inspired pop songs, which he would just say, not going to sing that load of old shit. He was a tough guy to write songs for. And a tough guy to work with, he was very, very bluff. Much easier, happier

relationship now. But in those days, he was quite a bullish character. And, you know, he didn't develop a high voice until we came to work on Tommy when, you know, he started to sing see me filmy and we realized he had a falsetto. He'd never revealed it before. See me.

So quite a few of the songs that I'd written for that album at the time got bumped because they didn't fit. So why did we choose my generation? It was the best song. I think it was Epoccal. It was obviously going to be the one that it was just clear right from the very beginning. You know, I knew right from the very beginning that even if we'd have done a Jimmy Reed version of it, It would have been a song that lasted forever.

You know, I just knew that I'd hit on a word and an idea that captured that period. And what was so interesting was that other really great bands like Beatles and Stones and the Kinks in particular seemed to be writing about other things. They weren't writing about their audience. They weren't writing about their people. They were writing for their audience to entertain. them, you know, or in the Stone's case to seduce them, or in the King's case, to describe the world which had gone before, which should be mourned, you know, quite rightly.

But for us, for the Who, it was very much, and I think possibly because we rose out, out of the mod movement, which pretty much finished by the time my generation came out. It was over in 1964. At least the, you know, the fashionable element of it was over by 1964. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you.

Okay. Ready? Do not sugarcoat something for me. No, no. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs, and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits.

I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue. President Trump is now targeting predominantly Democratic cities for ice raids and deportations. Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minneapolis Tuesday. We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talk about America. and politics beyond the current president.

So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want border at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up, instead of the top down.

That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds. A lot of people will focus on the lyric. I hope I die before I get old. I actually saw a 1989 interview with you where you basically said I've given a thousand answers to that question and I have to keep on trying to find creative answers to it. But the lyric that really stands out to me

is I'm not trying to cause a big sensation. I'm just talking about my generation. Because it seems like it's a foil to the thesis of the song. I was wondering if you could unpack that. lyric for me a bit. Well, there's the rhyme. There's this other thing that, you know, that in R&B tradition and Bob Dylan grabbed at it and made it part of the folk tradition was Talking Blues. Hey, man. What's that, boy? I want to tell you about your girlfriend.

What about my girl? One time ago, crazy dream came to me. I dreamt eyes walking in World War III. Went to the doctors the very next day to see what kind of words he could say. And my generation is a talking blues song. It's a talking song. Talking about, you know, I'm talking about, I'm talking about, I'm talking about. And so the sense was that however heavy, the music was, however angry it seemed, over and under, inside and outside, between layers and so on. It was part of a necessary conversation, I think.

So the idea that, you know, we're not here to shout at you. We're not here to challenge you. We're not here to scare you. We're just here to point out to you that we're here and we matter. You had a brief, there are a couple of briefs, both from your fans, but also from the band, hey, we need the next hit. We've got two good songs. We need a third one.

And it sounds like you were quite aware that you were working on something powerful. But I'm curious about the relationship to your lyrics in the time of writing them. I mean, you just joked, hey, it just rhymed. And what happens after the fact? To what degree did you have a sense that these lines had this almost sort of divine power to work an audience? Or was it something that sort of just arrived in that moment and took on a larger meaning?

I think it was the latter. I think it wasn't that they were flipped out, but I certainly felt that it was so much an innate expression of how I felt at the time that the words just tumbled out as a very, very accurate reflection of how I felt at the time. It wasn't meant to be a student piece,

in a sense for my little gang of kids. It came from inside out. Where it was rather considered was when I went back and I was talking to you about how it actually grew from a few sentences on a piece of paper. People try to put us down

just because we get around. That came before I had the My Generation thing. It was just two lines. And I could sing it a couple of ways. I could sing it like a Moes Allison song, you know, People try to put us down. That's how Moes would have sung it. Or I could have sung it like Bob Dylan.

People try to put us down, you know. There were two ways of doing it. And then there was our way. And by the time the song was finished, I had, you know, the stutter, I had the heavy guitar, the bass solo. It grew in an interesting way because it had so many different demos. I mean, it was the most demos that I've ever done for a song.

It grew from that chugging blues pattern right up to that onbeat. And then Chris Damp, who heard the third demo, our other managers, said, you know, it needs to change, Pete. It gets a bit boring after all. It needs to change. So I started to introduce key changes. And in the end, it ends up with one, two, it has three modulations. And that's unusual.

It was unusual even for the kinks at the time who were the kings of modulation. It's like only Whitney Houston. Who else gives us that many modulations? Beyonce, Love on Top. So did the lyrics all come at once, or were those also evolving throughout the demos? They all came up once once they landed. So by the time I did the first demo, I had the lyrics landed. It's just that when I had in my, I started on the song in my flat in Ealing, where I grew up.

And I had a couple of tape machines. I was bouncing from tape machine to tape machine. That was where I had those two lines. And I did do a demo for any way, anyhow, anywhere using that system. And that I gave to Shel Tamei and he never gave it back. I've never seen it since. But that was not a bad demo. But the demos for my generation, I did over and over again

because I knew that I needed to get it right. But in the process, I didn't change any of the words. I just added more stutters and more key changes. So the song comes out, what is it? October, 1965? Was it really released two weeks after it was recorded? I don't know how they did it in those days, but that's what they did.

If you had the songs ready, they would record them and get them out really, really fast. You know, you could, you know, I think the Beatles had a period where they were putting out a song every month. Okay, so the song is basically done. You put it to bed and it's out on the radio and out in distribution just weeks later.

What happens? Well, you try to get on television and try to get it on the radio. You do shows. And in our case, because I was a talker and I was interested in conversation, I would do interviews. That's what we did.

You wanted to get it on radio and television. You were banned from the BBC. Was this effectively a good thing for the song? You know, I don't know. You know, probably not. No, the BBC were very, very strange. I mean, when Pimble Wizard came out, you know, one of the big DJs,

at the time, a guy called Tony Blackburn, who's now probably called Sir. Tony Blackburn by some pratt in government called it Sick, Sick, Sick, Sick, you know. It didn't listen to it properly, didn't look at the context of it. And we suffered from a lot of that, the idea that we were this smutty little band with filthy minds that came out with nasty little ideas. My understanding is that part of the story is the BBC says that they banned the song because it would be detrimental to those who stutter, maybe, you know, a line like, why don't you all fade away. Also kind of sounds like there's going to be a curse word there.

Is this why it was banned or was it simply so effective in creating a generational divide? I think the people that banned it were intelligent people and they were being protective. I don't think it was because they felt it would create a revolution or that it was a reflection of a potential revolution. In fact, there was never a revolution. The revolution in the UK of which, you know, I hope. to feel that I was a part was about fashion and about art and about music. It was not about societal change. It wasn't about politics. There were no musicians and no artists that spoke about politics. You know, there was nobody suggesting who you vote for. You know, it was considered

to be passe to even have a political stance. When you look at early interviews with the Beatles, what they did is every time they were asked a serious question, they made a joke. You know, I tried to answer questions seriously, but I knew there were subjects I had to stay away from. I would have defended myself, you know, really quite violently on stuttering. It wasn't meant to be a piss take about people stuttering. It was meant to be that I grew up in this group of boys who took so much amphetamins that they couldn't speak. So you don't think the BBC banned it simply because it was lewd, anti-establishment? Probably they did. Yeah, I think they probably thought it might offend people that stutter. Perhaps what we don't know and we'll never know is maybe the Queen Mother really had her

way and called up the BBC and said, you know what, I'm going two time on the song. I would love that. You know, I would love that. I heard such, as a friend of Kit Lambert's godfather, Sir Freddie Ashton, a little old guy who was the premier dancer and choreographer, the lighter side of ballet at the Royal Ballet. And I had dinner with him once. And I said, so what are you up to at the moment, Freddie? You know, you're sort of semi-retired. And he said, well, I still do a bit of dancing. He said, but, you know, every afternoon I pop around to see mom. And I said, Mom, who?

And he said, the Queen Mum. Me, I pop around to see the Queen Mum. And we have Gen Tonic and we tell each other dirty stories. And apparently she was, you know, wild. She was great fun and extraordinarily egalitarian. So I got her wrong, you know. She just didn't like my hearse So the song

shoots up the charts It becomes one of your biggest hits At that moment Of course in history It is one of the greatest hits of all time Rolling Stone has called the 11th greatest song of all time You're in the Rock and Rolls of Fame

for the song Grammy Hall of Fame How is your reception to the song Your experience of the song Evolved over time Well I think for the band members For me and for the band members It became a burden

we were still playing it as our closing song in our late 20s. It felt to us that the conversation was over. When we first went to New York in 1967, there were kids who were still being called up for Vietnam, but the Vietnam issue was over, and we were still doing my generation on the stage, and I was probably still smashing guitars, and Keith Moon was still smashing his drums up, and we were still doing that in 68. After we started performing Tommy, we would close the show with listening to You, I Get the Music. But if there was a desire for an encore, we would end up playing summertime blues and then follow up with my generation and smash a guitar or whatever it was that we were doing at the time.

There were long periods where we would try to not do that. My explanations of why I was doing it were not being accepted. So in a sense, the song became a burden. We didn't want to keep playing it at the end of the show. And I have to say, Roger and I did a couple of shows for Teen Cancer recently at the Royal Albert Hall, and we played my generation, and I hate playing it. It's difficult to play. It changes key a lot. And I don't have that great big, huge stage sound that I used to have when I was young.

You know, two great big Marshall Stacks and a rick-and-backer guitar turned around and the whole thing would catch fire on its own. I didn't have to play. I could just stand like a bird man, and the guitar would go, that doesn't happen now, so I have to play the fucking thing and try to create this sound of planes going to war on a guitar that's plugged into a five-watt amplifier. So you talked about the importance of creating conversation

and I'm getting the sense that the conversation that you wanted to have in 1965 changed quite quickly. And it's not been the same conversation since then. I think it's exactly the same conversation. I think it is exactly the same. And I think one of the problems for me is when, for example, if I talk about Tommy, I will end up talking about the post-war phenomenon, the idea that youth was disenfranchised, children were neglected,

they were abused, they were sent away during the war and then brought back, and some of them had been abused, but they were told, well, at least you're fucking alive, so stop complaining. If I talk about quadrophenia, I talk about the fact that the mod movement was something, which was an expression of, in a sense, sense. We are cool people, but we're in disguise. We're not rockers. We're not filthy motorbikers who dress in leather jackets. I think we associated those people with the people that had been in the Army and the Navy and they'd been, you know, who used to beat each other with chains

as a way to initiate themselves into their gangs. We were smart, we were cool. We danced on our own. We were a male group and if women wanted to be around us, that was fine, but we didn't need them to dance. We didn't jive. We danced on our own. And we were elegant and we were smart. But that too was an expression of let's draw a line between us and the way that the previous generation and the previous strata's of society have operated. It was drawing a line. So every time I go back to my work, I see that line drawn. You know, when I look at my recent novel, The Age of Anxiety, I see another line drawn, which is out of that pop art phase between 1964 and 1967, did something change in society, which changed the function of creativity? Did we discover that play was more important than work?

Did we discover that because we were told that we could do nothing through our work that was of value that we had to find a new way to play. And creativity is play in a sense. You know, I think it's important for me, you know, somebody pushing 80 now just to talk about what I feel we've achieved and what the function of music is. I mean, you're teaching this stuff. And that word function is the most important thing. You can play. You can play. You can have fun. But when you look back at recent history, and my recent history is my lifetime, nothing very much has changed or anything that has changed seems to be revisited. We keep coming back to the same issues again and again and again and things change and they change for the better. And so we look at what it's for. Is it there

to entertain? Is it there to speak? Is it there to share ideas? What is it for? If I was going to, you know, write something new today, I would feel it would have to be based. It would have to have its chair legs in a sense, its foundations in the period of my generation when I was able to say the line is now drawn. And it's interesting that a lot of my songwriting after that was so lighthearted. You know, I'm a boy about gender issues. I can see for miles about taking drugs and thinking you can see God and thinking you can see your girlfriend cheating on you.

These were lighthearted songs. they were nothing like as serious as my generation. It felt to me like now I can start to play. I felt I was in a safe place. And I think Tommy was written about that period, but looking back at it dispassionately and putting everything in order. I'm hearing that there are many layers of this feeling

of the song being a burden. One being, obviously there's the burden of success and the repetition of something which is so beautiful and captures this moment. It sounds like there's also the burden of recreating a moment, which was momentary, that represented a time and a place for yourself of being a young man and how that changes so drastically in just a few years. And that play acting, that version of yourself with the wrong amplifier, it's just never, you can't go back there

and a burden that new generations need new my generations because there are new issues of freedoms that need to be fought over. But also maybe a burden in that there has been insufficient change in what was the feeling of a larger political movement. And of course, major rights have been created in the post-war period, but not nearly sufficient or matching the expectation of the error of the counterculture and the civil rights movement and what it wanted to achieve and the actual outcomes. And also the burden that the benefits that did come from this post-war period also feel like they are tenuous. I think that all of that's correct.

Yeah. And I think that there's a, so it's quite painful to feel that we came so close to. And also, of course, that it didn't, it wasn't a hit in America straight away. You know, it was a hit in Europe, but it wasn't a hit in America. So it was something that we brought with us later, but that we were a part of this movement, its Brit Pop movement. And we always felt that we were a small part of it. And history has shown us to be a rather larger part of it than we would have, I think,

that we feel comfortable with even today. You know, I still think that the kinks are a more important band, if you're going to talk about the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and the Who, as being bands in the first wave, Led Zeppelin coming a bit later. We were a little pop band supporting those bands when we were young. You know, we supported the Beatles. We supported the stones three or four times. We supported the Kings three or four times. They were the stars. We were the support band. So I think in a sense, you know, the success of my generation cornered us into a place where we were very much carrying that banner.

You know, it was so important to me. Still is. I'm wondering, do you feel like there's anything that we just haven't been able to touch on that is an important piece of the generation, creation or reception of this work? Well, I think mainly the conversation could go on and it could diversify and go here and go there,

but every time you bring it back to the song, it feels to me central to my development as a musician, as a band member, as somebody that has survived the rock industry, and still has a sense of duty to that audience and a sense of duty, even though, and now in a sense, what I would like to do for the survivors

is just write a series of checks. Just say, listen, go buy yourself a nice car. Unfortunately, I can only do it for a few people, and I do do it for people that I can reach, that I owe loyalty to. You know, one of the boys that came up to me at the Goldhawk Club, I've just written a few checks for him. And I've written a couple of checks for the guy who came up with the name, The Who. You know, I feel like these are my people.

And they were a very, very important part of that wave. They were part of the engine of what led to that song, not just landing, but being recognized as being functional. and realizing with Khan explain that the song had a function that I hadn't intended, the joy for me with my generation was knowing that the song had a function which I intended. I set out to do something and it landed and it worked. And it's still in a sense, when we play it now, it still has a function. It's not quite what it was. There's a, you know, when we sing I hope I die before I get old or, you know, why don't you all?

It's the audience. that shout, fuck off! You know, how did they know that we were going to say fuck off? It was fade away.

That was the, why don't you all just fade away that was never meant to be fuck off? And the success of it really for me as a songwriter was just doing the job

that I was born to do and doing it right and it lasting so long. But also the fact that it has lasted so long, I'm not sure that it fits anymore. But the idea that,

you know, that it still matters and it's still a part of my life and I could, you know, I think I'd still, if I was doing solo shows, I would still perform it in my own way. I think I would do it and I would probably do it. And I think when I've done solo shows, I haven't done very many solo shows in my life and I've done my generation. I've done the early version, you know, the bluesy version, the fokey version. Does it feel more appropriate to who you are today? Yeah, I think more like, you know, some old guys singing about years gone by. Thank you, Pete.

I really appreciate this conversation. Thank you for all your candor. You're welcome. Good to talk. Switched on Pop is produced by Rihanna Cruz, edited by Art Chung, engineered by Brandon McFarlane, illustrations by Iris gotlebe, theme music by Zach Tenario and Jossi Adams of Ark Iris, or member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture, which is part of New York Magazine.

you can subscribe at nymag.com slash pod. I need to give a special shout out to Peggy who gave me some of my first CDs when I was a kid, including The Who's My Generation. Thanks for setting me on the right track. Subscribe to our newsletter in our show notes or at our website Switchedonpop.com where you can get more back episodes

as well as cool mugs, shirts, and totes. We're going to be back next Tuesday with more episodes about music of this generation. And until then, thanks for listening.