Who I Am: A Memoir

It’s extraordinary, magical, surreal, watching them all dance to my feedback guitar solos; in the audience my art-school chums stand straight-backed among the slouching West and North London Mods, that army of teenagers who have arrived astride their fabulous scooters in short hair and good shoes, hopped up on pills. I can’t speak for what’s in the heads of my fellow bandmates, Roger Daltrey, Keith Moon or John Entwistle. Usually I’d be feeling like a loner, even in the middle of the band, but tonight, in June 1964, at The Who’s first show at the Railway Hotel in Harrow, West London, I am invincible.

We’re playing R&B: ‘Smokestack Lightning’, ‘I’m a Man’, ‘Road Runner’ and other heavy classics. I scrape the howling Rickenbacker guitar up and down my microphone stand, then flip the special switch I recently fitted so the guitar sputters and sprays the front row with bullets of sound. I violently thrust my guitar into the air – and feel a terrible shudder as the sound goes from a roar to a rattling growl; I look up to see my guitar’s broken head as I pull it away from the hole I’ve punched in the low ceiling.

It is at this moment that I make a split-second decision – and in a mad frenzy I thrust the damaged guitar up into the ceiling over and over again. What had been a clean break becomes a splintered mess. I hold the guitar up to the crowd triumphantly. I haven’t smashed it: I’ve sculpted it for them. I throw the shattered guitar carelessly to the ground, pick up my brand-new Rickenbacker twelve-string and continue the show.

That Tuesday night I stumbled upon something more powerful than words, far more emotive than my white-boy attempts to play the blues. And in response I received the full-throated salute of the crowd. A week or so later, at the same venue, I ran out of guitars and toppled the stack of Marshall amplifiers. Not one to be upstaged, our drummer Keith Moon joined in by kicking over his drumkit. Roger started to scrape his microphone on Keith’s cracked cymbals. Some people viewed the destruction as a gimmick, but I knew the world was changing, and a message was being conveyed. The old, conventional way of making music would never be the same.

I had no idea what the first smashing of my guitar would lead to, but I had a good idea where it all came from. As the son of a clarinettist and saxophonist in the Squadronaires, the prototypical British Swing band, I had been nourished by my love for that music, a love I would betray for a new passion: rock ’n’ roll, the music that came to destroy it.

I am British. I am a Londoner. I was born in West London just as the devastating Second World War came to a close. As a working artist I have been significantly shaped by these three facts, just as the lives of my grandparents and parents were shaped by the darkness of war. I was brought up in a period when war still cast shadows, though in my life the weather changed so rapidly it was impossible to know what was in store. War had been a real threat or a fact for three generations of my family.

In 1945 popular music had a serious purpose: to defy postwar depression and revitalise the romantic and hopeful aspirations of an exhausted people. My infancy was steeped in awareness of the mystery and romance of my father’s music, which was so important to him and Mum that it seemed the centre of the universe. There was laughter and optimism; the war was over. The music Dad played was called Swing. It was what people wanted to hear. I was there.

IT’S A BOY!

I have just been born, war is over, but not completely.

‘It’s a boy!’ someone shouts from the footlights. But my father keeps on playing.

I am a war baby though I have never known war, born into a family of musicians on 19 May 1945, two weeks after VE Day and four months before VJ Day bring the Second World War to an end. Yet war and its syncopated echoes – the klaxons and saxophones, the big bands and bomb shelters, V2s and violins, clarinets and Messerschmitts, mood-indigo lullabies and satin-doll serenades, the wails, strafes, sirens, booms and blasts – carouse, waltz and unsettle me while I am still in my mother’s womb.

Two memories linger for ever like dreams that, once remembered, are never forgotten.

I am two years old, riding on the top deck of an old tram that Mum and I have boarded at the top of Acton Hill in West London. The tram trundles past my future: the electrical shop where Dad’s first record will go on sale in 1955; the police station where I’ll go to retrieve my stolen bike; the hardware store that mesmerises me with its thousands of perfectly labelled drawers; the Odeon where I will attend riotous Saturday movie matinées with my pals; St Mary’s Church where years from now I sing Anglican hymns in the choir and watch hundreds of people take communion, but never do so myself; the White Hart pub where I first get properly drunk in 1962 after playing a regular weekly gig with a school rock band called The Detours, that will one day evolve into The Who.

I am a little older now, my second birthday three months past. It’s the summer of 1947 and I’m on a beach in bright sunshine. I’m still too young to run around, but I sit up on the blanket enjoying the smells and sounds: sea air, sand, a light wind, waves murmuring against the shore. My parents ride up like Arabs on horseback, spraying sand everywhere, wave happily, and then ride off again. They are young, glamorous, beautiful, and their disappearance is like the challenge of an elusive grail.

Dad’s father, Horace Townshend (known as Horry), was prematurely bald at thirty, but still striking with his aquiline profile and thick-rimmed glasses. Horry, a semi-professional musician/composer, wrote songs and performed in summer entertainments at seasides, parks and music halls during the 1920s. A trained flautist, he could read and write music, but he liked the easy life and never made much money.

Horry met Grandma Dorothy in 1908. They worked together as entertainers and married two years later, when Dot was eight months pregnant with their first child, Jack. As an infant, Uncle Jack remembered his parents busking on Brighton Pier while little Jack watched nearby. A grand lady walked up, admired their efforts and threw a shilling into their hat. ‘For which good cause are you collecting?’ she asked.

‘For ourselves,’ Dot said.

Dot was striking and elegant. A singer and dancer who could read music, she performed at concert parties, sometimes alongside her husband, and later contributed to Horry’s songwriting. She was cheerful and positive, though rather vain and a bit of a snob. Between performances Horry and Dot conceived my father, Clifford Blandford Townshend, who was born in 1917, a companion for his older brother Jack.

Mum’s parents, Denny and Maurice, lived in Paddington during Mum’s early childhood. Though obsessive about cleanliness, Denny was not a careful guardian. Mum remembers hanging out the upstairs window with her baby brother, Maurice, Jr, waving at her father driving past on his milk float. The little boy nearly slipped out.

Granddad Maurice was a sweet man who was cruelly jilted when Denny – after eleven years of marriage – abruptly ran off with a wealthy man, who kept her as his mistress. On that day Mum came home from school to an empty house. Denny had taken all the furniture except for a bed, leaving only a note with no address. It took Maurice several years to track the wayward woman down, but they were never reconciled.

Maurice and the two children moved in with his mother, Ellen. Mum, just ten, contributed to running the house, and fell directly under her Irish grandmother’s influence. Mum was ashamed of the mother who had abandoned her, but proud of her grandmother Ellen, who taught her to modulate her speaking voice to round out the Irish in it. Mum became adept at mimicking various accents, and showed an early aptitude for music.

Eventually, as a teenager, Mum moved in with her maternal Aunt Rose in North London. I remember Rose as an extraordinary woman, self-assured, intelligent, well read; she was a lesbian, living quietly but openly with her partner.

Like me, Dad was a teenage rebel. Before the war he and his best friend were members of Oswald Mosley’s fascist Blackshirts. He was ashamed of this later, of course, but forgave himself – they were young, and the uniforms were glamorous. Instead of staying with Prokofiev’s clarinet studies, through which he’d brilliantly stormed for two hours every morning, Dad at sixteen chose to play at bottle parties, an English variant on the speakeasy. The musicianship required of him at these gigs demanded little of his skill. Throughout his life he was over-qualified, technically, for the music he played.

Within a few years Dad was performing around London with Billy Wiltshire and his Piccadilly Band, playing music for dancing or lounging at bars – ‘bar-stooling’, as it was known. In the interval between two world wars, sophistication, glamour and light-heartedness obscured an underlying fear of extinction. The big issues were hidden in clouds of cigarette smoke and innovative popular music. Sex was, as ever, the ingredient that would calm the anxious heart. Yet in the music of my father’s era, sexual energy was implied rather than displayed, hidden behind the cultivated elegance of men and women in evening dress.

War and music brought my parents together. Dad enlisted in the RAF in 1940 and played saxophone and clarinet in small bands to entertain his colleagues as part of his duties. By 1945 he was playing in the RAF Dance Orchestra, one of the largest in any of the services. Recruited from enlisted men who had been members of well-known bands and directed by Sergeant Leslie Douglas, it has been described as the greatest dance orchestra Britain ever produced. It was, in its own way, revolutionary. Its secret weapon was Swing, still not generally acceptable to society at large, but the common people loved it. Dad had secured the job because Vera Lynn’s husband, saxophonist Harry Lewis, although in the RAF, was afraid of flying and didn’t want to fly to Germany. And in fact when the motorcycle messenger shouted out the news of my birth from the footlights, Dad was away in Germany, playing saxophone for the troops.

Mum falsified her age to enlist in 1941. A gifted singer, she became a vocalist in Dad’s band. A concert programme for 18 June 1944 at Colston Hall, Bristol, lists her singing ‘Star Eyes’, ‘All My Life’ (a duet with the handsome Sergeant Douglas) and ‘Do I Worry’. Dad is featured as the soloist on ‘Clarinet Rhapsody’ and ‘Hot and Anxious’. According to a sleeve note, the RAF Dance Orchestra directed the ear of the public. ‘From slush to music with a beat, the rhythm had flexibility, the soloist more room for expression.’

When the war ended the band chose to go by its popular name: the Squadronaires.

According to Mum, the early years of her marriage were lonely. ‘I never saw Dad. He was never there. And when he was, he was over the road in the bloody White Lion or up at the Granville.’ Cheerful, good-looking and quick to buy a round at the bar, Dad was popular in the local pubs, where his musical success made him a bit of a celebrity.

Mum’s loneliness may help explain why she was so angry with my father for being absent at my birth. Mum, who had been living with Dad’s parents, showed her resentment by moving out. She knew a Jewish couple, Sammy and Leah Sharp, musicians from Australia, who lived with their son in one big room, and Mum and I moved in with them. Leah took me over. I don’t remember her, but Mum described her as ‘one of these people who loved to do all the bathing and pram-pushing and all that lark’. Mum, less interested in ‘all that lark’ – and still working as a singer – was grateful for the help.

In 1946 my parents reconciled, and the three of us moved to a house in Whitehall Gardens, Acton. Our next-door neighbours included the great blind jazz pianist George Shearing and the cartoonist Alex Graham, whose studio, with its adjustable draughting board, huge sheets of paper, inks and complicated pens, fascinated me, and planted the seeds that later inspired me to go to art college.

We shared our house with the Cass family, who lived upstairs and, like many of my parents’ closest friends, were Jewish. I remember noisy, joyous Passovers with a lot of Gefilte fish, chopped liver and the aroma of slow-roasting brisket. Each family had three rooms, a kitchen and a bathroom, but no inside toilet. Ours was in the back yard, and our toilet paper was a few squares of newspaper hung on a nail. Between the cold and the spiders, my trips there never lasted long.

I slept in the dining room. My parents seemed to have little sense of the need to provide me with a place of my own, where I could leave my toys or drawings out without feeling I was encroaching on adult territory. I had no sense of privacy, or even any awareness that I deserved it.

Mum gave up singing and later regretted it, but she always worked. She helped run the Squadronaires from their office in Piccadilly Circus, and often took me on the tour bus, where I basked in the easygoing attitude of the band and looked after the empty beer bottles. Our road trips always ended at a small seaside hotel, a holiday camp or an ornate theatre full of secret stairways and underground corridors.

Charlie, who managed the road crew, was the butt of numerous practical jokes, but the Squadronaires clearly loved him. The impact of Mum and Dad’s daily influence on me waned a little in the presence of the band, which was like a travelling boys’ club. Mum was the singing doll in residence, and Dad’s musicianship gave him a special status among his peers. Dad always worked for at least an hour on scales and arpeggios, and his morning practice seemed magical in its complexity. In rock today we use simpler language: he was
fast
.

The holiday camp was a peculiarly British institution – a working-class destination for a summer week of revelry that often included entertainment in the form of a band like the Squadronaires. The one-family-per-hut layout of the camps didn’t seem ideally suited to illicit sexual liaisons. But if, instead of a family in one of these huts, you imagine a small group of young men in one, and young women in another, you begin to understand the possibilities.

There was an egalitarian feeling about holiday camps, but I always felt a little superior to the ordinary folk rotating through. After all, I was with the band, and I was there for the whole summer, sometimes as long as sixteen weeks. From behind the stage curtain I discovered the magic of capturing the campers’ attention. I grew up with a feel for what entertains people, and saw the price this sometimes demanded. As a stunt to amuse the camping plebs, each afternoon at two o’clock Dad was pushed from the highest board into the swimming pool below, fully dressed in his band uniform. Emerging from the water still playing his old clarinet, he pretended to be sad, defeated. As a child I felt this rather too deeply. My shining Dad is humiliated, I used to think, so you camping plebs can get a laugh.

I learned to set myself apart from those ordinary folk, the customers who indirectly paid for our keep. To this day when I go to a concert in which I’m not performing I always feel a little lost. And I always think of my dad.

In September 1949, aged four, I attended Silverdale Nursery in Birch Grove, Acton, which probably appealed to Mum because she thought I looked cute in the school uniform, a red blazer and hat. Mum herself was naturally glamorous, and when clothes rationing ended after the war Mum outfitted herself like a Hollywood film star. Her in-laws disapproved. Why was she spending Dad’s hard-earned money on clothes and sending me to private school when she should have been pushing a pram?

I was happy, though. Whitehall Gardens was one of a series of streets overrun with little boys my own age. Our gang was led by my best friend who we all called Jimpy, after a character with a similar quiff in a popular
Daily Mirror
cartoon. Like all kids, we played football, cricket, hide-and-seek and cowboys and Indians – our favourite game. War games were limited to toy soldiers or model vehicles: the real thing was still too raw a memory.

Our fantasies were inspired by films we saw on Saturday matinées: Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, Flash Gordon, The Three Stooges, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy,
Looney-Tunes
, Disney cartoons and the rest. Laurel and Hardy were the funniest people on the planet. Chaplin seemed out of date to me, but then practically all the films we saw had been made before the war.

Once we got out of the house we could do pretty much what we liked. We sneaked under fences, onto railway sidings, scrumped apples from trees in people’s gardens, threw stones at ducks, opened any garage door left unlocked (cars were a great curiosity), and followed the milkman and his horse-drawn cart all the way to Gunnersbury Park, a round trip of about ten miles.

Jimpy and I both had tricycles, and one day, still only four, we both rode mine to the park to attempt a new downhill duo speed record on the steep path in front of the manor house. I stood on the back axle and Jimpy steered. The bike became uncontrollable at high velocity so we could only go straight ahead – crashing right into a raised brick planter at the foot of the hill. We ended up with our faces in the soil, shocked and bloody. The bike was so badly bent we couldn’t ride it back home. My nosebleed lasted two days.

In 1950, when I turned five, I didn’t go to the local free state junior school with my pals. Mum, still thinking I looked cute in uniform, sent me to the private Beacon House School, two-thirds of a mile from our home. I knew none of the children there, remember no one I met there and hated almost every minute of it.

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