Pete Townshend: Who I Am. Pete Townshend

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СКАЧАТЬ I got it correctly strung, I started learning a few chords. Within minutes three strings had broken and the neck of the guitar started to bend, but I just reduced the tension and made do with the three remaining strings.

      One day I was strumming when Dad’s trumpet player friend Bernie Sharpe heard me in my room and looked in. ‘You’re doing well, Pete,’ he said. ‘Isn’t he, Cliff?’ No response from Dad, but alone in my room picking out notes on my guitar I had visions of leaving him and his glorious musical traditions behind. Deep down, I suspected that my father had had his day.

      In 1957 Chas McDevitt had a UK hit with a song called ‘Freight Train’. I first heard the song on BBC TV sung by Nancy Whiskey. Listening to the homespun campfire sound of skiffle I realised that with a guitar and a few chords you could make hit records.

      Because of the very real and immediate threat that skiffle music posed to Dad’s recording career – and thus to my family’s security (for now I never seemed to see a saxophone or clarinet player on the TV) – I had a unique window on how society was subtly changing. After decades of dealing with military threats, our parents now faced a danger from within. ‘Youth’ was what it came to be called. I had joined an army of my peers by picking up the guitar, that instrument that threatened my father’s career. Perhaps that’s why I delayed by picking up the banjo for a while, playing Dixieland jazz.

      The group of school friends with whom I played music was full of potential Jimpy substitutes. Chris Sherwin was a student drummer, and with Phil Rhodes on clarinet and John Entwistle playing trumpet we met each week to rehearse a quartet in which I played banjo. We called the group The Confederates. In spring 1958, when we began, I was still only twelve years old, but they were already teenagers. I knew John Entwistle a little, and enjoyed his sense of humour. Chris Sherwin acted like the band’s leader, partly because our rehearsals were held at his father’s house on Ealing Green.

      Our first gig with The Confederates was at the Congo Club at the Congregational Church in Acton on 6 December 1958. We played for about ten people. I was frozen with nerves as we played a tune we’d made up together, based around a banjo ‘C’ chord I picked out. We went on with ‘Maryland’ and ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’, featuring Chris Sherwin’s explosive drum solo. After we finished I watched in complete amazement as John Entwistle and the other boys jived with girls. One girl tried to teach me the steps, but I just couldn’t hit her marks. I still can’t jive today.

      And when the lights went down and the snogging started, I slid away home.

      One day, while looking through the junk shop, Miscellanea, that my parents were now running, I found a mandolin, which whetted my interest in the so-called antique trade. Dad enjoyed the simple rhythm and informality of running the shop – it was often ‘closed for lunch’ while he went to the pub. In the summer I stayed with Dad for the few weeks he was playing on the Isle of Man, and when I got home I realised that while I’d been developing my banjo skills other boys also had been getting on with their music.

      John Entwistle, Chris Sherwin, Phil Rhodes and Rod Griffiths were rehearsing regularly with Alf Maynard’s jazz band. Alf was a great fellow, but he played banjo, which made me redundant, although I remember playing duelling banjos with Alf at Christmas, when the band of six took in £18. I was briefly part of their brave, grown-up world and could even afford my first decent guitar. Purchased from my parents’ junk shop for £3, it had been built in Czechoslovakia and had a thin but pleasing tone.

      I saw less of John Entwistle while he was playing in Alf’s band, and I left music itself behind for a while as Chris tried to help me catch up with the march of adolescence all around me. He took me to my first X film, Peeping Tom (which turned out to be elegant film noir rather than the smut I’d hoped for). He also arranged a doubled paper round for me, earning 30 shillings a week, which seemed a colossal sum of money. It was a difficult round, though, taking in most of the big houses around Ealing Common, and it was awful in winter. One cold wet morning I slept through my alarm and was sacked.

      My parents gave me extra pocket money for looking after my brother Paul, but he was a wonderful little boy and I enjoyed it. Denny lurked in the wings like a vampire, but I gave her dark looks, warnings that she wouldn’t get her evil hands on my little brother as long as I was around. Paul’s arrival had made us feel like a real family, and no one was going to take that away from me.

      My parents were obviously lovers again. They spent a lot of time at the local pub, which I didn’t understand at the time but I now know that they both had drink problems. Dad needed booze to feel comfortable with his peers, and Mum was trying to deaden the lifelong pain of being abandoned by her mother. She became pregnant again, and my brother Simon was born at home in October 1960, when I was fifteen.

      In the last term of grammar school in spring and summer 1961, I continued to count Chris Sherwin as one of my closest friends. He was sweet to my baby brother Simon, and I knew he had a soft heart, but Chris began to harp on my failures with girls. One day, as we headed home from the pool, I lost my temper and said I would fight him. A big fellow, he just laughed and turned away.

      I swung my school bag and hit him over the head; to my amazement he dropped to the ground. Assuming he was being silly, I walked off, still angry. Seconds later I felt his fist smash into the side of my head from behind. ‘You knew I had a concussion,’ he shouted. He spread word of my ‘cowardly act’ all over school, which sullied my reputation to the point where John Entwistle seemed the only one who would have anything to do with me.

      Then, if possible, my social standing fell even lower. I was cycling home one day, past some boys from my school throwing stones at an old man’s windows, when a policeman showed up. The boys escaped but the copper grabbed me. Incriminated by wearing the same school uniform as the vandals, I was arrested and persuaded with the usual threats of prison to give up the boys’ names.

      Next morning the headmaster called out the names I had supplied, and after a pause added my own. We all received the cane, naturally. But this was a new low point for me, as rumours circulated that I had ‘grassed’ on the stone-throwers. Mum remembers seeing me sitting hangdog in a small public park next to the school; it was raining, but still I wouldn’t go in. Dad was so worried he came to speak to me, but I was too ashamed to tell him my problems. My schoolwork slumped, and I locked myself away with my guitar, swearing to go it alone somehow.

      By the end of the spring term I had electrified my Czech guitar and bought a small amplifier. John had made his own bass, and we rehearsed together at my house. We would visit a fish-and-chip shop in Acton and walk back to Ealing with our tongues scalded by the hot oil, sharing dreams.

      One day Denny burst into my room while John and I were playing music. ‘Turn that bloody row down,’ she shouted.

      I looked at her coolly, not replying, but picked up my small blue amplifier and threw it violently against the wall. ‘Fuck off,’ I said, feeling very calm as the amp smashed to the floor.

      Denny went pale and left the room.

      ‘Great,’ John said dryly.

      John was playing bass guitar with a group started by our school friend Pete Wilson, a fan of Cliff Richard and The Shadows. Pete’s guitar playing was enthusiastic but clumsy, so when I was invited to join the band I was flattered but ambivalent. Having grown up with the notion that I was going to be an artist of some sort, the idea of playing Shadows songs didn’t set me on fire, but Pete became a friend and he was an encouraging, natural leader.

      Mick Brown, our drummer, was a competent musician and one of the most amusing people I’ve ever met. He also had a tape recorder, the first I’d ever come across, and I realised immediately that this was an extraordinary creative tool. He made the first СКАЧАТЬ