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
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
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