any comment, then pick his favourite. He was incisive, and astutely never said anything I did was bad, or could be better, or would be better when it was finished. When he didn’t like something, he found something about it to praise.
It turned out that Kit was an expert at keeping the artist in me properly stroked. He was essentially kind, but I also took pleasure in the sense of his investment in me, expressed in a creative partnership. He treated me like a serious composer. If he laughed, it would always be a joke he knew I could share.
Roger sold our van and purchased a lorry to carry our gear. He always wanted to drive one. It was like a furniture hauling van, with no windows or seats in the back, except for a bench that wasn’t bolted down. It was far too big and our equipment crashed around us as Keith, John, Mike and I tried to avoid vomiting. It was also very slow, managing only 55 mph on the motorway, so it took ten hours to drive to Blackpool. Roger had installed his girlfriend in the front seat so we were confined to the rear, travelling in the dark. He wanted to keep the rest of us out of his hair when driving long distances. He was a nervous passenger, and rarely allowed himself to be driven anywhere.
On 30 July we played at the Fender Club in Kenton. Karen Astley, a college friend from Ealing, came to the gig, and even handsome Chris commented on how cool she looked, calling her a ‘dolly bird’, a great compliment at the time. She had brought her best friend, who was keen on John Entwistle. It was fun to speak to someone from the old gang, and we all went out drinking together. Outside the hall after the show, as we waited for a taxi, Karen suddenly threw her arms around my neck and kissed me.
The essence of the song ‘My Generation’ had probably been contained in the first, abandoned lyric for ‘I Can’t Explain’, which only Barney ever heard. That first version was a kind of talking blues. The title came from Generations , the collected plays of David Mercer, a dramatist who had impressed me at Ealing. Mercer was a socialist, like Arnold Wesker, verging on Marxist, and his rallying on behalf of his plays’ working-class anti-heroes later offered me a way to connect with the West London fans of the band.
At that time Kit Lambert had loaned me a record that changed my life as a composer. It was what I had played during my Scotch-fuelled listening experiment – a Czech recording called Masters of the Baroque including the principal movements of Purcell’s Gordian Knot Untied , a baroque chamber suite, the most powerful part of which was the Chaconne. The performance is passionate, tragic and deeply moving. I was struck by Purcell’s unique, luxurious use of suspensions, a staple part of baroque decoration at the harpsichord, but in Purcell’s hands the suspensions were elongated into heartrending, tortuous musical modes, especially in the minor keys. I began to experiment, and the first time I used suspensions successfully, in ‘The Kids Are Alright’, it was mostly to suggest a baroque mood.
Belgravia, a rich neighbourhood where women in fur coats shoved me out of line as if I didn’t exist, only made more starkly apparent the generational divide I was trying to describe. I worked on ‘My Generation’ all through the summer of 1965, while touring in Holland and Scandinavia (we caused a street riot in Denmark). I produced several sets of lyrics and three very different demos. The feeling that began to settle in me was not so much resentment towards those Establishment types all around my flat in Belgravia as fear that their disease might be contagious.
What was their disease? It was actually more a matter of class than of age. Most of the young people around me in this affluent area of London were working on transforming themselves into the ruling class, the Establishment of the future. I felt that the trappings of their aged customs and assumptions were like a death,
It turned out that Kit was an expert at keeping the artist in me properly stroked. He was essentially kind, but I also took pleasure in the sense of his investment in me, expressed in a creative partnership. He treated me like a serious composer. If he laughed, it would always be a joke he knew I could share.
Roger sold our van and purchased a lorry to carry our gear. He always wanted to drive one. It was like a furniture hauling van, with no windows or seats in the back, except for a bench that wasn’t bolted down. It was far too big and our equipment crashed around us as Keith, John, Mike and I tried to avoid vomiting. It was also very slow, managing only 55 mph on the motorway, so it took ten hours to drive to Blackpool. Roger had installed his girlfriend in the front seat so we were confined to the rear, travelling in the dark. He wanted to keep the rest of us out of his hair when driving long distances. He was a nervous passenger, and rarely allowed himself to be driven anywhere.
On 30 July we played at the Fender Club in Kenton. Karen Astley, a college friend from Ealing, came to the gig, and even handsome Chris commented on how cool she looked, calling her a ‘dolly bird’, a great compliment at the time. She had brought her best friend, who was keen on John Entwistle. It was fun to speak to someone from the old gang, and we all went out drinking together. Outside the hall after the show, as we waited for a taxi, Karen suddenly threw her arms around my neck and kissed me.
The essence of the song ‘My Generation’ had probably been contained in the first, abandoned lyric for ‘I Can’t Explain’, which only Barney ever heard. That first version was a kind of talking blues. The title came from Generations , the collected plays of David Mercer, a dramatist who had impressed me at Ealing. Mercer was a socialist, like Arnold Wesker, verging on Marxist, and his rallying on behalf of his plays’ working-class anti-heroes later offered me a way to connect with the West London fans of the band.
At that time Kit Lambert had loaned me a record that changed my life as a composer. It was what I had played during my Scotch-fuelled listening experiment – a Czech recording called Masters of the Baroque including the principal movements of Purcell’s Gordian Knot Untied , a baroque chamber suite, the most powerful part of which was the Chaconne. The performance is passionate, tragic and deeply moving. I was struck by Purcell’s unique, luxurious use of suspensions, a staple part of baroque decoration at the harpsichord, but in Purcell’s hands the suspensions were elongated into heartrending, tortuous musical modes, especially in the minor keys. I began to experiment, and the first time I used suspensions successfully, in ‘The Kids Are Alright’, it was mostly to suggest a baroque mood.
Belgravia, a rich neighbourhood where women in fur coats shoved me out of line as if I didn’t exist, only made more starkly apparent the generational divide I was trying to describe. I worked on ‘My Generation’ all through the summer of 1965, while touring in Holland and Scandinavia (we caused a street riot in Denmark). I produced several sets of lyrics and three very different demos. The feeling that began to settle in me was not so much resentment towards those Establishment types all around my flat in Belgravia as fear that their disease might be contagious.
What was their disease? It was actually more a matter of class than of age. Most of the young people around me in this affluent area of London were working on transforming themselves into the ruling class, the Establishment of the future. I felt that the trappings of their aged customs and assumptions were like a death,
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