The Who Biography

Under the management of the well-known mod Peter Meaden, the group were briefly renamed 'The High Numbers', and under that name they released 'Zoot Suit/I'm the Face', an unashamed attempt to appeal to the mod market. (For those not in the know, a 'Face' was a prominent mod...what do you mean, you've never seen 'Quadrophenia'?) However, the single failed to chart, they sacked Meaden, named themselves The Who, and never looked back. The group became the quintessential mod band in any case, and gained a reputation for destructive concert performances.

The whole 'instrument-smashing' thing came about as a bit of an accident, as all the best things seem to. In the autumn of 1964, the group were performing in a pub in Harrow and Wealdstone (that well-known hub for all things showbiz), on a high stage. Townshend had already developed a physically flamboyant style of guitar playing, and one flourish of the guitar's headstock saw him smash it into the ceiling. He then proceeded to smash up the guitar entirely. Was he angered by the tittering from the crowd? Or was he merely trying to make it look as though he meant to do it? Who knows, and who cares - the crowd for their next gig was sizeably increased, eager to see the fireworks again.

Townshend has maintained since then that the destructive stage shows were more than a mere gimmick, and that smashing up the equipment was a deliberate statement - 'My early manifesto for The Who was that we would destroy everything about us in a very short space of time. It was like an art installation idea, which was that there would be nothing left after 18 months. I'd been indoctrinated at college, firstly by people like Gustav Metzger, saying it was the artist's duty to make their work self-destruct, but on the other hand, by my art-school friends telling me that in ten years' time all information will be on the back of a pin head that you put behind your ear and then everybody will know everything. So it seemed as if there was no need to keep stuff.'

Image was all-important, as the group were steadily learning. The famous photograph of the band posing in front of a Union Jack, Townshend wearing a jacket composed of the same flag's design, was a bold statement. Indeed, photographer Colin Jones, recently exhibiting some of the many shots he took of the group, said that the process of getting that particular photo taken was in itself a memorable day. As the group had become known for trashing whatever hotel rooms they stayed in, they had had to find a remote hotel that would let them in, and that ended up being one out near Heathrow. Daltrey ended up letting off a twelve-bore shotgun out of the window at 4 a.m., but the funniest moment came when the word 'flag' was mentioned to the drummer: 'I remember Keith Moon saying, 'I know where we can get a Union Jack' and promptly climbed up the flagpole outside the hotel to bring it down. They were a wild bunch - the wildest of all'.

Townshend provided most of the song-writing from the start, and the poignancy of his lyrics were matched by the relentless energy of the music - perfectly suited to a disaffected yoof market, eager to upset their parents by dressing in the latest fashions, pootling about on mopeds and turning up their records loud. First single 'I Can't Explain' was a strong debut, reaching number 8, and second effort 'Anyway Anyhow Anywhere' hit number 10. However, with third single 'My Generation' the group really arrived - as well as reaching number 2 (only kept off the number one by The Rolling Stones's 'Get off My Cloud'), the group seemed to have fully captured the zeitgeist. Rebellious baby-boomer teens would have been bopping to their heart's content in 1965, repeating the mantra 'Hope I die before I get old', no doubt before going on to find sensible jobs and settling down to grow old gracefully.

The group's journey to global stardom cranked slowly upwards through the gears. However, having got themselves near to level pegging with the Stones and the Beatles in England, across the Atlantic it was a different proposition. As with so many British acts in rock history, 'breaking America' did not come easily to the band, and their early singles barely made an impact on the US charts. In addition, thanks to the touring and the increasingly expensive live shows - all that wanton destruction of equipment, night after night, was costing them dear - the band were losing money nearly as fast as they were making it. Still, June of 1967 saw them take the stage at the Monterey Festival, where a rather childish bid between the Who and Jimi Hendrix as to who could outdo the other in terms of on-stage antics took place. Although most observers scored Hendrix the winner of the duel (after setting his guitar alight), anyone who was there (or who has seen the 40th anniversary film footage) would have trouble forgetting the Who in a hurry.

However, what really provided the next huge step, not just for the group but for music in general, was the rock opera masterpiece 'Tommy' in 1969. Whilst many would probably have been happy to continue peddling out the 'Maximum R&B' hits that had flowed for the band, Townshend was increasingly hungry for something else, something new. Encouraged along the way by producer and mentor Kit Lambert (the son of Constant Lambert, a renowned classical composer), Townshend sought to expand the work of the band beyond what he saw as a limited three-minute pop song format. Having already pushed the envelope with the arguably sociological undertones of his lyrics (especially on 'Substitute', say, or 'I'm a Boy'), the songwriter looked to have a complete 'rock opera' album, taking the longer view and weaving a narrative through the course of several songs rather than wrapping it up within each track.

The idea of a 'concept album' was not something new to the band- for example 1967 album 'The Who Sell Out' had been themed around a pirate radio station broadcast, and included a short rock opera, 'Rael'. But 'Tommy' was something else - and the burgeoning 'serious' music press, both in the states and in the UK, seized on it as a masterpiece. The deaf, dumb and blind kid, who played a mean pinball, finally enable the Who to justifiably claim that they had made it in the States, supported not only by the music press there but by extensive campus airplay.

Although it had been a long time coming, 'Tommy' was in fact slightly undercooked, and the group had not ironed out all of the kinks in it before its release. Despite this, in bringing this lengthier narrative form to rock albums, Townshend had certainly opened the door for a new wave of possibilities in music. There was one drawback - The Who had always sought to sound on stage as they do on record (in fact, you could argue that their recordings were actually capturing their live act, rather than the other way around). Thus, the expectation from fans to perform 'Tommy' in its entirety was huge every time the group took to the stage, and they'd made a rod for their own back. That 'Tommy' was such a phenomenon eventually meant it was adapted for the stage and performed across the world, as well as being captured on film by Ken Russell in 1975, starring Daltrey as the title character, and featuring Oliver Reed and Ann-Margret, as well as cameos from Elton John, Jack Nicholson and Eric Clapton.

Unsurprisingly, Townshend didn't find it easy to follow the masterstroke of 'Tommy'. Whilst he worked on new material, 'Live at Leeds' was released in 1970. Capturing the group's knockout performance at the Leeds university student union, it is widely held to be the best live rock album ever, and features in most 'albums you should own' lists, if lists are your thing. The original release only featured six tracks (three of them covers), but the 1995 remastered CD edition extended this to fourteen numbers - and for those really wanting maximum R&B value, the deluxe edition in 2001 contained two discs, the second of which was a live rendition, end-to-end, of 'Tommy'.

Townshend ventured back to rock opera territory for his sci-fi project 'Lifehouse' in 1970, heavily influence by his guru Meher Baba, but the rest of the band weren't too keen, not least because they struggled to understand what he was driving at. Townshend was best by personal problems, suffering a nervous breakdown, but upon his recovery the remnants of Lifehouse were dusted off, filled out with some more new work, and released as 'Who's Next'. A more conventional studio album than Townshend might have hoped for, it was still a huge success, with some pioneering usage of keyboard technology on 'Baba O'Riley' and 'Won't Get Fooled Again'.

The group returned to the operatic form with 1973's 'Quadrophenia', a study of growing up as a mod in 1960s Britain, and a clear wink to the band's early mod following who had propelled them to their early chart success. Daltrey, Entwistle and Moon had all been working on their own solo projects, the latter somewhat against the odds considering that the drummer's legendary substance abuse was beginning to make it difficult for him to produce anything other than vomit - as the 1970s went on, the excesses became ever more extreme, culminating in one show in 1976, when Moon collapsed at the start of a live show, and an audience member had to take his spot and fill in on drums. Townshend himself wasn't in great shape, having suffered serious hearing damage from all the years of touring - who'd have thought, what with him forever smashing guitars into amplifier stacks turned up to eleven, that his hearing might suffer? Daltrey was probably in the best shape of the band, having always eschewed the amphetamines since the early days to protect his voice - in fact Daltrey's relative abstemiousness, matched with the remaining band's excesses had once led to a blazing row with Moon, and a brief expulsion form the band. In 1965, at the end of their first tour of Europe, Daltrey had got so fed up with the loose playing of his under-the-influence band-mates that he went backstage and flushed their pills down the toilet. As the singer later said, 'Moon went nuts. Of course, I was the wrong person to have a go at. Ended up in a huge brawl and I was thrown out for six to eight weeks...'

1978 saw the release of 'Who Are You?', an ostensibly prog-rock effort which clearly marked the band apart from the nascent punk movement. It was to be the last record featuring Keith Moon, who died from a drug overdose that same year, at the age of 32. Some might have said that 32 was actually a pretty good innings for a man who seemed so hell-bent on self-destruction - his gargantuan appetite for booze and drugs aside, he did also like to raise hell wherever possible, destroying rooms in hotels and his own house, exploding toilets as well as his own drum kit, and if the stories are to be believed he once drove a car into a swimming pool, for a bit of a laugh. The Who were certainly never the same after their drummer's demise - and although Kenney Jones (of the Small Faces/The Faces) was no mean replacement, fans and the remaining band-members felt that the band, as they knew it, had died with Moon. (In one of those eerie rock ironies, Moon had appeared on the front cover of 'Who Are You?' sat astride a chair bearing the stencilled words 'Not to be Taken Away'...spooky...)

The group continued working and touring, but further tragedy struck at a Cincinnati concert in the winter of 1979, when several audience members were trampled to death. Fearing reprisals from the large crowd if the concert had not gone ahead, the organisers had not informed the band until after the concert, and having been told afterwards the group were devastated.

Things were unravelling. As Daltrey and Entwhistle went about their own solo work, Townshend succumbed to his own substance problems, his alcoholism being exacerbated by addictions to coke, heroin and tranquilisers. 'Face Dances' (1981), their first album since Moon's death, was a surprisingly successful hit (reaching number two in the charts), given the trying circumstances from which it had been produced. Still, the writing was on the wall, and the tour to support the group's next album, 'It's Hard' (1982) was overtly billed as a farewell tour.

In true Sinatra style, this was not, of course, the end. As well as reuniting for the 1985 Live Aid concert, the group reconvened for a '25th anniversary tour' of the states in 1989, albeit with session player Simon Phillips taking Jones's place on the drum-stool. Despite the tour being derided by the critics as a mere money-making exercise (after all, two million tickets were sold), it served to breathe new life into the group's following, such that 'Tommy' was brought to Broadway, and Townshend then rallied the group to perform 'Quadrophenia' live, both at a Prince's Trust concert in 1996, and on a less-than-successful US tour.

2001 saw the group performing in New York at the 9-11 charity concert, but the following year, with plans to kick off another North American tour, Entwistle passed away in a Las Vegas hotel room - the heart attack that killed him being down to the decades of smoking and drinking, as much as the small trace of cocaine found in his blood that the press were so keen on.

Townshend was in the papers himself in 2003, for all the wrong reasons - arrested as part of Operation Ore, aimed at smashing internet paedophilia, he admitted having accessed child-porn websites. His defence was that he was researching for his own autobiography, as he himself had been subjected to child abuse by his maternal grandmother, and although he was to abandon this book, his offence was deemed so minor (he actually entered credit card details, and accessed a non-child-porn area of a website) he was cautioned, and placed on the register of violent and sexual offenders for five years ( with a convenient waiver on the ban on travelling abroad, so he could continue to tour).

Even the death of their bassist, and the troubles that surrounded Townshend did not prove to be the end of 'The Who' - they continued to perform live, with several different bassists taking the place of Entwistle, and in 2006 Townshend and Daltrey released 'Endless Wire', their first album of new 'Who' material since 'It's Hard' in 1982. Well received, the album reignited the band's popularity once again, such that they were invited to perform at Glastonbury in 2007. November that year also brought about the release of 'Amazing Journey', a glossy documentary and anthology of the band's work, and in recent interviews Townshend has intimated that as well as planning several tour dates in 2008, he is also working on new material.

• The Who Discography