Peter Stanfield provides a chronological description of The Who's rise to mega-fame in the fabled 1960s, focusing on the influence of Pop Art on the band. A thoughtful reading of the book, however, provides far more than that. Hint: the good stuff is hidden in plain sight, including in its title.
‘Ours is music with built-in hatred’ (p. 9), said Pete Townshend, the band's creative centre, after changing the band's image from Mod to Pop Art. ‘Built-in hate’ has nothing to do with interpersonal animosities and much to do with art. Townshend was speaking in mid-1960s media interviews about his motivation: ‘It consists of a hate of every kind of pop music and a hate of everything our group has done’ (p. 9). Such hate erases responsibility for his past actions, providing creative freedom in the ‘now’. Yet it also allows him to keep those parts of the past that feel right in the moment, and to blithely contradict his prior statements. For example, he claimed that his guitar smashing was done as a piece of performance art in the manner of Gustav Metzger's Auto-Destructive method that he encountered in art school, rather than as a crowd-pleasing shtick. Stanfield never calls out the deceits when later in the chronology he mentions words or actions that refute them.
In his late teens, Townshend attended Ealing Art School. As Frith and Horn (Reference Frith and Horne1988) describe, a large proportion of famous 1960s-era British bands had a key member who also attended art school. Townshend was studying to be a graphic designer, a trade involving creating packaging and advertising for consumer products. At night, in contrast, he played guitar in a band that became The Who. Art school also involved learning about fine art and imbuing students with the romanticist ideals of ‘art for art's sake’. It was at Ealing that Townshend was introduced to the new art movement called Pop Art. The high/low style amalgamated fine art techniques with popular culture subjects. Museums and galleries featured Pop Art pieces. Most notable was Fraser's gallery, where the glitterati from the fine arts mingled with popular musicians.
In 1962, the BBC broadcast a documentary on the movement featuring Peter Blake. His self-portrait epitomised Pop Art. In a pose taken from Gainsborough's ‘Blue Boy’, he is clad in blue denim holding an Elvis fanzine. His jacket is bedecked with myriad badges of US celebrities – the largest is of Elvis. Blake's most famous work, the cover of the Beatles’ 1967 Sgt. Pepper album, is reminiscent of those badges (Weinstein Reference Weinstein, Helbig and Warner2008).
A friend of the Stones’ impresario Andrew Oldham, Pete Meaden, encouraged the band to pass themselves off as Mods. Doing so required changing their name and clothing style. This earned them an instant fan-base. An odd pair of La Nouvelle Vague film buffs, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, happened upon the band's show. The two would-be film directors, attracted to the amphetamine-fuelled dancing Mods, shot a short documentary of the scene. The Who's real luck came when they became the band's managers. Stanfield points out a few of the pair's differences: ‘Lambert was gay, Stamp heterosexual. Lambert had a private school and Oxford education, and was the son of a respected composer and musician. Stamp was the son of a Thames tugboat captain’ (p. 39).
Townshend declared Pop Art as the band's guiding principle. Doing so, he inverted the fine art movement's high/low binaries; it was now more akin to their new managers’ Nouvelle Vague tastes. Despite their lack of knowledge of the music industry, the twosome managed to get the band TV appearances, slots at major rock festivals, extensive press coverage and hit record sales too. They also stepped out of their business roles and worked as creatives. It was Lambert who produced four of their albums and he was the one to suggest the idea of doing a rock opera (Tommy). It is doubtful that without them The Who would have been so very successful.
Fast forward to 1976. Lambert and Stamp were replaced. Stanfield sees the band changing direction as due to ‘the business of making heritage products, selling their fans the comfort of consuming the already experienced’ (p. 239). At the same time, the Sex Pistols’ impresario Malcolm McLaren, art schooled and ‘acutely aware of pop and of art history’ (p. 230), wrote the first press release for his band: ‘We hate everything’ (p. 231).
Beyond Stanfield's impressive history of The Who's creative first decade, his book is brilliantly awash with a raft of binary oppositions, in various stages of deconstruction.Footnote 1 Deconstructed binaries are not merged oppositions. Instead, they breach the impregnable wall between the two and create bridges between them. Thus, the fine art/commercial art of the Pop Art movement is an example of a deconstructed binary.
One set of deconstructed binaries relate to the book itself. For example, Stanfield names his two guides, George Melly and Nik Cohn. Melly is an art critic (among other things), whose assessment of pop, Revolt into Style (Reference Melly1989), was in part about The Who in the 1960s. Cohn was one of the early pop music critics for the popular press. The book itself is delightfully readable because of the author's jargon-free prose, which is heavily interspersed with innumerable quotes of Cohn's over-the-top raving fan-boy enthusiasms of The Who's work. A more significant set of deconstructed binaries comprises the structure and culture of society itself. These binaries, like upper class/working class or straight/gay, do not give each part equal status. One has more power or higher esteem than the other. Deconstructing these challenges the hierarchies they support. Recognising these ubiquitous forms throughout the book rewards the reader with a bird's-eye view of the zeitgeist of the 1960s.
By the mid-1970s, when the music industry focused on gigantic spectacle, arena rock and increasingly massive profits, at a time of severe stagflation in an oil-dependent world, nostalgia ruled. Nothing creatively new stood a chance. Much of The Who's great success in the 1960s was because its deconstructed binaries so perfectly matched those of the era. By 1976, that zeitgeist had been blown away, in large part by the corporate music industry the band had helped to create.
