Pete Townshend on the ‘Magic’ Era of Thunderclap Newman, ‘Tommy,’ and 1969, the Year That Saved the Who

Jem Aswad
·16-min read

The only thing less likely than Thunderclap Newman, the strange band masterminded by Pete Townshend in 1969, having a No. 1 single is the notion that a 400-plus page history of them would be published 55 years later.

Yet both of those things happened: The group’s Townshend-produced first single and only hit, the generational anthem “Something in the Air,” topped the British charts in July of 1969, at the same time the Who’s “Tommy” and “Pinball Wizard” were also making their first impact; and “Hollywood Dream, the Thunderclap Newman Story: Pete Townshend, a Band of Outsiders, and the Birth of British Indie Music,” an exhaustive history of the band, its members and its milieu by Mark Ian Wilkerson, was released last month on Jack White’s Third Man Books.

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Make no mistake: Thunderclap Newman were a one-hit wonder, a group consisting of three completely dissimilar musicians who Townshend had thrown together: his friend, singer-songwriter-drummer John “Speedy” Keen; wiz-kid guitarist Jimmy McCulloch, who’d just turned 16; and Andy Newman, a jazz pianist and genuine eccentric who looked more like a post-office clerk than an accidental pop star. And as Townshend says below, he himself was a member of the band as well, even though the Who’s career was beginning its skyrocketing ascent on the back of “Tommy,” which had been released in May, and he was on the road for weeks on end.

Thunderclap Newman, which struggled through its live performances, released “Hollywood Dream,” an excellent Townshend-helmed album, the following year, but any momentum from the single had long since passed and the group dissolved. The three musicians went on to varying degrees of success, most notably McCulloch, who played with Paul McCartney for three years but succumbed to substance abuse and died in 1979; Keen passed away in 2002 and Newman in 2016.

Yet “Something in the Air” has lived on, covered most notably by Tom Petty, and it and the album remain a vivid time capsule of a time when anything seemed possible — especially for Townshend, who talks below about the group, whose album he calls “one of the best pieces of work that I’ve ever been involved in,” as well as the Who and the era in the lively conversation below.

What was it about those three far-flung people that made you say think they could be a good group?

I think the fact that they were far-flung is what makes it so intriguing. The story of Thunderclap Newman is almost novelistic: It’s about the background, the setting, the period, all of the things that were going on at the time. So it paints a picture which is more than just a little pop group that had a brief candle, but also about the time, and this community of people who, when you finish the book, you think, is this really about Speedy and Andy and Jimmy, or is this about the people that Mark has interviewed as well?

That Thunderclap Newman album, which I made in my home studio, is so extraordinary. I still think it’s one of the best pieces of work that I’ve ever been involved in, I love it. It’s poetic, it’s mysterious, it’s joyful, but it’s also sonically quite amazing. It’s amazing that I did it in my tiny little home studio.

The book also paints a vivid picture of what your life was like at the time. “Something in the Air” and “Tommy” blew up at the same time, right?

Well, I was on a bit of a roll at the time. I really like to make recordings, it’s a hobby for me, so I was always looking for people to bring into my studio. I worked with the Small Faces, John Sebastian, a guy called Steve Claren, who was part of the Hardly Worth It. I worked with Speedy Keane, who helped me on drums with demos. I worked with John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett, who were a folk band. I brought in whoever I could to advance my craft on home studio recordings. I didn’t produce a Who album until “Quadrophenia,” and it was because I had proved myself as an engineer and as a producer.

So I was experimenting and having fun in my studio — which was so tiny that when you put in a drum kit, it filled it up. And just before “Tommy,” I was looking around to gather together a group of artists for a record label I was going to start called Talkus — it was just a name I came up with.

I wanted to do to work with people who were eccentric and different and who otherwise wouldn’t get a record deal. I spoke to Tiny Tim, Arthur Brown, Andy Newman, Speedy — who I regarded as a great eccentric — and Jimmy McCulloch. I was in the middle of trying to make individual recordings with each of these people, and I didn’t know that “Tommy” was going to take off, but it did. So Kit Lambert, the Who’s producer, said, “Pete, this is a great idea, but you’re going to have to combine some of these people together, so just make a record with them as a band.” So I picked those three, and the first time they met was in my home studio.

Bands usually form organically, but obviously this one didn’t at all, and it seemed like for the first year or two, if you weren’t there, they just couldn’t get it together.

I think it’s because I was a member of the band. I played bass and produced and I helped the songwriters compose the songs. I helped them quite a lot with “Something in the Air” — it’s a really good demo, but it doesn’t have a key change, it doesn’t have the strings, it was in a slightly faster tempo, so I think I brought to bear all of my own gifts in that area.

But I think you’re right, it was an act of supreme confidence. I did it for me; I didn’t really do it for them. They were wastrels (laughter), you know, I can’t put it any other way. I think if I hadn’t come into Jimmy McCulloch’s life, he might still be alive today. I think the fact that he went on to work with Paul McCartney and Wings [from 1974-77, including the massive “Wings Over the World” tour] was the death of him. He wasn’t fit for stardom. When I met first met Jimmy he was 14, maybe even younger, and he was in a band with his older brother, Jack, who was his protector. And because he was so young, we didn’t notice that he potentially was an alcoholic. At that particular time — despite the fact that Paul and Linda tried very, very hard to help him — there was no machinery to help him. Speedy, the same story.

None of these three people were ever meant to be stars, and there they were, with a No. 1 record on “Top of the Pops,” and “Pinball Wizard” was No. 4 (laughs). I remember when I finished the mix — which I did in a proper studio — the engineer banged on the desk and “That’s a No. 1 record!” I think everybody just knew it.

Andy Newman was the odd one out: He looked like a bank clerk, and the book is filled with hilarious stories about his eccentricity. Was he there for comedic reasons as well as his piano playing?

No, no, I took him very, very seriously because apart from all his personal eccentricities, he was also an extremely committed artist and had a style that was unique. With Andy, the thing for me was the link to [legendary jazz pianist] Bix Beiderbecke, whose style was really quite strange harmonically. He’d made a recording called “In a Mist,” and Andy developed this technique of playing around that one song that became a kind of a method: You hold your middle finger on the root chord and move your hand backwards or forward, it goes [he freestyles], bang, bang, bang, bang, where the root is maintained and the left hand just clunks away.

When I was in art school he performed at our college, and he asked the audience to give him a song to which he could apply his method. Somebody came up with a Beatles song, I think it was “Hard Day’s Night,” and he started to play it with his method. And what you really realized was how fucking mundane the song is (laughter), but also how it evoked an incredible connection between the Beatles and Bix Beiderbecke.

I hadn’t known you’d recorded with a few of the artists you mentioned, a lot of them never came out, right?

Right, and a lot of it was incomplete. I did some stuff that ended up on [the Who’s label] Track, like Arthur Brown had a worldwide No. 1 record with “Fire,” although I didn’t produce it. I had worked with Arthur to develop his style, and then the Who were on the road so Kit Lambert took over and finished it.

It must have been shocking to have so much success all at once.

And it was a long haul! It was an awkward time in the Who prior to “Tommy.” The band was splintering, Keith Moon nearly joined Led Zeppelin. And I’d written “I Can See for Miles,” which I’d kept in my back pocket for two years, thinking, “When we get into trouble I will stick this out and then we’ll have an international number one!” I was convinced it was — potentially — a huge hit.

But I think I’d diversified too much. Look at what I was doing with the Who: I went from “My Generation” to “Pictures of Lily, which is about wanking, to “I’m a Boy,” which is about transvestitism and gender dysphoria, and I moved to “Happy Jack,” a song about a fucking donkey! (Laughter) And from there I think I went to “Faith in Something Bigger” [an existential-themed song not released until 1974] and then a song called “Dogs,” which was about greyhound racing.

Now, “I’m a Boy” did very, very well on the English charts, I think it was even No. 1 for a few seconds. But I’d drifted into novelty, and I’d certainly lost touch with providing the Who with the kind of hits that their audience expected, because onstage we were still a raging ex-Mod band: We were sort of like [the current bruising rock band] Idles, throwing ourselves around, Keith’s falling off his drum kit, John standing quietly while Roger was trying to become a sex symbol, which he did in the end. So I thought “I Can See for Miles” was going to crack it, but we put it out and it didn’t. “Fuck, what am I gonna do?” And in a sense, when I started to work on “Tommy,” it was as a way of trying to save myself as the composer for a big rock band. I was in the midst of this period of [experimenting] and I came up with the idea of a rock opera, and that happened at the same time as me putting the three guys together for Thunderclap Newman.

In a sense, it was the end an era of having fun. And I would say since then there’s been no fun. There’s been no fun like making “Tommy,” which was incredibly fun. There’s been no fun like making the “Hollywood Dream” album, nothing like that. It all became very, very serious, very grim, very much about image, about following up the one before. It’s something that I’ve lived with and some of the stuff that I came up with after “Tommy” was fantastic, but not always successful. So I think now, at my age — I’m pushing 80 — I want to have fun like I used to. This book reminds me of a period when people were taking cards and throwing them in the air, that creativity was something that wasn’t defined by business.

It’s a little surprising to hear you talk about how much fun it was making “Tommy” because there was an element of desperation to it as well, right?  

I’ve told this story many times, but toward the end of [recording] “Tommy” I remember going to a rehearsal hall to rehearse it, which took us just two hours — I mean, we couldn’t believe how easy it was to perform. And Kit and I went to a pub for a drink and he said, “Pete, you’ve done it. You’ve fucking saved us.”

So it was a time of certainty. Of course, it ended up feeling like a bit of a yoke after a few years, because it always had to be at the center of our performances. But when it first came out, we had “Pinball Wizard” in the charts and “Something in the Air” at the top, and they were my projects.

And in the background of all that was the fact that I made the Thunderclap Newman album in my house with my wife and kids living in the same tiny house, and my little girls were fun to be around and they liked the fact that music was in the house and musicians were passing through it. Up to that point the Who had made no money and we were still living pretty much a threadbare existence — I had a car which wasn’t a very good. But it was a very happy time.

And yet it all became less fun because of the pressure to replicate that success?

I don’t want to get into self-analysis here, I mean the history is the history. But what followed was “Life House” [an even bigger, ultimately unsuccessful concept that ended up being boiled down to the classic “Who’s Next” album] that made a big hit album for the Who but didn’t work as a concept — the best that I’ve managed to do with that is to release a graphic novel of it (self-deprecating laughter) — which I love, by the way.

On the Thunderclap Newman, album, there’s a cover of “Open the Door, Richard” from the legendary “Basement Tapes” by Bob Dylan and the Band, which wouldn’t be officially released until years later. How did you guys get hold of it? Did a publisher send you an acetate or something?

I think everybody in London had one — I don’t know how! — and almost anybody who had one managed to grab a song and turn it into a hit [Manfred Mann and Julie Driscoll both scored Top 5 singles in the U.K. with songs from it]. Actually, I believe it was made with a microphone outside a [disc-]cutting-room door: There was a gap in the door, and the guy put the microphone in when they were listening to it, then cut himself a new acetate disc and made copies.

Was it frustrating that you finished “Hollywood Dream” so long after the single was a hit that it felt like the moment had passed?

I think that’s right. I think the group had failed to find a way, and one of the difficulties was that Speedy, as a drummer, had a style that was very special and unique that I think contributed a huge amount to the songs. He played slightly behind the beat and sort of oscillating around it, it was really extraordinary. But he decided not to be the drummer, he decided he was going to be a frontman and somebody else was going to play the drums. He got a perfectly good drummer, but that drummer was not Speedy.

Despite that, you’re talking about this all these years later. What is so special about it to you that makes all this worth doing?

I think it’s about closing circles.  It’s been a long, long time, and Mark’s book has kind of reconnected me with the magic of that kind of moment. And it’s opened up a circle as well. When I went to [a Q&A last month with the author at Jack White’s Third Man London store], I met not only Speedy’s daughter, Trish, who I’d only met once before, but his two grandchildren, both of whom are beautiful, beautiful people, lovely personalities, and it just suddenly make you think life just has this rolling, evolving thing.

Like for example, just before I went to art school, Roger asked me to join his band; John Entwistle was already in the band. I thought Roger’s band was fucking awful, but I’d had some problems with gangs at school and Roger was a renowned fighter and was a key face in [the West London suburb of] Acton, where we lived. And I thought if I’m in his band, I’ll be safe. So I joined and then I realized actually that, with me and John and Roger — we had a few other people at the time — we had a great band. A few weeks later I landed at Ealing Art College, and this new world opened up for me from this revolutionary teacher, Roy Ascott, who fried my brain.

Those two incidents are so interesting because if you take one of them away, you don’t end up with the Who. Instead, you’d just end up with either a rock band that maybe has a bit of a career, and maybe somebody that makes sculptures. So in a sense, that closing of a circle is about the coincidences that happen in life.

What’s next for you?

I know that if Roger and I do tour again, as I’m sure we will, it will probably be one of the last periods that we tour. I would love to do another album with Roger. I really enjoyed doing the last one, but he doesn’t really want to do that — I feel like with the Who, I’m still trying to push this elephant up the hill, with Roger being resistant to doing new creative work. He always says to me, “Pete, you’ve done enough. We did enough in the early days. That’s what people want here. Let’s just do that.”

So I thought about doing solo work, and I’m still a conceptualist; I still want a story to hang the music on. For me it’s about pencil sketches, poems, song lyrics, playing with the latest electronic toy, doing books. It’s about all kinds of things. I may have 10 years left to work, but I work very, very slowly, so one thing I’m trying to do is speed things up a bit. So I may dump a couple of the projects that I’ve been working on for a long time, and I may decide just to do a one-man show.

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