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Sat 23 May 2026 15:00, UK
Pete Townshend knew from day one that his time as a rock and roll star wasn’t meant to last forever.
Even in the days when The Beatles were one of the biggest bands in the world, the thought of any of them making an entire career out of playing music would have been unheard of in the age when most bands only lasted for a few months. But even when Townshend had years of experience and massive classics under his belt, there was always bound to be someone else out there coming along to try and replace him at the top of the musical food chain.
But even when other genres were popping up, Townshend was still given a healthy amount of respect from a lot of his peers. The punk genre as a whole would have never happened without him, and by making music that had a lot of fury behind it, he achieved the distinction of being one of the only people who could be appreciated by the spiky mohawk crowd and yet still find time to make theatre critics proud with the different movements that he put into the production of Tommy.
The complexities of his songwriting were one thing, but what made him stand out was that you could really feel the passion in his voice. Any good rock and roll singer needed to have that sense of gravitas whenever they had a microphone in their hands, and while Townshend didn’t need to be singing every single time the band played, you could tell that he had a very intense relationship with his own music when he sang the key line in the middle of ‘Baba O’Riley’.
By the time that the band hit Quadrophenia, though, they had crossed more than a few boundaries than most rock stars are supposed to. They seemed too larger than life for anyone to reach when they started travelling in limousines and luxury jets, and when someone like Bruce Springsteen started talking about the struggles of the common man, Townshend felt that he had finally found someone who was going to push the movement forward.
To paraphrase one of his song titles, Townshend knew that music must change, and people like ‘The Boss’ and even John Lydon signalled a changing of the guard to a certain degree, saying, “Bruce had been celebrated in the New York Times with the headline ‘If There Hadn’t Been A Bruce Springsteen the Critics Would Have Made Him Up.’ I concurred: in my mind I had already made them up, and Johnny Rotten too. I saw them both guaranteeing my extinction, or at least forcing my early retirement, a thought that triggered mixed feelings.”
But just because the kids found a new idol to follow didn’t mean that Townshend didn’t have more to say. Sex Pistols had become the greatest force in punk when they started, but whereas Lydon was one to try and provoke the listener during every single interview he gave, Springsteen was the one willing to reach out his hand to the listener and show them a reflection of themselves that could be their life if they pushed themselves hard enough.
Further reading: From The Vault
Townshend had strayed a lot further away from that kind of writing, but the craftsmanship of his songs was still intact. He was the first to say that albums like It’s Hard didn’t really need to happen, but when you look through those records, you could still tell that a tune like ‘Eminence Front’ was still coming from a genuine place, even if it did sound like the distilled sound of the entire 1980s in one song.
His time as one of the greatest spokesmen for rock and roll may have been up, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t any gas still left in the tank. He could still be brutally honest when it came to his own place in the rock and roll world, but being able to express himself through his songs was something that even ‘The Boss’ couldn’t take away from him.
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