Original subtitles

When you listen to the Who sell out now, it's like listening to a time capsule.

It's as if they'd recorded it and buried it. And now we can go back and it's a

history lesson.

It's almost like an education than an album.

It should be in schools. It should be like, look, this is what happened to

British music. It changed in 1967.

Here's the album to prove it.

For anybody who wants to get a real snapshot of what was going on in London

at the time, the Who sellout is a perfect place to start.

Of all concept albums, this has got to be the ultimate concept album.

One is more able to recognise the value of the concept in a documentary like

this than you could at the time when you got the album.

We were going to make the album sound like a pirate radio station.

Good afternoon, this is Radio London, England's most successful commercial

radio station. On today's show, we're going to be hearing from The Who's Pete

Townshend and Roger Daltrey and playing cuts from the group's third LP, The Who,

Sell Out.

But first, here's a top ten tune from 1965.

I always thought The Who were very much a London band.

They had that feel to them. They were very much a kind of a band that came out

of a kind of London genre and spoke very much to a London audience that then

reflected onto a much broader stage.

We had our own kind of music. It wasn't everybody's kind of pop.

There's a lot of people who hate The Who. There's an awful lot of people that

like The Who.

We're that kind of band.

The good thing is, it's not the kind of band you sit on a fence to.

It was not just pop, which was aimed primarily at girls who would scream.

They weren't the kind of band that girls would scream at. So I remember saying to

the band in the early days, listen, stop worrying about the screaming girls.

Let's play for the boys.

Let's play for the boys.

And if we put out a crap record, it would be like a football team having a

bad game. They'll be okay next time.

To me, it wasn't really a case of them being a men's band or a women's band. To

me, they were a life force.

The songs meant the world to me. They were my band.

At the beginning of 1967, I don't think that they...

were actually thinking about an album at all. I think they were more concerned

with playing live, keeping the show on the road.

You know, I mean, if there was a chance of sort of flying off to sort of, you

know, Norway or something for three nights and they could come back with a

thousand quid, they'd do it. When we was in the studio, I can remember a few

times when it was saying, guys, you've got to stop recording because we've got

to pack away the gear into the van and get to like Croydon or get to Cheltenham

because you've got to be on stage at... eight o'clock and then drive the next

day back in the studios it was like the recording process was always very

scattered because this album was the last one that we'd done of the first

kind of three that were done in that kind of scattergun method you know

recording on the hoof

What I love about the album is that you're thrown straight in the deep end.

You've got that Radio London jingle, then you've got Armonia, City in the

Sky, and that sounds like something from outer space. You're thrown straight in

the deep end, and that's what's good. It's not subtle, it's not, oh, here's

our concept album, please listen to it.

Whether you like it or not, you're listening to it.

Check out the craziest psychedelic sounds on this one. This is Armonia,

City in the Sky.

Arminia, City in the Sky.

Strange choice to open the record with.

Bit un-Who-like, really.

Strangely enough... That doesn't sound like Roger Daltrey to me.

Natural fact, it's Speedy Keane, who was a mate of Pete's at the time.

Sounds like it might have a bit of Varyspeed on it as well to me.

But surprisingly enough... Singing with him is Roger.

It was always a bit of a mystery to me why we ever did this track that opens

the album.

It's a track written by... It wasn't written by Pete, nor John.

It was written by a friend of ours called Speedy Keen, more of a friend of

Pete.

We had done a demo for him with the band.

He'd said, will the Who play it for me?

So we used the demo, Speedy's demo, as a track on the album. And, you know, he

went on to be the drummer and the writer in Thunderclap Newman. He wrote

something in the air, a fantastic song. And years later, Speedy said, you know,

you got it wrong. It wasn't called Armonia City. And he said, I'm an ear

sitting in the sky.

Oh, I think my version was better.

Oh, LSD.

That's just a tape played backwards,

so the chords are coming out in reverse.

This track's famed for its use of backward guitars.

The great sound and the pan throughout the record cross the image to create

sonic and stereo interest.

for those of you with stereo TVs.

Very psychedelic track.

As soon as I hear that first track, Armonia, City in the Sky, and you hear

that drone, I'm thinking, you're not in Acton anymore or Shepherd's Bush or the

Goldhawk Club. This is going somewhere else, you know, somewhere else

completely. The thing about that period was that I loved...

The variations, the experiments, the things that were going on, the fact you

could almost do anything in that time. It was a really extraordinary time.

Kit Lambert, their manager, and Chris Stamp, their old co-manager, they were

just coming up with ideas. It was all so exciting for them, and it was all so

fast. There was so much going on.

Track record!

Track record!

In 1967, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp launched their own record label.

um track records now this was a revolutionary tactic at the time we were

in a small office in um radio caroline house in chesterfield gardens with kit

chris um secretary myself and maybe one or two other people and that was it and

the only band on the label at that time as far as i'm aware was was the who and

track had this incredible luck to to pick up not just the Who,

which, of course, they got for nothing, because track was run by our managers,

Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, but also to stumble into Jimi Hendrix.

We were supposed to have 40% of it was going to be the Whos. I never saw a

penny. Never saw a share.

And, of course, Chris Stamp, East End, Canning Town, you know, street lad,

sharp as a razor.

Chris was kind of, you know, Mr. Cool.

He was always, you know, telling us what we should wear and where we should go

and, you know, who we should date.

Kit being the son of Constant Lambert, the composer and founder of Sadler's

Wells.

He became much more involved in the production.

Most important thing that Kip was, he was incredibly creative.

He'd fuck up all the time. I mean, he'd record something that was great and then

you start mixing it, all of a sudden it would disappear. He wasn't a great

producer, but he was creative. That's the most important thing of all.

He was always trying to get people to put the needle in the red because he

thought it might be better if it was red, you know.

He wasn't very technical.

I loved working with him. He was such a great, great... a mentor for me. So I

would do my demos at home. He would come, we would discuss them. Sometimes I

would remake them or tweak them.

So sometimes when I would write a demo, I would think, well, great song, Pete,

but there's no fucking wangy, wangy guitar on it. What am I going to do when

I'm on stage?

That's what I would often say to myself when I'm playing myself the demo.

Mary Ann with the Shaky Hands is a 12-string acoustic. It's not a Who

track.

you know it didn't have that kind of edge that we could become used to the

who needing

two

tracks bounce

together and it's kind of weird this one

And then we would go to the studio and then try and get the stuff past the

band, try and get the band to get the music that I'd written, find a reason

for getting into it. So let's hear our version.

I can't believe how incredibly polite he is, especially Moon.

It's such a tight, controlled performance from him.

Must have been a bad day for drugs.

Mary Anne with a Shaky Hand was almost like a

companion piece to Pictures of Lily.

It's a very pretty song when you first hear it with a flamenco-style guitar.

And then you listen to the lyric and you think, hang on.

Mary Anne had a shaky hand and the rest is up to you.

But it's a wonderful melody.

Mary Ann with the shaky hands.

What they've done to a man, those shaky hands.

And as I mentioned at the top of the show, today

we have an exclusive interview with Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey.

And first, we asked Roger, despite having huge success here in the UK, how

important was it for the group to repeat that success in America?

Breaking America wasn't just important to The Who, it was like every rock

band's dream.

You know, America was the land of steak.

We were the land of suet and taxation.

So it was, you know, that's all we wanted, was to, you know, to earn our

living doing this job that we love so much.

and America seemed to be the place that offered us the opportunity to really do

that. And we didn't actually get there until we did something called the Murray

the Kay Show. That was in New York.

He was the DJ they called the Fifth Beatle for a while, and he had this show

in New York where he did six shows a day.

We were kind of like second or third on, and in those days you were only allowed

to play two songs,

which is hardly worth getting out of bed for. Eight minutes.

in which we had to do two songs and smash a guitar.

And I was rebuilding them between sets.

We went to stay in what was the poshest hotel we'd ever stayed in, called The

Drake, and the first thing that you could do is you could order these

fabulous steaks. I remember John Edwards and Keith Moon ordering a bottle of

Every Spirit Under The Sun, and I don't know who we thought was going to pay for

it, but we didn't think it was us. Following the Murray Kaye show, it

was... kind of weird we came back in in like eight times as much debt as we went

away with in

1967 there were very few outlets for for music

on the radio there was the light program which featured a few hours of pop music

on saturday mornings and if you were lucky two nights a week the rest of the

time it was smulch the pirates were anarchic and who were anarchists so it

was a Perfect symbiotic relationship.

The DJs on the ships were all music fans, and they had the freedom to play

what they liked.

You'd hear the hoo, the moo, the kinks, the beatles, the stones.

You know, this is what our generation wanted.

Well, the territorial waters, in other words, the waters round Great Britain,

it was three miles up. So as long as you were outside that three-mile limit, we

weren't governed by the British government.

Everybody remembers Radio Caroline, but the real format came from Radio London,

Big L Radio London in the North Sea.

Our audience of 10 million people liked to be able to tune into...

to popular music when it suits them.

I mean, when I did The Breakfast Show on Big L Radio London in 1966, they were

kept going by commercials and well. Calling all pop fans.

Are you receiving me? Receiving me loud and clear?

You will if you listen on the Perdido transistor.

The BBC, of course, is a licence fee. We pay a licence fee and that's it. Take

your popsy wherever you go for all your favourite programmes from Radio London.

And it was kind of an exciting place to be.

Describe... as pirate radio. They were pirates. It was brilliant.

Here's a tune that will hopefully transport you back to the crazy days of

summer.

1967, the so-called Summer of Love, it was amazing.

I mean, to me, it was one of the most important years of my life. I know a lot

of the psychedelic stuff was about elves and all this stuff, but a lot of it

wasn't. It was about what psychedelia was about, which was serious kind of

stuff.

The psychedelic thing was just something that was happening around us, and we,

you know, used LSD.

And Roger was on the outside. He was outside of our trio, no question. He

didn't like smoking pot.

He wasn't a big drinker. We were true rock and roll art school into that shit.

Really, we were.

And I got very lucky. I got warned off of taking any of the chemical stuff by

the guy who used to make all the Purple Haze.

And someone had to keep the band together and kind of...

be the straight one and that became my job. So I didn't do much of that.

I just thought I lost too many friends.

We

were

going to do this one gig in San Francisco, at Fillmore West.

and then go on to do a thing called a pop festival.

I went, what's that?

Nobody had heard of them before.

And they said, well, it's an outdoor festival and everybody's going to be

there. When they told us the bill, which included Otis Redding and Mummers and

the Puppers and you name it, everybody was there. I think there was an

agreement that this was something that was needed, you know, a free festival,

something where any money paid would go to charity.

And the atmosphere of it was fabulous.

And this was their most important gig to date. More important than anything

they'd done in England. And they managed to do a phenomenal show in front of

these people who'd never seen anything like it, especially when they smashed

their equipment at the end. It was a huge showcase.

It wasn't so much that the crowd was huge. I think there was about 25,000, 30

,000 people there. But it was these 25,000 people would go and tell all

their friends.

And they'd tell their friends. We've seen this fantastic group, The Who.

But that really got us noticed on the West Coast.

And from there, there was a buzz around. In those days, the word of mouth buzz

was far more powerful than the social media buzz of today.

There was something about the word of mouth that left a mystery that social

media doesn't leave.

There's no mystery in social media. It felt pretty epic.

Yeah. For me, it was epic in another sense. Owsley, who was the drug, the

chemist for Grateful Dead, came and gave... gave us all this special acid,

STP. My girlfriend and I then took it, and that was my last trip. It was a near

-death experience for me. So that was when I drifted into spiritual matters,

into life as a bigger thing.

The month following Monterey, The Who went out on tour with Herman's Hermits

in the US.

That was their first proper US tour. Might be a strange combination because

they've got such a teeny following.

And we thought, oh, dear, what's this going to do to 12-year-old girls?

You know, we were a yod band. We were like an original punk band, you know.

You know, we did, I think, 14 weeks and we played loads and loads of shows.

and it worked very well for us.

And when they were touring in the States, whenever they had a day off or

two days off, wherever they were, Lambert would book a recording studio,

the one they'd never been in before. As long as it got multi-tracking, they'd go

in and they'd do a bit more on some of these songs.

The album was kind of...

Three quarters in the can by the time we went on that tour.

I seem to remember we recorded something on that tour too. I can't remember what

it was.

I can't even remember what's on the album.

It's very polite.

Fine.

gone to see pete and he played me this he said listen to this and it was a demo

of i can see for miles and it was great and i mean i was making this film for

art school with some people i said can we have that music for the future no

that's my ace in the hole that's my this is the one and even then he thought it

was it this was going to be the thing you know this was going to be it if you

think that i don't know about the little tricks you play shake it all over

Now, if I heard that today was recording I Can See For Miles, I would conclude

that. But on the record that we made, it's not there at all. I Can See For

Miles had started in a studio in New Bond Street, CBS, with a basic track.

Then we'd taken it to Nashville while we were on tour. We'd had two days in a

place called Bradley's Barn.

And then we took it to Gold Star in Los Angeles, where we finished it off.

This is the band.

This is the live track.

We've got guitar, bass, drums, and strangely enough, acoustic guitar

peeping out.

You can hear it.

It doesn't feature the well-known Keith Moon snare drum.

put in the overdub track.

It's completely sensational.

Let's check that out.

Again, it's that energy that Moon used to put in.

And you can hear it's the start of us.

Really gelling as a band, just to hear the performances and the way the vocals

go together.

The harmony singing is brilliant, absolutely brilliant.

It's as good as the Beatles' harmony singing. Everybody knows that Paul, John

and George could sing brilliantly behind whichever Beatle was doing the lead

singing. And the Who were the same, like Pete and John sing behind Roger

beautifully. I think it's a five-part vocal harmony, so it's much more Beach

Boys-y, the sound of the harmonies.

I could see for miles and miles... We used to sit round the piano and

pick notes between notes and it just used to build and build and build. And

again, even though we only had four tracks, we always used to leave one

empty to bounce onto.

Keith Moon was mad on early Beach Boys and Jan and Dane and if something had

harmonies on it, he would be happy.

So a lot of the thing about the harmonies was to just make...

Make Keith smile.

You know, if he was smiling, he was good fun.

That's Keith doing drum-over-dubs.

Toms.

Snare.

Pete adding lead guitar.

You never know. Sounds like a complete performance. It sounds live.

That would have been construction that was put together by Kit Lambert as a

producer. But I imagine that he would have got Keith and I, and the reason why

we're both playing together is we were probably working four-track, and...

Yeah, so we would double up, both do an overdub together.

But Moon's drumming on I Can See For Miles is just outstanding.

It is absolutely outstanding.

I can see Moon's facial expressions immediately.

And people, you know, the

strange thing is that people kind of say that Moon was a sloppy drummer.

Sloppy? Are you kidding?

It's just... He just felt the music differently than everyone else, that's

all.

Brilliant. Best song I've ever written, I think. And it also felt to me, too,

like an aspirational song about the idea for instead of being young people

against society, it was we don't need to worry about battling against the

establishment any more.

We don't need to worry about, you know, whether...

We need to be caught up in fashions like the hippie thing or anything like that

because we can see into the future and we can see What's gonna happen?

That was the first record that really hit big on the charts in America and I

think mainly because we got Right at the end of the Herman's Hermits tour, we got

the chance of having a big Saturday night or Sunday night TV show called The

Smothers Brothers.

And we got to play I Can See For Miles.

It

didn't

do that great over here. It's better in America.

But when they released it over here...

It went to number nine, not number one, and Pete was... He was shattered. He was

livid. And he said to some journalists, he said, I spit on the British public. I

mean... And I couldn't work out what had gone wrong. I couldn't work out how we'd

lost contact with our audience or whatever. I just thought, you know,

we're... we're scuppered.

Throughout 1967, pop or rock was becoming more sophisticated.

All of the top acts were raising the bar.

There was also this change from bands doing singles to doing albums.

Sgt Pepper came out, and Sgt Pepper was a complete and utter game changer.

Yeah, and on the Hermits, Hermits tour, we were listening to Sgt Pepper, and I

was enchanted by it. I think we all were.

We thought it was a really amazing piece of studio craftsmanship, and, you know,

the idea of the studio, the recording studio, as a tool, as a machine for

craft. And I was...

bathed in that you know i'd always had a studio since i was 18 a recording studio

you know i actually persuaded mccartney to get himself a studio at home

you know he was saying oh yeah i don't have to do that because i've got abby

road i would have been very happy not to tour and to do what the beatles did and

sit in the recording studio and i think that there was also a feeling that there

was a feeling that the who needed to do something different One day I was in

Soho, I went to see Chris Stamp and he said, I've got the album.

And I said, you can't have the album because we don't have one. He said, no,

this is it.

And presented me with the track list, which is very much like the track list

of Who Sell Out. But what was interesting was all that music was

already recorded.

And I said to him, this is really not good enough.

And then we brainstormed for a couple of hours and came up with the idea of

turning it into a radio show.

One thing that happened while we were away on tour with Herman's Hermits

was... The Labour government of the time managed to bring out a law that banned

all our pirate radio ships.

The reason why the pirate ships came to an end in 1967, because they made it

illegal to advertise on the pirate ships. The BBC were basically forced

into opening up a pop station.

I opened up Radio 1 on September 30, 1967.

It was a Saturday morning, it was at 7 o'clock, and I opened up with, and

welcome to the exciting new sound of Radio 1.

That was it. And when Radio 1 came, for a while, it copied Pirate Radio, but

then it went off on its own thing. And to a certain extent, The Who's tribute

to the Pirates was the album The Who Sellout. We were going to make the album

sound like a pirate radio station.

And we were going to use the jingles from Radio London.

And that's what you hear on it. We want the album to run very smoothly and

perhaps have the atmosphere of a pirate radio station. You know, like a jingle.

And then into the next track, you know.

I think it would be rather good. That thing between, there's two tracks it

goes from one song. I think it's between Mary Ann and the song that follows. It

goes... It's just

immaculate, you know, timing.

It was Kit's idea.

I loved it. I loved what he did with it.

They really did achieve what they set out to do. It does sound like a radio

broadcast, a pirate radio broadcast.

What people don't realise is about radio, that it's a very visual medium.

And when you're listening to radio, you're imagining that space, that DJ

behind the desk. And what the Who Sound Out does, it really creates that

environment for the listener.

The idea is that the LP will be surrounded by and aided and abetted by a

series of commercials.

This was sparked off.

by the fact that we recorded a commercial, instrumental, with just a

few voices over the top, saying a slogan for the Coca-Cola company.

And you could only hear it in the cinemas.

So if you went to the cinema to watch a movie, there would be an ad, a Coca-Cola

ad, and that would be our music.

And we were thinking, this is a bit of a laugh, you know, we can do commercials.

The thing that Chris and I came up with was a little bit more grounded. It was

that we were going to sell the space in between the songs for commercials.

And whoever...

Wanted the space we would write a commercial for them which would fill the

space so there'd be no spaces between tracks So the first company I think who

was the first company we approached I think it might have been coca-cola

because we already had the connection.

Would you like to buy?

Time on our album to you know an advert to our fans and they said yeah, we would

be quite interested Could how could you tell us how many?

People are likely to listen to it. And I think we very proudly said something

like, well, at least 120,000, and the person at the other end of the phone

just put the phone down.

So we just decided to do it anyway, but, you know, not ask for money.

He got very lucky. He did Premier Drums and got sponsored, so we had no more

bills to pay for drum kits that were smashed.

Thank you, Premier Drums.

Yeah,

John did the same thing, wrote the sound strings, and he played wrote the sound

strings to the day he died.

I'd discovered in an old ad from the early days of Jaguar a saying, grace,

space, pace.

And I thought, grace, space, pace.

And Jaguar obviously was a bit of wishful thinking. I don't know whether

he ever got one.

I had a Jaguar already. Fuck off.

In 1967, we had

learned hugely from what was happening in America in the mid-60s. We'd learned

about how advertising would be engaging and entertaining.

Print advertising, for example, was always illustrated, whereas they found

that... By using photography, it'd become a lot more believable and

connected with the audience.

The Sunday Times magazine became so important because it was the first time

people had been communicated in such a platform.

The iconography was so standout. It was fresh, it was modern, it was new, it was

bold and it was brave.

Just as the face was in the 80s, believe it or not, the Sunday Times Colour

magazine was in the 60s. I worked for the Sunday Times Colour magazine and

there was a guy up there, the art director, called... David King.

And David King and Roger Law, who worked with David, got in touch with me and

said, look, we're doing this thing on The Who, and it's a sort of

satire on advertising.

And what was interesting about Montgomery's studio, it was in Edith

Grove, right opposite this legendary flat that Mick and Keith used to live in

in the early days.

And it just felt really magical.

They came down and they made these giant-sized

things and then we had an old-fashioned bathtub.

I think we tossed up for who was going to do what. I was going to get the big

odorono, Roger was going to sit in the beans.

Yeah, here's a bathtub shot where you see the floor.

We photographed Roger.

I don't know if he knew that he was getting into the beans or who was doing

what, but he sat in the...

half-empty bathtub, and we started pouring tins of baked beans around him.

When it got up to here, he started shaking.

I'm positive he was shaking and saying, I'm freezing in here, I'm freezing, get

me out of here.

And I had to sit in the bath of this stuff, and after about five minutes in

it, my teeth started chattering.

I'd just come home from Hawaii, which made it worse.

This stuff was freezing, I've got to tell you.

And so they put electric fire around the back of it.

So I slowly started to bubble, you know.

It was crazy. You know, when you think of the things we did, we must have been

insane. I think he got chilled to the bone and got ill, I think, after that.

But we had a good time.

The Who Sellout, such a great title.

You know, it's not that The Who was selling out concerts or anything. It was

that, well, it was that too, but it was that they were selling out to

advertising. And The Who's sellout really grabbed me because I thought, oh,

what's going on here then? So it's to do with maybe it's a comment on

consumerism. The song that summed that up for me, which is my favourite song on

it, is Odorono.

Keith will play what we did yesterday.

Would you do that? I'd be very bold of him.

At the time, I was convinced it was a political statement, you know, about the

stage door Johnny's Toffs abusing these young chorus girls.

She sang the best she'd ever sang She could never sing any

better But Mr. Davidson never rang She knew he would

forget her

What Odorona reminded me of was when I used to read magazines like Jackie and

Blue Jeans and they'd have these photo strips, usually with a girl that was

trying to get with some boy that she liked at school and it often would end

badly, you know, so it could be along the lines of...

having BO or something like that. And, of course, it was to get you to buy

products. It's a lovely little song, you know, beautifully sung, about a girl,

you know, meeting a man and they're getting together and in the end they

bend over to kiss.

And she's got body odor or whatever odor owner's for.

She ripped her glittering gown Couldn't face another show, no

Had the odor and she'd let her down

She should've used Dodger, oh no

And they're laughing at advertising.

They're laughing at the whole way it sells, the way it elevates a product as

though life can't go on without it. I've got to have it. This is not about the

truth. This is about absurdity. I love the fact, it's so funny, this one on the

back, you know, with Keith Moon and his acne. I mean, it's all very cartoon,

isn't it? But you can see the product.

He's got his cliché spot and he's got the sad face. Oh, poor me.

I've got a spot.

I think this imagery might be quite tricky nowadays

because I think the woman hanging on the arm with him is the kind of like, oh,

the man. And look, he's ever so happy with himself, he's put on a quarter of a

stone and she's mad for it.

The child's atlas course with dynamic tension can turn you into a beast of a

man.

I think when I was thinking about doing this interview, I thought, you know,

what I have to get across here is that we wanted this to be fun.

That's what we wanted. And just thinking, you know, where's the fun?

Where's the fun of the old days? People taking the piss out of themselves.

Where's that gone? So I think this album was meant to kind of bring some of that

back. It's smooth sailing with the highly successful... This next one

should maybe come with a public health warning about not trying this at home.

This is The Who and Tattoo.

How amazing that in 1967, Pete writes a song about tattoo, which in those days

we were always advised, don't ever get a tattoo.

The police will be able to chase you.

You'll be marked forever.

Now everybody's got tattoos.

Again, it's quirky.

It's totally, totally original. It's not like anybody else.

It wasn't writing about love affairs or unrequited love or the usual stuff, you

know, boy meets girl.

It was odd stuff.

And they were songs about people. They were little stories. And I think that

storytelling thing came out of my mini-opera thing, which I'd done on a

quick one, the album before. I wanted each song to be like a story.

Pete is presenting me with a whole different canvas to paint

the vocal onto.

totally different from my generation or any way, any how, any where, which were

all kind of aggressively driven.

And I was searching for the right voice to use on these.

And it gives it that kind of haunting quality.

When I listen to this now, it's almost like there's a film between myself and

my real voice.

And it's because I'm desperately trying to find the character in these songs

rather than just the notes.

It may have been...

When Roger actually found his, what I would call his dramaturgical, his kind

of role as a kind of an interpreter and an actor.

Yeah.

I started to approach it as an actor, approaches a part.

Exactly what I did.

Yeah. He's a good actor, Roger Daltrey. You know, Tattoo, very interesting what

that song's doing and how he puts that across.

You know, and so he starts...

having to inhabit other characters. And you can feel him doing it, pushing

himself to do it.

It's such a simple recording.

because his tattoo was of a lady in the nude and she thought that was

extremely rude welcome to my lifetime

too we've a long time together who would have thought this song's probably got

more relevance to that

Tattoo famously became a key fixture in The Who's stage act.

And they played it beautifully on stage as well. And it's not an easy song to

sing.

That's another aspect of The Who. Some of their recorded work was difficult to

perform on stage.

What sellout did was gather up all the little bits that we had left everything

that we could use Put it in and it just about worked and

in sequence looking back. It has much more

much more significance than it felt at the time. It showed rock fans that here

was an imaginative group, here was a group that was on the cusp of success,

if you like, that were trying really hard to do something really original.

It feels like it's what they've been working towards in the first phase of

The Who. And then they go on to the next phase, the epic, Tommy, Quadrophenia,

and the rest phase.

But that, to me, I call it, like...

The end of the beginning.

Thanks for keeping me company on The Big L, broadcasted on 266m.

And we're going to end the show with a final song on the LP.

This is Real.

This one track alone really shows where Pete's brain was heading.

with his compositions, the fact that he's thinking outside the box of just a

three-minute pop single.

Raoul was a big operatic piece that I had to run away from and had to drop,

so I knew it was never going to be, so I just pirated bits of it.

Part of the music of that became the underture and the overture in Tommy.

The dun-dun.

It's almost Beethoven-ish. It's really fantastic writing. And it was all done,

made up, as I went along, you know, in my little studio in Soho, before Tom Lee

was started.

I don't think it was till quite a bit later, when people took rock more

seriously, that people looked back at The Who Sellout and thought, what a

great album that was.

This is 53 years later. When you go back and listen to it, it's totally

different, and it does qualify for a classic album. A lot of thought went

into it. You know, when you think of the things we did, we must have been insane.

It was the last time that we went into an album with smiles on our faces,

having fun.

After that, it all became really...

deeply serious process, you know, like hanging on to our audience and our life

and our career and our hits and our gold albums by the skin of our teeth.

From classic albums to great songwriters, the man who brought us

Don't Look Back In Anger, Live Forever and many more, Noel Gallagher, After The

Break.

Then again you disappear My morning put to shame