Quadrophenia: Can You See the Real Me? Page #4

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you want me to explain

"and I can't explain what it is

you want to explain?"

Jack immediately goes, "That's it!"

So, in words, Pete Townshend

became the song laureate of the mods

in Shepherd's Bush, Hammersmith,

Acton, Ealing.

You declared you'd be three

inches taller

You only became what we made you.

There's a fabulous postcard,

we're about 18/19,

we look like perfect

little girly mods.

That's the band that Jimmy looked at

and went, "That's me!"

Then he goes into that band

and finds that these four people,

each one of them is a deeply

eccentric and complex and difficult

and f***ed up individual

and they're each in their own way.

I'm the guy in the sky

Flying high, flashing eyes

No surprise I told lies

I'm the punk in the gutter.

All of those youth movements

are built on false idols.

They're all built on the idea

of loving something

and never meet your idols.

There's that crushing

sense of disappointment.

They're not the people

you think they are.

This was the only time The Who

were in the entire book.

We shot about 4am in the morning

so we wouldn't have any traffic

and it was the Hammersmith Odeon,

that was the idea.

And in the story it's where Jimmy

sees The Who otherwise

they don't intersect in the story.

He's feeling inferior,

his hero's scooter is bust

and these guys have a limo.

I have to be careful not to preach

I can't pretend that I can teach

And yet I've lived your future out

By pounding stages like a clown

And on the dance floor broken glass

And bloody faces slowly pass

The numbered seats in empty rows

It all belongs to me you know.

OK!

There's this idea of The Who,

who had these kind of mod roots,

and they later became a great big

bloated rock band.

The distance between them

being almost '70s rock stars

and the '60s roots of what they were

is played up in this photograph.

You get this image of Jimmy,

the mod, from the 1960s, clearly,

down on one knee and out here's the

band coming out of Hammersmith Odeon

but the band appear to be like

a '70s rock band and the interesting

thing is it's the distance between

him and them, that's the time shift.

This is when the album is recorded,

this is the distance

between these two things.

It's important.

I'm the guy in the sky

Flying high, flashing eyes

No surprise I told lies

I'm the punk in the gutter.

He just happens to pass

his ex-heroes, The Who,

and says to them, "You bunch of...

You f***ing let me down."

That's all it's about.

This one song,

Punk And The Godfather, that was it.

I don't mind

Other guys dancing with my girl

That's fine

I know them all pretty well...

Is it me for a moment?

Records traditionally have tracks

with gaps in between.

What Quadrophenia has

is a soundscape

and the thing it's closest to

is it's a film soundtrack.

So, between the tracks you get

the sound of Jimmy's life,

losing his bike,

losing his dirty job,

living rough on the streets alone.

The sound of the train

in the station, the whistle.

The boiling kettle and a fried egg.

In a sense,

it's using sound as music.

For sea and sand, for example,

I literally walked down a beach

with a stereo mic singing

sea and sand.

Here by the sea and sand.

But Quadrophenia had a sound, it

was one sound from start to finish,

and that sound was

the sound of the backing track.

What had happened was

the Who couldn't find a studio

that they liked,

so they said, "Let's buy a place

and build our own,"

because they had some money then,

so they found this church

in Battersea, in Thessaly Road,

Battersea.

Thessaly Road was really

a storage facility.

Pete Townshend came down one day to

see where all his guitars were.

Blimey.

I'm surprised how spacious it is.

He looked around, he gave

a click of his fingers, and he said,

"This has got good resonance."

It had, you know, a bright...

It's still got quite

a bright sound in here.

But it was brighter than this,

it was quite a bright...

And that was unusual at the time.

Most studios in London were a little

bit deader than this one.

He said, "This would make

a bloody good studio."

So, I goes,

"Right, turn it into a studio."

There's a window, you can see, here,

just there, which would have allowed

you to see from this room...

If you are sitting down, you could

see into the control room,

which would have been there,

where the doctor's waiting room is.

The main intention was that the

control room should be quadraphonic.

There were no rooms in the UK,

or in America at the time,

that had for speakers, one in each

corner. They just weren't any.

This is an acoustic ceiling,

designed...

They're always designed like this,

with this dish,

and you can see that that would have

been one of the plinths

on which we hung one of

the quadraphonic speakers,

another one there,

another one there.

You can see that the room is

designed in a quadraphonic shape.

The mixing desk would've been here,

tape machines there.

I had the idea to do something

in quadraphonic

before I was certain about the

story of Quadrophenia.

And the band that were doing

the most experimentation with it

were Pink Floyd, and they'd done

a couple of shows where

they'd introduced quadraphonic

sound into their live shows.

Money...

Dum, dum, dum, dum, tchk...

would come out in the back right,

this great big chink,

then it would come out there,

and then it goes round and round

and round. It was very exciting.

So, we had a test unit sent over,

and Pete hated it.

The separation wasn't...

It was like a big mono.

And Pete said, "You know,

I am not going to make

"a quadraphonic album that sounds

worse than the stereo."

These days, on a computer, you can

do this kind of thing in 15 seconds.

Back then, it was much harder.

We actually never mixed

anything in quadraphonic.

Quadrophenia is strictly

a stereo album.

At the same time as trying to do

that, everything was up in the air.

They were building the studio

and trying to record this thing

in the studio, while there

were builders in there.

There's people under the desk,

undoing things.

He says, "Hold on a minute,

another take,"

and then they start...

It was utter chaos.

What was different about our studio

to everybody else's,

that we had the bar

IN the f***ing studio.

You know, you'd kind of go,

"Na, na, na, nee, na,"

and then pour yourself

a pint of beer,

or a pint of brandy,

whatever it was, right there.

You didn't have to reach

out very far.

The average Who session, not for

Roger, but for John, Keith and I,

would start, we'd roll up,

it would be two o'clock.

By four o'clock, we would

have had enough brandy

to start fiddling around.

We would be telling stories.

Roger hated all that stuff,

he just thought it was time-wasting.

We were building round

the making of Quadrophenia,

and we didn't know

our arse from our elbow.

We didn't know what we were doing.

When the desk got put in, Pete said,

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