Mojo - The Music Magazine

...Here's The Who Sell Out. Danny Eccleston revels in Pete Townshend's Summer Of Bitterness And Disdain.

WHAT WAS BRITAIN IN 1967 really like? For a fractional percentage of hipsters it was, perhaps, the halcyon aeon of micro-minis, liberal thinking and free love in the changing rooms at Biba that historical shorthand records. But for the rest it remained an all-too-slowly-evolving world of mild-and-bitter, Neanderthal sexual mores and barely existent street lighting.

While pop music's counter-cultural gladiators slugged it out with the leader writers of the Express and Telegraph - establishing no more than a precarious beach-head - Britain remained much more Saturday Night And Sunday Morning than Magical Mystery Tour.

Pete Townshend, never one to look on the bright side, understood the pinched old Britain. It clung to him like Woodbine smoke. Hearing the siren call of swinging London, he answered with songs narrated by wanking, stuttering outsiders and sexual cripples forced to cross-dress by their parents. He was the first rock'n'roll songwriter to do psychologically damaged, white middle-class alienation (thereby inventing Thom Yorke, Kurt Cobain and the rest), while The Who's aggressive aesthetic placed them outside the pale, like a bunch of pre-Ecstasy football hooligans looking for a barny in Shoom.

So 1967 was not looking like Pete Townshend's year. Already bored of psychedelic drugs, and scared to death by fellow Track Records recording star Jimi Hendrix, he fretted about the way forward. January saw music press reports that Townshend was planning an opera set in 1999 about China invading the world, while March saw the release of Pictures Of Lily, an elephantine single narrated by a wanking sexual cripple.

Meanwhile, the June release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band brought with it a flash-flood of so-called concept albums, from The Pretty Things' SF Sorrow to The Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request. Even the most brickie-like rockers hastily donned a kaftan and gave their music some fashionable raga windowdressing. A sceptical Townshend considered his response.

"I suppose what I wanted was to rescue the pop song," he later recalled, "which seemed to me to be in serious trouble in the late '60s, partly because of the post-psychedelic wetness that seemed to be everywhere. You could write a song that went, Weee love you, weeeee love you, and it would get to Number 4 in the charts. I was outraged and desolate because I knew I was too much of a cynic to ever be able to do that."

Between May and November, amid punishing touring commitments and Who-ish mishaps (Entwistle broke a finger punching a picture of a "a well-known pop star" backstage at the Stevenage Locarno; Moon suffered a hernia recording Melancholia at Advision studios in London), an album's worth of moody, contemplative songs were recorded. While The Who Sell Out would make the odd concession to psychedelia (Armenia City In The Sky, written by Townshend's pal "Speedy" Keen, remains a bad-trip counterpoint to Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds), it countered that "wetness" in the air with lashings of sardonic humour and a defiantly unhippyish preoccupation with consumer culture.

Jaguar, a warped acid-pop ditty not on the original 14-tracker but gracing the current CD version, was the first song written in this vein. "The radio blasting, the girls are glancing," goes Townshend's lyrical ad for the venerable car marque, "the dash is dancing with gleaming dials". Elsewhere, Townshend uses the language of commercials in songs about culture's power over individuals. So, Tattoo is a baroque advert for the benefits of tattoos ("I'm a man now, thanks to you") and the Spectorish Our Love Was sees its pair of sweethearts construct a version of romance they feel is expected of them: "Our love was famine, frustration / We only acted out an imitation / Of what real love should have been."

The developing theme inspired Townshend and co-manager Chris Stamp's master stroke. By interspersing the songs with spoof ads, the whole album became a parody pirate radio show, celebrating the medium by which pop music had reached The Who's audience and simultaneously serving as its epitaph. In August, the Marine Offences Act would plug the legal loophole that allowed the pirates to broadcast offshore. When The Who Sell Out was released in December, the kitsch Radio London stings commemorated a station that had only just disappeared from the airwaves.

Charged with inventing a batch of stupid commercials, Entwistle and Moon hunkered down in the pub next to Kingsway studios and produced their funniest, least laboured compositions for The Who. Out of the same idea came the magnificent sleeve, conceived by Sunday Times Magazine art editor David King and Peter Cook associate Roger Law as an ad industry satire and packed with poignant detail, like the cut on Townshend's forefinger (damn those windmills!). John Entwistle later claimed he was earmarked to sit in the bath of baked beans in the cover shot but accidentally-on-purpose contrived to be late for the photo session, "so I got the girl and Roger got the beans". Fresh out of storage, the beans were so cold Keith Moon set up an electric fire behind the bath. "One half of me was cooking," complained Roger Daltrey, "my feet were freezing and it made me very ill".

Mercifully, the radio concept allowed the set-piece songs to be as varied, or typically Who-esque as they needed to be. I Can See For Miles, ...Sell Out's glaring masterpiece, came together at a session at Goldstar, Los Angeles, on 16 September, with eight hours spent on the vocal harmonies alone. Their most psychedelic song, built on Moon's daringly sustained series of apocalyptic rolls, it's a moment of transcendence laced with a Townshend-strength cocktail of jealousy and bitterness: "I spat on the British record buyer," he claimed when it peaked at Number 10. And just to doubly prove that this is a goddamn Who album, here's Mary Anne With The Shaky Hand - a song so typically Who-esque that it's about wanking, albeit of the assisted variety.

And there you have it. Famine, frustration, baked beans, zit cream, wanking. Not the glistening, hello-trees vision of 1967's hairier idealists, but a concept album that holds a mirror up to the real world of teenagers and - PS3, SATs and iTunes notwithstanding - holds as fundamentally true for 2009 as it did for the year it was written.

Danny Eccleston