"I remember saying to Eric, 'I'm going to play him off the stage one day'. But what Eric did was even more peculiar, he said, 'Well, I'm going to pretend that I am Jimi Hendrix!'": Pete Townshend looks back in this classic 1990 guitar interview
"I got my guitar for Christmas but I didn't learn it. Instead I bought myself a banjo, because in my class at school we had quite a good trad band, we even had a tuba player - and [The Who's bassist] John Entwistle was on trumpet. We were all very left-wing, or they were – I didn't know what politics was about. And they were always disappearing into sleeping bags with girls.
No. I think it might have structured my songwriting a bit better; I look back and see wasted songs because I was working so intuitively. There were lots of really lucky songs, like Won't Get Fooled Again or Behind Blue Eyes, which came out perfectly, but not through any understanding of song structure.
"Computers have since helped me a lot there - it's a bit like having always suffered from hay fever and then finding that your computer will analyse the pollen count. Analysis is a lost art, and to replace it with intuition is asking too much of intuition. Intuitive players and composers should have all their armoury before they start relying on intuition. That's when they'll make quantum jumps.
"Look at somebody like Prince. He has that armoury, he can write an orchestral score, sit at a piano and read a part, knock out a fairly good version of the Moonlight Sonata or study Gershwin if he likes. Then you've got this impetuous, imp-like character grafting all this intuitive waif-like feel - and you come up with that kind of magical quality."
"People occasionally try to revive the saxophone: the saxophone is the symbol of the eighties - bullshit! Even today, people hold saxophones like guitars! I'm not claiming superiority for the guitar, I'm just talking about what's been imposed."
"When I broke my first guitar, I'd actually watched a guy called Malcolm Cecil, at Ealing Tech, where I was at High School, beat me to the punch. He went on to co-produce Innervisions for Stevie Wonder and he was bass player with the Johnny Scott Quintet.
"And then he started to bang it. Somebody had been doing something on the stage with a saw, and it was still there, and he picked it up and said, You can even saw at the bass, and he started to saw through his strings and we all stood up and cheered! It made a fantastic noise, and the fact that he was sacrificing his strings! And he just carried on sawing, right through the strings and through the belly of the bass!
"The whole college was full of it, so that wall had been broken and it seemed perfect, natural for me, a couple of months later, to find myself doing the same thing. I saw myself as an R&B/ jazz musician, and also as an artist. (source Music Radar)
Well, maybe. I'm sure it was a kind of defence mechanism. You have to remember that I knew Jimmy Page – Led Zeppelin weren't formed then but I'd seen him in various bands and if anything his playing slowed down as he got older! He was an extraordinary player, arrogant, flash...
"And Eric [Clapton], with the Yardbirds, used to play absolutely beautifully and he'd only been playing a year! And Jeff Beck, who always had that guitar quality of making the guitar sound like a voice. That was the kind of marketplace I was in, and although I hadn't been belted round the chops by Jimi Hendrix yet, I definitely didn't want to be competing with those players."
Hendrix was a great player, but he wasn't really creative. He was dealing in other people's ideas, old blues things and tricks that were either borrowed from Eric – that Marshall kind of style – or the pyrotechnic things that he had caught off watching me
I was belted round the chops by Jimi Hendrix.
"It's very difficult now, just listening to records, to understand what all the fuss was about. He was such a visual performer There was something else, other than music, going on. Hendrix was a great player, but he wasn't really creative. He was dealing in other people's ideas, old blues things and tricks that were either borrowed from Eric – that Marshall kind of style – or the pyrotechnic things that he had caught off watching me.
"He used to follow the band around, watching, and then he suddenly appeared on stage doing all this stuff. But it was something else that made it extraordinary; he was just an extraordinary man. Talk to the women who came in contract with him - he literally enchanted them. And he was a pretty unremarkable kind of gnarled-looking guy, but he was a real enchante
