The double ending is okay. Also, Moonie, watch those breakers.
Very treacherous undertow there.
It's just the most dramatic thing to come out...
...by the time you give me another listen.
With all that dynamic lead guitar playing...
...the drums would make the best contrast against it.
Being sent to the British Museum.
My resignation, actually.
It's interesting without being... Picking the word to pieces.
Maybe it's not the right word, because "irreverence" suggests...
...that you don't give a fuck about what's already there.
What was interesting is that I think we all did.
Us, from a...
...middle class and working class background...
...and our audience being middle and working class because we were postwar...
...and that that actually meant that the generation above us...
...had real difficulties engaging with us.
So you'd have terrible trouble with schoolteachers and stuff.
They would just expect you to do what they said.
And if you even didn't just... You know, if you kind of...
It wasn't necessarily you went out of your way to disobey authority...
...but if you didn't do it in the right way, they would get angry with you.
So you would end up with, you know, situations of outright rebellion.
♪ I'm going down ♪
♪ I'm going down, down, down Down, down ♪
♪ Right now ♪
♪ Going down ♪
♪ Down, down, down, down, down ♪
♪ Get down ♪
♪ I'm going down ♪♪
Running on seven.
Because the drum... After the silence, you come in with drums, Moonie, okay?
Cut that, some of it. Is it all right with you, Pete?
I like your adlib yells and screams, by the way.
On the second time around, that would be very effective.
Okay, go.
And this is, like, '62 or something, '61, '62.
And anyway, I had this sort of, like, um...
...breakdown of some sort, right?
I had, like, a fabulous apartment, I had a car, you know?
I had this huge sort of career really moving ahead in the film business...
...and I'm hanging out, you know, and I'm just dissatisfied.
I didn't really believe anymore what I was doing.
It became very superficial.
I thought... I was looking for some sense in myself.
I just hadn't really ever thought about that before.
And I'm lost, you know?
Anyway, and I'm wandering around looking, do you know what I mean?
And thinking that, you know, I need to do something...
...which is more to do with my own self expression, you know?
And, um...
You know, Kit... I think a lot about Kit...
...and I miss Kit and, you know, how we have this sort of thing going on...
It comes and goes. But I'm basically trying to sort of work out...
...where I am.
I'm reading books that, like, seem to say things.
Philosophy and the great novelists and whatever.
I'm seeing these films. You know, I'm testing...
...you know, my awareness, my consciousness, right?
I'm listening to jazz.
And I've also now decided to become a cineaste, right?
I thought you did things... Like, I became a mod.
You just call yourself that, right? So I'd gone to see all the films, read all the...
You know, I was voraciously open to take anything in.
And so I see that the thing to be in films, right, is a director.
I figured that's the game.
And there's a coffee shop called...
...Act One, Scene 1, right?
That was the name. It's early in the morning...
...and I go into the Act One, Scene 1 for a coffee...
...and Kit is sitting in the coffee shop.
So anyway, we meet in this coffee shop, and it's fantastic to see him...
...and he's very happy to see me, and we spend the day together.
And at the end of the day...
...we decided that we were gonna sort of write a screenplay...
...to make a film that would be our film.
I fell in love.
I mean, literally, with both of them immediately. I mean, I just...
They completely and utterly, the pair of them, totally changed my life.
That was good. Can I have a look?
However highbrow you want to make it, I still think there is more valid...
...new creative music being made at the pop end.
I don't see any good classical composers emerging at the moment.
I certainly haven't heard a decent new symphony...
...or a decent new opera in the last 18 months...
...and I think opera as we know now is absolutely defunct.
One needs a completely fresh approach and I think pop's gonna provide it.
You gotta talk to Chris about this. It's a pity that Kit isn't here to tell his side.
But, you know, how did these two guys find each other, you know?
I mean, for a while there...
...I thought they must have fallen in love and had an affair or something.
I couldn't work out where they'd come together.
I knew they'd worked on films together, and they loved that about each other...
...that Chris did one thing, Kit did another. We'd come up with dumb reasons.
Like, you know, maybe they were lovers...
...or something, but that just made it more intriguing, you know. More interesting.
This memory came up that I was being carried.
I think I was being carried by my Aunt Maude, ahem...
...and my mother, and I guess my brother. And we went into what was called...
...an Anderson air-raid shelter.
You know, I played, as a kid on, you know... In the bomb sites.
That's what we did.
We played in the bomb sites, in the half bombed-out houses.
We liked to smoke and, you know, do those very young things.
So life was very quick.
You were very sort of, like, old in a sense, quite quickly.
We were really different individuals.
Chris, he was always like a big persona.
You know, he was this rough, tough, fighting, sort of spiv.
I missed most of his kind of gang years, you know, because I'd left home.
And then I remember getting a call...
...and having a conversation with my mother because she was frightened.
I think police had brought him home.
And so I was aware that I had to bridge a lot of water that had come between us.
And the initial thing was just getting him to admit...
...or getting him to acknowledge that he did have an interest.
In my conversation with him, there was this kind of lethargy...
...like he just wasn't interested in anything.
I had found something.
Unbeknownst to him and the family...
...I had found this thing to be an actor, and then, finally...
...he confessed that...
When I, you know, pressed him...
...he said he was interested in girls.
That's what he was interested in, girls.
And so I said, "What kind of girls?"
"Well, you know...
...dancing girls." And that came to me...
...the ballet, because I thought, "God, if you're interested in chicks...
...working backstage at the ballet...
...is the place where a young East End hobbidy wants to be, you know?"
And I knew from my experiences that most of those girls were just dying...
...for somebody like Chris to fall across their path, you know.
And if you worked backstage in the ballet...
...they're there and they'll love you. You know, you just gotta be there.
And I stand on the side of the stage...
...looking for all these amazing women.
And then the orchestra starts to tune up and I hear this music.
And then the lights come on and then the show begins, and then...
...these people are just dancing...
...and it's the lights, you know, and it's so, like, gigantic to me.
The show is about another half hour to go and this old prop guy comes up to me.
"And so you haven't got any more cues. You can go home now."
I said, "No, no, no! I'm not leaving."
And that night, I mean, I absolutely know that whatever this was...
...um, I wanted in.
I'm now, like, a second A.D. or second assistant, right?
And Kit, he's in the same position as I am...
...and in the studio we bump into each other, as you do, right...
...when you're a runner, an A.D.
We used to go to the cafeteria together at lunchtime...
...and we discovered we had exactly the same...
I had the same as him, in terms of French cinema...
...you know, certain types of films that we liked.
So that began the relationship.
He said he'd met this guy, he was very smart, and different to him...
...but they kind of were a very good duo.
They complemented each other, like two and two made six.
And that they'd had this idea where they could never really make that jump...
...from being film assistants to being film directors.
You know, it was impossible.
Their idea was that they would find a rock 'n' roll group.
They would find a really good rock 'n' roll group...
...and they would manage them.
And they would make them so successful...
...that they would be able to direct a film about them.
And then that film would be their showpiece.
That film would be their entrée...
...into the world of film directing. And he did tell me about the idea...
...and before they met The Who, or The High Numbers as they were called.
Kit, he'd been in the army, he'd gone to Oxford...
...and he'd also then gone from Oxford to some cinema school in Paris, right?
All of that stuff that I thought was fantastic because none of that...
...was even in my viewpoint. We didn't know that you could go to college...
...where I came from. We weren't told. Then the fourth thing I knew about Kit...
...was that he had gone to Brazil...
...with an explorer to film...
...and he was actually...
So, he was, like, a guy who'd held a camera, right?
He's gone to Brazil because it was a chance to film...
...and because he was a reckless, impulsive, sort of great guy, right?
The Iriri River was the longest river...
...in the world that had never been descended in full.
You could go about a thousand kilometers in any direction and meet nobody.
Just as though it was an island out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
Kit wanted to come. I even thought it was great...
...because he was thinking of making a career in filmmaking.
And he came along as the cameraman.
He was very tough and, um, uncomplaining.
Because it became quite a tough expedition.
Much, much harder than we realized it was going to be.
Kit had incredible, um, courage.
You know, he had incredible...
He was really always able to sort of really take risks.
He'd gone to Brazil with this explorer, this guy called Richard.
And, um, the guy he was with, they'd gone into an unknown part...
...he got killed by a tribe.
I remember him coming back saying:
"I've just had a radio message that there's been an attack on your camp."
And, at that time, he said, "I think five people have been killed."
In fact, it was only one, and it was an ambush on the trail.
And in a way, I'm incredibly sort of, you know, in wonder.
It was the possibility that you could do, you know... It was widening my angle...
...of awareness on possibilities.
Mr. Lambert, Mr. Mason was an experienced explorer...
...and other members of the party have a lot of experience of this kind of country.
What went wrong on this expedition?
Well, the verdict of the Brazilian authorities was that it was:
Pure fate.
We end up living together, right?
So we're in the same apartment, and then...
...we start to try and write screenplays, right? We started coming up with ideas.
And then we got round to sort of what we really both liked.
We got round to this whole sort of Jean-Luc Godard...
...cinema verité type of thing...
...and we realized that that's really where we should go.
That's when I came up with the idea of the rock 'n' roll thing.
We could manage a group, and how we did it...
...would be the theme of the film. How we managed them.
We'd shoot it all as we were doing it...
...and that we would film the whole process of the managing...
...and the idea of, like, finding the group, working with them...
...making records, becoming successful...
...would be filmed, the whole process on all levels.
Kit and I, we looked everywhere. We looked all over the place for these bands.
How we defined what group we wanted to put in our so-called movie...
...was we didn't know what we wanted...
...but we absolutely knew what we didn't want.
I mean, we looked for months.
We found the people who were doing the music to be smart and neat and...
They were very, like, jumping up and down.
You know, they weren't what we wanted.
But this we wanted was really about us.
But it was gonna be some mad fucking concoction of stuff...
...that looked like Lambert and Stamp.
What we did with the Railway Hotel, the Railway Club...
...it was a sort of a institutional pub kind of place.
It was a bit sordid and grotty like they all are.
So we blacked out all the windows, we turned all the radiators up...
...and we took all the light bulbs out and put in pink or red ones.
So it was dark. It was hot.
The band were loud. We had too many people in.
It was fantastic. It was a real success.
Things were going well, and one day I'm there on the door...
...and The High Numbers are playing. I think someone came and said:
"There's some straight guy poking around outside."
Now, we used to have in the club 500 people or something, you know?
We were officially only allowed 180, but I suddenly thought:
"Christ, it might be the local council." It was trouble.
This was Kit Lambert. I mean, I didn't know.
He's been driving around and he's seen this line of scooters and mods, you know.
He'd been looking for a band to put into a film.
Been looking for months with his partner.
And the first thing he said to me: "Is it always like this?"
I said, "No, no, it's a special night." Or something like that.
Anyway, he forced his way past me, I think...
...and looked inside and he looked really shaken.
And, you know, he's... And I'm going, I thought:
"This is it." And he said, "I'm looking to hire a band."
And I thought, We went in, we watched the band a bit...
...then we went upstairs to talk.
Lambert says later, when he went, he said it was like going into hell...
...or a version of Hades or something. He said it was pitch black...
...very loud. The band were doing feedback.
Pete was just getting into his feedback stuff.
And he said all these mods were doing these dances...
...and he said they looked mesmerized...
...and just what he wanted.
Up his street.
Yeah, I do remember him. I remember the night that he was there.
I remember Barney coming and saying to me, after the show...
...that there was somebody that had seen the band...
...that was interested in making a film about us.
They were just an extraordinary flash of...
I just felt a sense of serenity about them, of calmness.
Of Kit smoking...
...and not really addressing the band very much. Kit didn't...
...immediately engage with the band.
He seemed to be like somebody who had a big idea and was...
I felt like we were actors in his play.
There were two guys here, assistant directors in the film business.
They were prepared to give all that up and manage the band.
And put some money into it. I think they lied about the money.
It was an interesting time. I was at art school.
The other guys were in day jobs.
Our group, The High Numbers, we hadn't really...
We hadn't really got our heads sorted out properly.
We were still struggling to find an image...
...and find our feet and...
We wouldn't have been particularly impressive. Um...
We had a few gimmicks. You know, Keith had an extraordinary look about him.
In fact, you can see the movie of the event.
They shot the first film of the band at that gig...
...and took us over then. Their original intention, you know...
...was to make a movie, not to manage a band.
But they ended up doing both.
♪ Ooh poo pah do ♪
♪ Well, baby, call me the most ♪♪
I think they got to know the band...
...got to see it, and got to see the situation...
...and saw the potential.
They saw, probably, that the band really didn't have any leadership at that time.
And I walked through with Kit...
...towards the front of the stage. I'm sort of fascinated, you know.
I'm picking up what their audience... This is their audience, right?
And the atmosphere was just rich.
You know, you could really feel an audience, an atmosphere here...
...although the show is over.
I look at these guys. They're four, like...
You know, they're four complicated, difficult fucking guys, right?
I can see that, you know? They're really awkward. Heh.
And I'm thinking, "Yeah." You know?
And I just, like... You know, I got that, right?
Chris had got this job...
...as a second assistant...
...on a film called The Heroes of Telemark.
And he was going to location...
...a long location shoot in Norway.
And he told me that he had been able to sign this group...
...who they'd rechristened The Who...
...and they'd been able to sign them...
...because they'd offered them 20 quid a week...
...and he was going to go on location to Norway...
...and he was just gonna live on the canteen food.
And he'd arranged for his salary to be sent back to London...
...and that 80 pounds was gonna be 20 quid a week...
...for the four members of The Who.
And I thought that was kind of...
...a landmark, you know? I thought that was, like, really smart.
So then Kit and I went to their parents, and the parents loved this...
...because Kit could put on a white shirt, and he was... He'd been to Oxford.
But we went to the parents...
...and we agreed in the contract to give them a salary.
- Which the parents loved. - Right, so...
A guaranteed salary.
I mean, where's this salary gonna come from?
Well, we wanted to, you know... We were gonna find it, right?
He was excited about it. They were kind of potential.
And I said, "Are they kind of great-looking?
Are they like the Beatles?" And he said, "Well, not exactly."
He thought they had a look.
So he gets out this photograph and he shows it to us.
Our hearts sink, and we said:
"Chris, they're so ugly. They're the ugliest guys. They're not gonna make it.
There's no way these guys are gonna make it."
- That's right. - And we picked out which one...
We thought Keith Moon was okay.
- We thought he was cute. - We thought Roger was okay.
And Chris said, "That's the one the girls like."
And then... But we said, "But the other guy with the nose...
- That's right. - ...it's just not gonna work."
♪ When you move in Right up close to me ♪
- Do you think we could have... - Yes.
- ...a conversation with you? - Yes, yes.
♪ That's when I get the shakes ♪
♪ All over me ♪
♪ Quivers down my backbone ♪♪
It was about putting the ideas up, seeing what they looked like...
...and trying them out.
We had no idea of what they did in the music business...
...or what this whole world was about.
We didn't come to the group as, like, professional managers.
We came with these two guys who had these ideas...
...and were filmmakers and wanted to manage.
We never said we knew how to do it.
So we came in and like, "Hey, forget it, right?
We're gonna do this and that." They loved that.
They loved us. They... Every idea we threw at them, you know, they loved us.
- Why? - I have no idea.
I mean, we... You know, I mean, Kit was funny.
I was, like, hip. We had a lot of dialogue. You know, we'd been around the block.
They were sort of like a year younger than us and, you know, we were like...
Whatever it was. They thought we were great.
And we were telling them these ideas about filming and this.
You know, we were really selling the deal.
And they thought it was fabulous, and so they all went along with it.
- Um, then I... - Did you have any idea...
- ...what the fuck you were talking about? - No.
No, but, I mean, I knew that what we would do would be fascinating, right?
I told them, you know, we're gonna film stuff, you know, we're here.
You know, we gotta sort of... I mean, and I started to sprout off like, you know:
"We're gonna break the fucking iron stranglehold of the opium of the masses."
I was giving them sort of Trotsky rhetoric and, you know... Whatever, right?
- They fucking bought all this? - Yeah.
Well, I don't know if they bought it.
I mean, they thought, "These guys are fucking out there," right?
We often used to say this will be 18 months to two years, and then it's over.
Nobody believed, you see...
...that that period of pop music would last very long anyway.
So if you... What I had was this idea that it would deliberately...
...blow itself up.
You know, which Kit and Chris were really quite keen on...
...you know, as an idea.
They didn't know what hit them about ideas.
"We're gonna film everything. We're gonna sort of create images for you."
You know:
- Like what kind of images? - Who the fuck knows?
I mean, look, I'm like... I'm gasping for breath.
I mean, I'm doing the usual sort of, like, you know, mirrors work.
Balls in the air.
But I had, underneath all this, you see, I had...
...you know, the purpose, the meaning.
Kit and I, relationship, all those things.
There was an undercurrent in our personalities that was real.
And I think a lot of it was the chemistry of the two.
It was the most unlikely partnership, Lambert and Stamp, you could imagine.
I mean, first of all, Kit Lambert was very upper class...
...and had this upper-class accent.
It must have been very strange growing up with that famous father, Constant Lambert.
And all that involvement with all those sort of aristocratic celebs...
...and highbrow intellectual musical people.
So, what we are setting out to do is to assemble a portrait of Constant Lambert...
...viewed through those who knew him best.
Our search begins in a club in Wardour Street...
...where a Lambert is still involved in the making of music.
How does Christopher Lambert, manager of a pop group, remember his father?
Well, sort of kind, but perhaps a rather formidable figure in many ways.
Strongly eccentric. I'd say that.
I remember noticing that, children are very conscious of these things, I suppose.
He would be completely occupied by his own thoughts...
...and therefore not terribly aware of sometimes what was going on around him.
I suppose he's the only person alive to have been driving with somebody...
...who then found themselves unable to change gear...
...because they couldn't find the gear lever.
My father had managed to get it up the leg of his trousers...
...while doing the Times crossword puzzle on his knee. He was that kind of person.
He didn't talk much about his father.
He... I came into his room at Oxford in his first year.
And I find him in tears and I said, "Kit, what's the matter?"
And he said, "I'm just very depressed. I've been thinking about my father."
And I didn't take it any further.
I let him talk a bit more.
He didn't say anything particularly revealing.
I remembered that his father died about three years before.
And also he was gay and he must have gone through...
...incredible gay period at public school.
In those days, you see, I think it was illegal to be gay...
...and they were very open to blackmail and stuff like this.
And he'd gone to Lancing Public School which is a private school...
...and he'd been an officer in the army.
He came from this Oxford-educated theatrical environment...
...that he'd been to all these schools that we could only dream about.
Kit wouldn't say he was the first real posh guy I'd ever spoke to...
...but Kit was the only posh guy I'd ever spoken to...
...that was actually interested in me...
...and wasn't talking down to me and...
His enthusiasm was inst... I mean, it was...
You could cut it with a knife. I mean, it was... It was...
It was out here on him when he came to you.
It was so warm and he was just, "Fucking great!"
Well, not very short.
- Up to here? - Pretty short. No, no, no!
- Why not? - Further down there, about that far.
- Quarter inch above my eyes like that. - Quarter.
Not straight, of course. No?
Why's that?
It's all the worry I do.
It took quite a bit of time to get to know Chris...
...because he was always off earning the money...
...to pay our wages.
Earning the money for the guitars that we were smashing basically.
This was the Ace Face.
We were never gonna... Or I was never gonna be that.
I loved the fact that he did not give a fuck.
He... You know, he would not stand on grace.
You know, he wasn't frightened of authority.
He did not give a monkey's toss for breaking the rules...
...if the rules were stupid.
Chris Stamp was working-class in the East End.
His father was a tugboat captain on the Thames or something like that.
You know, something... I mean, talk about chalk and cheese.
And it's almost like... You can imagine if you'd made this up and gone as a...
You know, a sitcom comedy idea, say look, you've got this upper-class guy...
...whose father is a classical composer. You got this tugboat captain's son.
You know, working-class... They get toge... And you go, "No way."
You know what I mean? It wouldn't work. It... You know, it's too far-fetched.
When Kit and I first agreed to sort of make the film together...
...we were actually sharing an apartment.
On the... On the table.
Will anyone listen to me?
One of the things that Kit and I did talk about was class.
The rock thing was moving in a defiant way...
...in the class system.
Very loud, Keith, now!
We both considered ourselves, in a sense, outside of class, but of class.
We were incomplete...
...and we both knew that it wasn't like...
...I would sort of have an inner satisfaction by becoming...
...rich and upper-class, and he knew that he wouldn't have inner satisfaction...
...by becoming hip and working-class.
But we thought that there was somewhere within this...
...that would make life a little bit more...
...you know, like, real-feeling.
You know, like, really feelings, like, more authentic or something.
And in a lot of ways, I mean, Kit was the first...
...you know, really meaningful relationship that I'd ever entered into.
Kit was a man, but he was a gay man...
...so he had the sort of sensitivity that I wanted to sort of communicate with.
And I think that there was a certain safety...
- ...in this relationship with Kit. - You've got to be Chris Stamp.
- The living image.
I wasn't able to communicate emotionally with a woman, right?
I was naive in that area.
I didn't know how to get into an emotional relationship with a woman.
So Kit gave me that safety of being able to go there...
...because it was out in the open, it was understood.
And as I say for me, it allowed me, in a sense, to be...
...more risk-taking emotionally than I had been.
We were both marginalized sort of, you know...
...me in my class and him in his gayness.
And he obviously had some sort of love for me.
So I sort of trusted that.
I'd never risked relationship before...
...and the acceptance on my part, which was quite a profound acceptance.
You know, my young, stud, hip image...
...was rallying against this acceptance of Kit.
What that worked into was the ESP that we had as a creative force.
So it was a very powerful bond.
Not really quite defined...
...because it was really defined outwardly in a creative sense with The Who.
Believe me, my mind wasn't that fucking sophisticated then. But I knew something.
There was this vast impact of teenagers unifying into this big mass...
...which people call mods.
In marketing, you're always trying to find...
...some way to get around the fact that the audience are a problem.
The consumer is a problem.
Well, the way that you stop the consumer being a problem...
...is you don't give them what they want.
You allow them to be.
You affirm who they are.
You don't try to change them.
Kit and Chris, they could see...
If I could just give you a picture, there you are, you're on the stage with a guitar.
And the week before, from the stage, you would see...
I'll often tell this story. You would see, you know, the sharp guy.
Bill, the sharp guy.
I love that. Love that. That shirt.
Love those. That jacket.
You go out, you buy yourself a jacket and shirt like Bill.
Next week, you're on the stage.
Bill, meanwhile, hasn't realized how cool he looks...
...and is coming in his Dungarees and his, you know, sweatshirt.
You're on the stage with Bill's outfit from last week.
Bill then looks at you and thinks, "Hey."
So he comes back with the shirt and the jacket but everybody thinks it's you...
...that's influenced Bill, not the other way around.
So you become a mirror to the audience.
Kit and Chris watched this happen...
...and started to develop it as a way...
...of harnessing the energy of the audience...
...which was to empower them, make them realize how important they were.
I was really uncomfortable with it. Really uncomfortable.
You know, when we did our Marquee residency...
...Mike Shaw ran all around London giving people tickets...
...and he was choosing sharp-looking people.
So we'd go to play the Marquee...
...and the fucking whole audience is full of all these unbelievably sharp-dressers.
We had this idea which became known as the Hundred Faces Club.
We would pick one of these kids...
...and make them official members. We would tell them they'd get in free...
...and they knew that they were in this sort of unique thing.
They were able to recognize that synergy that was going on between the audience.
And the only reason that I was into that, spotting that, was because, again...
...because of art-school training. Being told by my teachers, find a patron.
Go out there, find a patron. Find somebody who will pay you to do art.
And I very, very quickly realized, you know...
...the point where I was gonna go, "Enough of this stupid band...
...and of this stupid industry."
Just as I'm looking at my watch...
...in the end, I suddenly think, "This is my patron. The audience."
Well, Kit and Chris took it further.
They're not just the patrons.
They're the essence.
And they are the people. You don't market to them.
You market them.
And we never quite knew what made them a Face.
They had to dance well.
They had to dress weird or well, in some way showed...
...their rebelliousness, their individuality.
So we weren't only trying to identify The Who as such...
...but their specific audience through our judgment.
We were the guys saying, "This is what we think The Who audience is."
And we made them a Hundred Faces member.
- And one of those was Irish Jack. - I remember like it was yesterday.
He was older than me and didn't look like a real mod.
As I stood there, I kept looking at this guy, Kit Lambert.
I couldn't believe Lambert was going to be the new manager of The High Numbers.
He looked timid and had a small physique...
...like it had never properly grown to his full proportions.
He had a scarf folded over his shoulder...
...and wore a blazer-type double-breasted jacket.
I shook his hand, and when he said, "Kit Lambert"...
...he sounded like someone from the BBC.
He reminded me of an Oxford don...
...and the accent, ridiculous as it was, suited him down to the ground.
I found myself liking him instantly...
...and I remember being very impressed when he told me his business partner...
...Chris Stamp, was currently in Ireland...
...working as an assistant director on the film Young Cassidy.
Standing next to Kit Lambert, I felt a rush of excitement...
...as I listened to his rich Oxford tones...
...while he preached a gospel about The High Numbers needing a new direction.
I felt Lambert studying me as he dragged the tar from a small French cigarette.
In the background, 500 mods stomped in their red nylon socks...
...desert boots and pink stay-pressed jeans...
...to the Nashville Teens' "Tobacco Road."
"Which do you think is best?"
Kit Lambert shouted to me over the din.
"The High Numbers or The Who?"
It was that good, and I hadn't even met Chris Stamp yet.
Kit thought that The High Numbers sounded like bingo.
He thought people would think it was bingo when he was giving out leaflets.
He didn't realize that, for mods, it meant the numbers were kind of kids...
...and a high number was some kind of top mod, I suppose.
First, we were gonna change their name. They'd used the name "The Who" before.
I was back at the flat, and they...
They were in the van, trying to think of a name.
And they didn't come into the flat because at the time...
...Pete and I were dope heads. We were smoking dope at art school.
The others looked down upon it. Didn't approve.
They were very straight then. Roger was a factory worker.
John worked in the tax office.
And they thought we were lazy, no-good, art students.
We were, actually, but we resented them knowing it.
Anyway, Pete said, "Let's go in and see if Barney's got any ideas."
So they did come into the flat. It was only the second time they'd ever been in there.
We made coffee and sit around. Just coming up with these names.
And I sort of thought, "Imagine what you'd do if it was The Who"?
You know you'd say, "The Who!" "Who?" "The Who." You know, corny but it was...
He'd milk it for all it was worth.
There were various other names. "Nothing" was a great name.
Fantastic sort of name.
At one time, I wanted to call it "British European Airways"...
...because I'd seen it... But I was so stoned by then, they ignored me.
And the other name in contention was "The Hair," which was also a good name.
Then Pete came up with the idea of saying:
"Let's call it 'The Hair and The Who.'"
"That sounds like a pub."
It was a terrible name. Absolutely awful.
And we left it like that, and then what happened the next day...
...when Roger came around to pick us up, he just said:
"It's 'The Who, ' isn't it?" So that was it. Anyway, "The Who" worked.
First of all, it looked good on posters. It was massive.
We wanted to use that name because we wanted it to be a name...
...anything could be written on.
Then he thought it wasn't long enough.
I thought he got rid of The High Numbers because it was long.
He said, "It's not long enough. We gotta have a longer name."
Then he came up with a masterstroke where he called it:
"The Who, Maximum R&B."
They had this on these black-and-white posters that were made for the Marquee...
...with Pete swinging his arm, and that's when they came up with this logo...
...with The Who with an arrow symbol for a male...
...and with the arrow coming out the O, which people think I came up with.
People say, "You designed that." I say, "I wish I had. I didn't."
I thought it was great, to turn it back to The Who.
Which was fantastic, because I thought of it.
We're trying to define, you know, what their image is.
And also, we were very constricted. We had no money.
We had no money at all.
So we were trying to be as clever with bank managers giving us loans...
...and running up sort of enormous debt with tailors and winemakers.
Whatever it was, right? We were trying to do all these things...
How did you plan to back any of this up?
How did you plan to back this up? Pay for it?
Well, we thought... We just had absolute belief in ourselves, right? Heh.
- Where's Pete, Kit? - I have absolutely no idea.
- We're gonna find him. - He rang off.
There were not probably two guys on the planet...
...that knew less about rock than these two, but you felt...
...the... And they had no connections.
Little doctor in Wimpole Street called Artemis.
Has it to do with venereal disease, do you know?
No, no, no.
This fella called...
This fella Chris Stamp introduced me to him.
First of all, we wanted to find out if they did any songwriting.
And Pete said, "Well, I've written one song."
And we said that will do.
If you can write one, right?
Kit soon saw in that band that, really, the two stars in it were Pete and Keith Moon.
They were the two, and he nurtured those two...
...quite clumsily, at the expense of the others.
And Roger, for one, I think resented it, quite rightly because he got a bad deal.
It was Roger's band. He was the leader.
So, what happened when the music thing started with Pete...
...something came out of Kit that was always there.
Right.
But he hadn't owned that.
- That was very good. - Suddenly, he could talk to Pete...
...about song construction...
- It's the quiet bit... - ...and just those ideas.
So he brought to this relationship with Pete...
...the newness of his acceptance of his musical heritage...
...and the beginning of Pete's understanding...
...that he was able to be a musician and a composer.
Pete just suddenly became like a really fabulous fucking writer, you know?
They were our managers.
Then things really started to change.
Their ideas were fantastic, and that's all I cared about was this band.
All I ever wanted to do was make this band successful.
And they, literally, had a map of England.
And they would stick... "Gonna play there, gonna play there, gonna play there.
And we're gonna get these posters, and gonna do that, gonna do that."
Just like planning a battle.
It was just... It was like being caught in a whirlwind of ideas of...
...how to get noticed.
♪ Took me three years of sweating blood To clean off all that Tennessee mud ♪♪
For that period, The Who was the...
...Kit Lambert, stroke, Pete Townshend Who.
I know Roger probably wouldn't like that, but there's definitely...
The Who went in this direction of writing this...
Having Pete Townshend's songs.
And very much inspired by Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp.
Kit started nurturing him and taking him and Keith to posh restaurants...
...and introducing them to French wine and so on, and all the rest of it.
And this is where Keith developed this "dear boy" thing.
"Dear boy." He got it from Kit.
I have to be honest about this. I do feel that I was treated differently by them...
...to the other guys in the band.
I felt valued, you know?
I was the one that was taken and moved from their apartment...
...to a flat in Belgravia, you know? Um...
Keith Moon was left to, you know...
...struggle out in Wembley, where he came from.
Kit came once to have a photograph.
I was having my photograph taken for a teen magazine...
...at the apartment I shared with Barney, and he went around, looked around...
...and immediately said, "You've gotta get out of here."
He knew Pete was the one that would write the songs, he needed to...
...kind of become his muse or whatever and encourage him.
Pete and I were living together, and Pete said:
"Kit wants me to go and move into his place."
I said, "All right." And he moved away.
Why did they move you in with them?
What was the...?
I think the, um...
They felt... I mean, you know... You really have to ask Chris.
But I... The message that I got that I felt...
...was it was nurturance, and in a sense, trying to draw me away...
...from the art-school crowd.
He'd come to our flat, it was just blues records...
...dark, red light bulbs, smoking dope...
...people hanging about, you know? He didn't like it. Well, I don't know...
And Pete said, "What he wants is, he wants to take me away...
...from the squalor that is ours to the squalor that is his.
His upper-class, posh Belgravia squalor."
We moved from one apartment to another apartment, Kit and I.
So we wanted an apartment that would have a lot of good credit rating.
We had absolutely no money.
We wanted to move to an area of London where you could get things delivered.
They'd deliver stuff with credit because of where you lived.
Kit would be teaching us how to get by with no money.
Which, you know, the aristocracy, they're educated in it.
I mean, they're, you know, absolutely expert at it.
You know, I've had an account at...
...Stone's Wine Shop in Belgravia...
...since I was 20.
They've never sent me a bill.
Whenever I go there and buy wine, if I need any...
I don't drink wine anymore... But if I need wine for a party.
They say, "Should we put it on account?" I say, "Do you want me to pay this?"
"Don't worry, sir."
It still goes on. So I think there was that.
That sense of arriving in this place.
And Kit was very, very transparent about it.
He said, "You know, we need to have an address in Eaton Place...
...because then we won't ever have to pay our bills."
I was living in the back of the van...
...but now I got a girlfriend. She didn't quite like the back of the van.
Heh. So she preferred the couch of the office.
The Who would do a gig, right?
You know, and we would get, like, for the gig...
...60 pounds, or 50 pounds, right?
Or 30 pounds. Really small amounts of money, right?
- Right. - And Kit would figure, "Hey...
...if I take the 30 pounds to play blackjack...
...I might come out with a couple of hundred...
...but if we stay with 30, that's not gonna pay for very much anyway."
So that was one of the systems.
That was a sort of like... That didn't happen a lot...
...but that was one of the systems.
We had many systems.
I loved it there. I loved living with Kit...
...because he was passionate, and...
And it was a fantastic fucking apartment too.
Big, high ceilings in Eaton Place, you know?
And you'd get in a taxicab, and he'd say, "Where you going, kid?"
You go, "84 Eaton Place."
He'd go, "Ooh. Ooh."
You know?
You could go into any bank account and say, "I want to write... "
Coutts or one of these sort of banks, And say, "I want to open an account."
Dress, and with your accent, "Eaton PI..."
"Of course, sir." "And I want an overdraft.
I want a 5000 pound overdraft." "Of course."
Because they started doing this, it's what they called...
First one they did it with was the Bank of Scotland.
And Stamp, they run up this... Write all the checks up, spend all the money...
...and then skip without paying it back and open another one.
Stamp used to say, "We're gonna do another Bank of Scotland job."
And then I also had an older brother...
...who'd become a successful film actor.
Yeah, it was... He was certainly making a lot of money, you know?
So he... I would go to him to get money.
Yeah. I mean, look. We were brothers.
I mean, he didn't just give it to me freely. I had to sort of promise to pay it back.
Pete said, "I was living there. Every now and again...
...these teenage boys would appear at breakfast.
Kit would say, 'This poor boy. I found him in the street.
Had nowhere to stay. I said he could stay.'"
Like I say, that fearless quality because he was...
You know, to be homosexual in...
In those years in London was illegal.
I was in the bedroom next to his, looking to offer him tea in the morning...
...and there'd be some boy in bed with him.
But he never once tried to seduce me...
...and I remember feeling quite pissed off at one point, thinking:
"Aren't I good-looking enough?"
It wasn't that I wanted to be gay.
I thought he should at least try it on if he's gay.
And I shared the flat with him at the office.
Mind you, I was with a beautiful girl as well. Ha-ha-ha.
Maybe she came between us. Ha-ha-ha.
He'd wear these suits.
Beautiful cut suits from Savile Row...
...but always be like this and buttoned up wrong.
And they'd all be... And he, I mean...
...I've never known anybody like Kit to smoke. Chain-smoke.
He'd chain-smoke Player's or Senior Service.
These were the best cigarettes. Untipped.
One after the other, he'd light one from...
We think he used one match in his whole life to light the very first one.
Kit remembered he was, like, 9...
...when, you know, one of the artists who his father was fucking or knew...
...or what, you know, offered Kit his first cigarette.
"Here, you want a cigarette, Kit?"
There was no sort of... The fact that he was a child.
He'd have cigarettes all over the place.
And also, he was renowned for setting things alight.
The number of sofas he'd gone through. In those days, sofas had horsehair.
And he'd always leave cigarettes, and they'd fall down...
You know, people would say things like:
"Kit's late, what's happened?" And they'd say, "Another fire."
And when I started to talk to Kit about classical music...
...and Baroque music, he immediately just simply...
He didn't bother to try to educate me.
He just chucked records at me that were from his father's collection.
So, wow, you know.
Wow, wow, wow.
He started playing classical music.
Purcell and English classical music that his father had championed.
These... You know, and stuff like that.
And Pete said as a result of listening to this sort of stuff:
"I developed my chord sounds" like in "Kids Are Alright."
The middle-chord bit was based on some particular Purcell...
...or music that Kit had played him.
Because of his father's background...
...he knew that you could add these three-minute pieces up...
...to make a much more important...
...dramatic piece.
And...
And he had that in him right from the beginning.
He kept, you know:
He was always trying to put things in a...
He taught me about the dramatics of a stage show.
"It has to kind of be like this, Roger."
"Really? What? No. Yeah, but wait."
My mentoring Kit in the...
In lots of the overview of the content of the songs that Pete was writing...
...we, the three of us, were working on that angle...
...with Pete, how we were staging them...
...how they looked on stage and how those things developed...
...you know, just fell to me.
And then we had wrongly signed a sort of standard-type of recording deal...
...because we didn't know and went into this deal.
And after we'd been in the studio for about three times...
...with this producer, we realized, wow, we'd let go of an essential ingredient...
...to the whole process, which was the studio work.
We had to be in the studio directing everything.
We couldn't have an outsider doing that. This guy was an outsider.
He was a professional producer.
Some say he was very clever, and very good, but he wasn't...
He wasn't part of us. He wasn't seeing the vision.
But it fell naturally into place.
It wasn't really that talked about and agreed...
...but the in-the-studio producer would be Kit...
...and I would become like, the more overall executive producer in the studio.
We had immediate success. I mean, we had hit records from day one.
And we were never, ever, um, financially balanced.
I mean, after we had, like...
...four or five hit records, we had no money whatsoever.
We were being sued, you know?
There were bailiffs outside the office. It was absolute chaos financially.
Because every sort of forward move was another level to sort of challenge.
Because they'd been in the film industry...
...they understood how a team of people...
...can change the way that you feel when you're creative and working.
You know, I didn't want to be in a band until I was 61.
I wanted to be in a band for a couple of years, you know?
And I think they convinced me that, um, it was worth staying with.
Particularly, those years that they were around and we worked as a team.
The support that they gave me to try new things...
...was really what made it all last.
But there was another magic, which was that John Entwistle is a fucking genius.
A fucking genius on the bass guitar.
I mean, an astonishing fucking genius.
You know, it wasn't something that we were particularly aware of at the time...
...but Jesus Christ, you know, what he did was just beyond conception.
And that Keith Moon...
...was not a drummer.
He just wasn't a drummer.
You know? He did something else.
You know? And Roger, of course, is, you know...
...probably the only conventional figure in the band.
And for years, for years and years and years, until Tommy...
...he didn't know what the fuck he was doing in the band.
He didn't know what to do, how to behave.
And has turned out to be one of the great...
...modern interpreters, editors and frontmen...
...of our business.
Not of the business of what Kit and Chris recognized in the band.
What they recognized there, that was what was great about Roger then...
...was the fact that he was lost.
And that would he find himself?
♪ I can go any way ♪♪
Kit and Chris were used to working and creating teams...
...where everybody had a function.
But that also... I suppose that sense of there only ever being one director.
That doesn't mean that there's only one creative person in a team.
It just means you have one person that has to have the last call...
...because otherwise you'd have chaos.
And rock bands are, by nature, groups of creative people with no director.
As soon as somebody says, "By the way, I'm the director."
He goes, "No, I'm the director." Or, "No, I'm the director."
It's like gang warfare.
And Roger was still a street fighter in those days.
He would win arguments by looking at you, and you got the feeling that:
"If I don't acquiesce to his point of view right now, he's gonna kill me."
It took quite an amount of wit and intelligence...
...and also people management for Kit and Chris to be able to juggle it.
And obviously, they must have kind of manipulated a bit.
But you know, like all good manipulators...
...you don't notice when it's done to you.
Didn't he tell Roger he had to actually get rid of his first wife?
- No. - No?
Well, he, it was kind of...
- As far as I know, I didn't even know... - It wasn't good.
...that was Roger's wife.
Yeah, Roger was married when he was very young.
- And... - And he was 19...
...and Kit said to him, "It's not a good idea for you to have a wife."
And so he didn't get rid of his wife because of that...
...but he actually kept her out of the picture.
- Right. - She was not in the picture.
I mean, I remember that Kit was very, um...
Always concerned, though, that...
...she got money.
The idea I've got is called "Glittering Girl." It's...
- That's a very good title. - It's, slightly different to that.
It's more beaty, more punchy sort of thing.
I'll give you a few bars.
I want it to sort of be very:
- Like that. No, it's got drums... - Some guitar in...
- ...and where the whole group will be... - Yeah.
♪ She wasn't a fool ♪
♪ That glittering girl ♪
♪ She followed the rules ♪
♪ That shimmering pearl ♪
♪ Said the rules Mama preaches ♪
♪ You just gotta break ♪
♪ The things Mama teaches ♪
♪ You just gotta shake ♪
♪ She isn't a fool ♪
♪ That slender love figure ♪
♪ She follows the rules ♪
♪ And made money bigger ♪
♪ She isn't a fool ♪
♪ That glittering girl ♪
Big key. Coming in harmony. That could take it to the next bit.
- Yeah. - And there's a very quiet bit after that.
Be good for Keith, yeah.
♪ You just gotta shake ♪
Yeah.
♪ She isn't a fool That slender love figure ♪ ♪
- That sort of... - That's...
I think, really, that's much more direct, which...
And when I miss Kit, is in the studio.
Although, you know, he spent a lot of time mentoring me as a writer.
There was this sense that everything about the band...
- ...was being honored in the studio. - Yeah.
You know, if I'd written three songs...
...and presented them to him, "They were all good."
That's how his response was.
He had found something good about all of them.
And he wouldn't, he wouldn't kind of say:
"And that, they're all good, but that one's great."
It'd be, "They're all good. Let's work on that one."
And what I started to realize over a period of many years...
...was the one that he'd pick to work on would be the one that he really thought...
...either was promising or great, and the others, perhaps...
...would just slide into the background.
When I go back through my catalog of the material...
...that I used to play to Kit...
...there must be 80 percent of what I wrote...
- ...just went on a back burner. - Right.
It didn't even get to be heard by the band until years later.
So I think it's that capacity that he had...
...to accentuate the positive.
He had a natural ear for commercial.
Something that you could sell out there.
But the commercial wasn't just a record.
It was a whole package...
...and that whole package also included attitude and philosophy, stagecraft...
...and art school kind of ideas.
And I think if you grab an idea and you run with it...
...the chances are somebody's gonna sneer at you.
You know, and if it's successful, um...
...and they didn't think of it first, they're gonna be particularly pissed off.
Well, originally...
..."My Generation" was going to be like a 16 bar Jimmy Reed song.
You know, um...
♪ People try to pull us down ♪
♪ Talkin' about my generation ♪ ♪
♪ Just because we get around ♪
♪ Talkin' about my generation ♪
♪ Things they do look awfully cold ♪
♪ Talkin' about my generation ♪
♪ Hope I die before I get old ♪
And it was Chris Stamp who suggested to Pete...
...that the character in the song "My Generation" have a typical teenage stutter.
♪ Talkin' about my generation ♪
♪ And don't try to dig what we all say ♪ ♪
Nobody else had ever used such a dynamic...
...and a true dynamic to society...
...as a kid blocked up on pills with a stutter.
It was so true.
It wasn't a gimmick at all, because kids stuttered.
Especially when they were on pills...
...on French blues and black bombers and Drinamyl.
And, it worked, and of course, it made everybody sit up and take notice.
I've heard a lot about you and the rest of the group taking drugs, Pete.
Does this mean you're usually blocked up when you're actually on stage?
No, but it means we're blocked up all the time, you know.
The intensity was always to keep The Who...
...like a new form of crime in as much as they were never meant to be...
...like, a "professional showbiz group."
They weren't handsome, you know, they weren't nice.
You know, they were outsiders, man. They were sort of like, misfits.
You know, they were looking to sort of, like, claim their place.
Remember those shows that we used to do in cinemas...
...and that guy, who was a big fan of the band...
...who banned us from the Granada Circuit...
...because he disapproved of us smashing our instruments?
- Do you remember that? - I remember it vaguely.
"And the pity because you're such a good band."
And it was always me he would take out and give these lectures.
And I was just reduced to kind of telling him to fuck off.
Kit was trying to explain, "You have to have this band on." Yeah.
- This is a different kind of music. - It's a different kind of thing.
You know, there was something about not honoring electric guitars.
A, they were electric.
You know, we were looking at sound as sound, not just music.
The electrification, if you like, the modernization of life, right?
And us as a generation had seen that first in destruction, you know...
...in a war, in a... On a beautiful city...
...that we're living in had been bombed. It was abstract.
And it was a huge statement for The Who audience...
...because The Who audience were coming to grips.
The Who audience was trying to, sort of, like, get some life in their body...
...and life in their head and life in their hearts.
And life wasn't really offering them that, you know.
It was offering them a sort of an abstract, isolated form of life.
You know, they were saying, here's TV...
...but they were also being sort of told...
...but, you know, you're still a working class kid.
You're still white trash.
The group were acting out, because, you know...
...we were like a fucked up family system right here, you know.
So there's a lot of like, weird behaviors going on...
...and one of them was Roger, whacked Keith Moon...
...and then they had a fight on stage. Thank God, right?
Thank God it wasn't wasted in the dressing room.
So they had a fight on stage...
...and, um, Keith said, um...
...that he'd never fucking work with Roger again.
So Kit and I sort of said, "Okay, so the band won't be the same band."
You know, so we presented an idea to them.
We'd create a band around Roger...
...and then the three of them would... That sort of stuff.
But we were just winging it.
We really wanted them to be the four guys.
I remember I got a phone call from Chris...
...and he said that he's spoken to Roger and that he got him to promise...
...not to resort to violence to win arguments again.
And I said something like, "Good luck. I hope you can pull it off."
And, you know, in fact he did.
That was really our only way of dealing with...
We all had our own methods.
- I would... - That's right.
You weren't as good as Keith.
He was...
He was incredibly cruel when... My God, I paid for that day.
I had three years of hell, and he would deliberately goad me.
He would do anything just to try and make me explode.
It was a hell.
It was a painful time, and you and I didn't talk about it really at all at the time.
I was living in the office. Went from the back of the van to the office.
But he went through a kind of strange misery of his own.
- Do you remember that thing where he... - I knew he was miserable.
That period where he was on stage and he was crying...
- Yeah. - ...in deep depression.
You could just tell that there was something that he wanted...
...that he wasn't ever gonna get.
- Yeah. - And in a way, he wanted us to deliver it.
- Yeah. - We couldn't deliver it.
And he couldn't articulate it.
I remember you were always more sympathetic to him than I was...
...when he was in that state. "Fuck off," you know?
I remember you going up and putting your arm around him...
...and saying, "What can... What is it, mate?
- What can we do?" - Yeah.
And I remember saying to you, "Tell him to fuck...
You know, stop taking his stupid whatever it is he's taking."
And you said, "No, there's something wrong with him.
There's something deeply wrong here."
And he was just... He had a... What looked like a nervous breakdown.
He was obviously on some drug or other. But it had led to a condition...
...that was definitely a manic depression.
- It lasted for about two weeks. - Yeah, yeah.
- And... - Like he became schizophrenic.
- Wasn't it? Very strange. - Yeah.
I think we all knew what we had. I remember thinking certainly...
...if this band breaks apart now...
...what I've got left is never gonna equal it.
We somehow eased that through, diplomatically, ahem...
...and Roger...
...wonderfully agreed to stop hitting people.
And he's stood up to that until today.
And they... And it worked.
So their end of the family was broken up for a period...
...and we managed to sort of get over the breakup...
...you know, and come back together.
And then there were lots of bits and pieces like that.
- I was thrown out. - No, I was thrown out.
- No, I was thrown out too. - Ha-ha-ha.
Now what actually happened was that I discovered that Keith and John...
...were forming this group with Jimmy Page called Led Zeppelin.
That's what they were up to. God knows I'd had no idea...
...that they were gonna form a heavy metal band...
...which is what they were talking about doing, John and Keith.
I'd gone through that thing in Paris...
...of hearing, um, Keith and John talking about me behind my back...
...in a way that was very, very disparaging.
Dear, dear Pete.
I was about to go into a hotel room and be with them, and I just turned back...
...and I went to my room and just sat there and thought.
I felt like a real outsider.
Kit and I were in a club. We saw Jimi. He's just played with the group.
It wasn't his show.
He just jammed with the group, and we saw that...
...and we heard him as well.
And we saw him, and we thought he's amazing.
And we went up afterwards, and Chas Chandler was there...
...and we realized that Chas was the guy taking care of him.
So Jimi's sort of standing there, and we're talking to Chas...
...and we said to Chas, "Listen, does he...
Can we... Can we produce him?" Right? And Chas said, "Well, I'm doing that."
We said, "Okay." We said, "Can we manage him?"
And he said, "Well, The Animals, you know, Mike, is doing that."
And we said, "Has he got a record label?"
And he said, "No." We said, "We'll do that then." Heh.
And we had talked about having a record label...
...but we'd never actually... We hadn't actually put it into place.
So we immediately put it into place to get Jimi.
So you offered Jimi Hendrix a record deal...
...but you didn't actually have a record company?
Right, that's right, that's right.
We didn't have a record company, but we intended to have one.
And so he was the beginning.
Kit was the first guy...
...to start an independent record label...
...you know, in the world.
And he went to Polydor and he got a deal.
I had got that artwork done of the f...
You know, have you ever seen the Track Record artwork?
You know, it's like a... It's a stylus on a record.
The arm of the stylus coming out onto a record...
...only it's a T, but that was the design.
- I mean, and it was done overnight. - Track was the other home.
- It's where everyone went. - It was great. It was a great vibe.
And you didn't say I'm going down the office.
- No, no, no. - Going down to Track.
And it wasn't very much of an office, was it?
- It was great. - It was great.
- It was wonderful. - But, I mean, it wasn't...
There wasn't a lot of, sort of, like, business going on there.
- Do you remember? - It felt like it.
But it was ideas driven, right? It was ideas driven.
But you've got sufficient financial backing.
Hold on, sir. Kit? Problem.
- Phillip's had his guitar stolen. - Christ. Um...
- Can you try and borrow one from Pete? - I'll get on to Pete straight away.
We wanted to do all of this message stuff, but we embraced all of it.
We were not afraid of commercialism at all.
I am the god of hellfire!
And I bring you...
♪ Fire ♪
♪ I'll take you to burn ♪♪
Track was the first time you and Kit did anything outside of The Who...
...and then all of the sudden, Kit was producing other artists.
And it did feel strange to me at the time.
Kit, to his credit, used to include me. I mean, when Arthur Brown was doing...
...when he was mixing "Fire," he'd say, "Come down.
I want you to help me mix it."
But it's just how it felt. It was very strange.
Is it going to be an R and B label or an experimental label?
We're gonna have a lot of experimental stuff on it.
In fact, Pete Townshend is...
...heading up a mysterious department...
...called Jazz and New Sounds. - For me, the Track years...
...were exciting because I had Thunderclap Newman.
- Right. - While I was doing demos for Tommy...
...I'm knocking the demos for Tommy out, you know, I'm working on...
...this little band, you know...
...and kind of cooking stuff up out of nothing, having this brain fart.
Thinking, "That guitar player, that guy, put them together." Da-da-da-da.
- Yeah. - Next thing, it was number one.
So there's this sense that, "This is easy." You know?
It was only hard because before it was with The Who.
You know, they're very hard. They're difficult.
But when you work with somebody else, it's easy.
Arthur Brown, number one.
You know, "Something In The Air," number one.
You know, Jimi Hendrix, number one.
Marc Bolan and John's Children with "Ride A White Swan," number one.
We couldn't get fucking number ones. Everybody else was getting number one.
Track had four number ones in a row with other artists.
Marsha Hunt went to number four.
I mean, you know, ours were down at ten, 14. Ha, ha.
No. Hold on, sir. Kit?
The feeling I had was that we were never gonna make it in America.
- Yeah. - Never in a million years.
I just remember kind of looking at the kind of bands...
...that were making it in America, thinking, you know...
...if they like Eric Burdon, we're fucked.
Where especially in the States would you like to visit?
- California, I think. - Why California?
There's a good recording studio over there, Western.
And the surfing and hot rods.
Yeah. Surfing and the hot rods and the girls over there.
Why do you want to record in America? Why does this appeal to you?
It's because it's different from recording here.
- Sunnier. - Better studios.
No, I'm just... I'm not worried about the studios or the sound.
But when you go outside, you can get a tan...
...which is more than you can get here.
We really saw the huge complexity of what America is.
Can you imagine Jackson, Mississippi...
...Chicago, Detroit, you know, and then Baton Rouge.
And we went everywhere on this tour in this horrible old prop plane.
And it had bunks in it.
These sort of, like, rope bunks.
It was really shitty, but it was... We were all on it, all these three groups.
And there was a sort of old sort of American tour manager.
And especially in the South, when the plane had st...
You know, landed and we were about to get out...
...he would stand at the door before we get out and he would tell us all...
...he'd say, "Listen, in this state...
...fucking women who are under, you know, over, under 20 or..."
- Because it was different in every state. - Every time he said:
"Because you could go to prison for this. You could do this," you know.
So the local rules of where we were going...
...were always told to us before we got off the plane.
And they were mostly about fucking.
♪ Magic bus ♪♪
And then they started releasing really mediocre songs...
...like "Magic Bus", "Dogs", "Call Me Lightning", things like this...
...that were sort of not really up to The Who's standard.
And he said, "Well, we've run out of songs basically."
And it looked very much like it was the end of the band.
Before Tommy we were finished. Without something audacious...
...The Who were done for. So, you know...
...somewhere there, Kit and I took a gamble.
I spoke earlier about the fact that...
...Kit had nurtured me as a composer.
I don't mean a songwriter.
I mean a composer. I wanted to learn to orchestrate...
...and I wanted to write an opera. Kit came in sideways...
...and he was the one that, in a sense, accused me of vanity.
He said, "You know, The Who need a new single."
You know, and I said, "Well, you know, I'm working on this opera."
He said, "Well, you know, how's it gonna help The Who?"
And I said, "Don't know."
He said, "Well, what have you got?" I said, "I've got this, this, this, and this."
We were just totally immersed in this venture.
You know, the... Any growth, any personal self-growth...
...was happening within this space.
It didn't really happen outside of it.
It started to end about 19...
You know, that closeness began to end, really, after Tommy.
That's the... That's the second era, so to speak.
Tommy was the major turning point for that band.
You know, there was up to Tommy...
...and after Tommy.
And Tommy was the turning point.
Pete said to me, he said, at the time of Tommy...
...it was the first time the word "million" ever appeared.
By the end of five years, we had produced Tommy.
We'd done all the opera house tours.
You know, we created a new way of touring.
And it was just a very short period of time.
And 1969, with Tommy was when we first had some money.
So we had worked all of this...
...without ever having any real sort of safety money...
...constantly in debt.
And Tommy made so much money...
...that we had to have some money.
It beat us, you know.
We didn't care, but it did, you know.
It outgrossed even our sort of expenditure.
♪ So ♪
♪ So long ♪ ♪
In those days, everything was mini: skirts, cars.
Even our money was mini.
Not today, though.
♪ See me ♪
♪ Feel me ♪
♪ Touch me ♪
♪ Heal me ♪
♪ Listening to you ♪
I could see that Tommy made Roger the singer...
...the frontman that he'd always needed to be.
♪ I get the heat ♪
What he is is a great, great, great interpreter and actor.
And so this gave him a role.
Kit had always wanted Roger to have his hair more natural and longer...
...and Roger had his hair straight, he was hanging on to the mod thing...
...and when Heather came into his life, his hair suddenly became amazing, right?
And he grew it long, and it was just curly.
And Kit always said, "Wow...
...Heather is really doing an amazing job with Roger.
- Ha-ha-ha. - She's got him to do the right hair."
And he always, thought that you dressed Roger amazingly.
- Yeah, we used to choose the clothes... - Yeah.
Well, mostly he wore my clothes.
- That's what happened. - Yeah, well, anyway...
...whatever you did, you were Kit's hero because you sort of...
...like, perfected the whole sort of look of Roger.
♪ Listening to you ♪ ♪
We bring up these arc lights, you know...
...real film studio stuff, right?
We bring them up behind the group, right?
Six of them, on these opera house stages.
And we shine them right through the group.
So the group just vanish.
And they're intense, those lights, those Brutes, right?
And the audience stand up and become part of this experience...
...and that was the first time that that movement in a rock concert was done.
And it was just such an incredible final.
"Listening to you, I get the music"...
...is not a prayer to God, it's a prayer to the audience.
It's about you. It's about you.
I don't write songs about me. I write songs about you.
That's why I'm successful, you know?
You think they're about me...
...so, you know, you can live, in a sense...
...through what you think I'm going through.
But actually, I'm writing about you...
...and that's really where... That was what Kit and...
And if Chris was in the room now he would be nodding. I know he would.
Because we got this very, very early on...
...and we reinforced it in each other.
Ladies and gentlemen...
The Who.
Typical Kit and Chris thing, when they were gonna break Tommy...
...they wanted it to play at all the opera houses...
...all over the world...
...and they were gonna try and break into the Leningrad Opera House...
...or the Moscow Opera House or something like that.
Stamp went to Russia and tried to persuade them to...
You can imagine. This was, like, we're talking about 1969.
I used to go to events at the Russian Embassy...
...and watch four-hour totally boring films on Lenin and all that, you know.
As I was a bit of an expert on Lenin, I could hold my own. But it was awful.
We wanted to get Moscow Opera House...
...and we wanted to get the Metropolitan Opera House.
And we wanted to sort of have the headline:
"Rock Breaks the Iron Curtain," you know, when we flew from Moscow.
They wouldn't give us their fucking opera house.
They offered us St. Petersburg, but it was years down the road, you know.
And in rock 'n' roll terms, that was like a century, right?
And who are The Who?
Well, The Who are The Who, that's who they are.
A rock group, veterans of Woodstock...
...and now the authors and performers in a rock-opera.
- You could feel the vibrations. - Man, we freaked it all out.
- It's beautiful. - It's unreal.
Without the libretto, it was more difficult than Italian opera.
The seats are comfortable, aren't they?
Keith Moon loved the melodrama...
...and the pomposity of, "Shut up, it's a fucking opera!"
You know?
John Entwistle got to play the French horn...
...and I could see that it maybe might give Kit...
...his big movie that he'd always wanted.
The relationship that I had with Kit...
...was about the fact that he...
...right from the very, very beginning...
...was quite clearly a frustrated composer.
So he saw in me...
...a chance to expound some of his own frustrated ideas.
He encouraged the preposterous.
The more preposterous, the better.
The more adventurous, the more dangerous...
...the more exotic, the more absurd.
Tommy was a mess. It was typical Townshend thing.
He'd have a song here, something there, a bit of music there, something here...
...some abandoned project there, a laundry list there.
And he put it all together and try and get some sort of...
...great concept out of it.
But Kit, because of his, I suppose...
...scriptwriting experience on films and stuff...
...put it into some order...
...because he was writing the script as Tommy was recorded.
Pete may have always known the story inside, right?
We know it was about this deaf, dumb and blind boy...
...it's about vibes.
I mean, the original idea is deaf, dumb and blind boy.
Um, he... Vibes, this was, like, '68, right? Acid was big.
It was all about vibes, all about connection.
The infinity of the universe...
...of eternity, of all the eternal aspects of the universe...
...aware of the invalidity...
...of what we know as reality.
Reality with a small R.
Kit found it very, very difficult...
...when I started to study spiritual matters.
And, particularly, the work of Inayat Khan...
...the Sufi Master who was a master musician.
Kit, you know, was just... He just wanted it to stop.
Yeah, but that's like fucking hippie-dippy, right?
Which it was. Come on, I mean, like, vibes, you know?
Deaf, dumb and blind, that bit's good. But how did he get deaf, dumb and blind?
Tommy began as a spiritual allegory...
...and he made it a story of postwar life.
So we had the lover come home with the husband from the war...
...kill the lover, the kid sees it, the lover and mother shake the kid.
"You didn't hear it." And traumatize him, right?
So he goes into trauma, becomes deaf, dumb and blind.
Then he tries some acid...
...the Acid Queen, to bring him back...
...and he's growing up, and never gets back.
Then he has a breakup, and he gets enlightened...
...he has a sort of spiritual experience and becomes an enlightened being.
When Pete was writing the songs...
...and it was his original idea...
...um, within the studio context...
...it wasn't clear where it was going...
...where it was gonna end.
I mean, the songs, the bad stuff, the shitty stuff...
...you know, Uncle Ernie, who's a fucking pedophile, right?
And Cousin Kevin who's a bully, right?
You know, the real stuff that happens in life.
You know, John Entwistle wrote those songs.
He was more of a sort of, you know, nasty, cynical, grounded type of being.
Do you know what I mean? That he could write that horrible shit...
...because John was a very dark guy.
What was it that you went to see this doctor for?
- I had a poisoned finger. - A poisoned finger.
- How did you get it? - It was weeping.
When we asked him, there was a big grin on his face.
"I'll write them, sure."
Kit wrote a screenplay...
...only as a guideline...
...for the guys in the studio.
Remember, we didn't have any money...
...we were in a sort of cheap studio...
...and come Thursday we would pack up, put it in the van...
...because the group had to go out and perform...
...to get the money.
They couldn't take time off to actually record.
And Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights were the big earners, right?
Then they would come back in. So it was always lost all over the place.
Sometimes they would go out and play some songs they recorded...
...then come back, they want to re-record them.
So Kit wrote this screenplay as a way to give it structure.
And he showed it to Pete.
And he'd noted where there should be some songs and stuff like that.
Now, whether that fell in line with Pete's overall vision, I don't know.
And, certainly, let me put it this way:
Pete doesn't really give credit for the screenplay to Kit.
So, it's an un... It's a mystery.
He started to bring in the idea...
...that there was a postwar element in there.
But, you know, I already had songs like "Captain Walker Didn't Come Home."
I already had songs about, you know...
...child abuse and brutality and bullying and, you know...
So, you know, it was all there, you know, it's my story.
And he came up with a few things that were really fundamentally important:
The idea of doing an overture, which I did at the end...
...and also the idea of repeating the refrain at the end...
...the "Listening To You" prayer at the end...
...putting that at the end. I think that's some ideas he had...
...but we were all rather kind of groping.
The film was gonna be produced and directed by Lambert/Stamp.
I mean, no one else, right?
So we're gonna make this film, and we're gonna make it our way.
We're gonna cast it our way...
...and we're gonna sort of, like, do it, and it's gonna be another level.
And suddenly, Pete Townshend balks at this idea.
The first sort of "pfft" in the camp.
Right? The first breakup.
You know, just on an emotional level, you know...
...Kit and I weren't even gonna attempt to make the movie without Pete.
What had happened was that they'd come at me with a script...
...with a treatment, and I wouldn't look at it.
I'm not... You know, I'm not gonna allow a film to be made.
I'm not gonna allow you to make a film. Because I didn't want to lose them.
I felt already that they were going...
...I thought they were going to Hollywood, so I wouldn't look at it.
And what was bad about it was the way I'd handled it.
And what I see now is Pete was afraid, now...
...that if Lambert and Stamp do the film...
...then Lambert and Stamp...
...being the producer-managers of The Who is sort of over.
We have also... We've completed our cycle...
...we've come back to make... And we make our film, and we leave.
We become the bad parents who are abandoning them, right?
What happened was, is that Kit appropriated it...
...the piece, as an opportunity to make a movie.
He took the story, he wrote a script around it...
...which was loosely based on the story that I'd written.
Um...
And...
Registered it as a grand right.
And took it to Universal...
...and tried to persuade them to make a movie and...
Meanwhile, I was on to the next thing, you know, so...
And, Tommy, he never got to make Tommy...
...but felt that he should do, you know, and...
Um...
And we never really worked together again after that.
In Kit's myth, he'd been conceived in Venice, if you like.
His father and mother were on their honeymoon...
...or Constant was playing some sort of orchestra or something.
And Kit had this thing about Venice...
...that it was his... There was some other draw.
In 1971, um, Kit rented a floor of a palazzo on the Grand Canal...
...and it was quite, quite magical.
He obviously developed a taste for Venice...
...because very soon he bought his own palazzo...
...the Palazzo Dario.
Kit bought it from some Italian nobleman.
Or rather the estate of some Italian nobleman...
...who had been murdered by his Yugoslav boyfriend...
...I think, about six or seven months before.
And Jane and I found ourselves sleeping in the murder bedroom.
And one morning, I was scrambling about under the bed for my slippers...
...and I felt something sort of slightly soft and plastic.
And I touched it, and I realized that it was a gout of blood.
By that time, Kit was becoming quite well known.
He was known as "Il Barone," "Il Barone Lambert."
And so I think when he started to make good money...
...I think he rather anticipated...
...the receiving of money by spending it early...
...but eventually he did make a lot of money.
And so everyone had money, for the first time.
Now, that was sort of needed, nice for everyone to have some security.
And so when the Tommy thing didn't continue...
...straight on into a film, there was this sort of gap.
You know, the actual life that came about was normal life...
...and we all wanted some normal life.
People had started to buy houses...
...and John had gotten married.
He'd married his schoolgirl sweetheart, and, um...
They've also started to make babies...
...you know, have girlfriends.
Kit found me having a conventional little family...
...that was gonna lead to me having children and a house and stuff...
...he found it very bourgeois.
And was quite antagonistic.
They're not quite as, dangerously out of control...
...right, as Kit and I.
I mean, you know, we were gonna go to the edge.
Kit went to New York and started to produce records there...
...and had some success.
The life of New York then was... You know, matched Kit's own decadence.
There was a lot of coke, a lot of drugs...
...a lot of, like, action, whatever.
I cried when Kit called me and invited me to New York to work...
...because I'd kind of really lost heart in the Lifehouse project.
Battering away, battering away, battering away...
...trying to get people to get inside what it was that I was trying to get across.
I knew I had this great music...
...but just not the craft and skills to deliver a story that made sense...
...and not any idea about how it would work...
...that was a hopeful return to a project...
...if not a frontline production process...
...certainly one in which he would have some kind of mentoring figure in it...
- That's right, that's right. - ...as he had on Tommy.
The next rift type of thing came about with...
...what became the Who's Next album.
The Who's Next album was a conceptual project...
...a rock opera called Lifehouse.
And Kit didn't actually think the piece was right...
...because he thought the idea, which was a mystical idea...
...was too mystical.
And also, I think, unconsciously Kit was, like, wounded in a sense of saying:
"Why should I work with Pete on Lifehouse?
So you can fuck me when I wanna make a film of it?"
I don't know. That's purely come to my head for the first time.
Kit did help. Um...
He brought us to New York, where he was based, working with Patti LaBelle.
And he thought we should invite all the great New York musicians to help.
Just... Not actually to do finished recordings. That wasn't Kit's idea.
The idea of Kit's was to, sort of, shift the focus.
Um, Pete had had issues with Kit on production, um...
...of Who's Next, which was kind of all a bit of a mystery...
...to the rest of the band, because something happened...
...between Pete and Kit, and we don't know what.
We went to... We did some recording of Who's Next...
...in New York, which sounded great to me.
Um...
Came back to England, and the next thing we know...
...we're gonna re-record it.
And these decisions were all made by Pete, who, you know...
...now was gaining more and more control.
Kit was making a new life in New York.
There was a sort of a sense of safety for Kit in that world.
We didn't see what Kit was building for himself there, and how carefully...
...he was structuring it, and how it was very much from his old world.
It became clear that Kit was in bad shape...
...but the most important thing was that Keith was...
It wasn't right for Keith to be working in New York.
He was using narcotics, and we were very worried about him.
So we had him and Kit at the same time...
...and it was almost like, you know, who do we keep an eye on?
At the end, on Quadrophenia...
...when we got to the studio, Kit did that thing...
...of showing up about two or three hours late.
Did really lose my temper with him one night, because he was so disruptive.
What happened?
I just... You know, just kind of went for him and...
I didn't do anything, I didn't hit him. I really wanted to.
I wanted to throw him down the stairs.
And he started to cry, and he was...
He was obviously in very bad shape.
You know, he suddenly broke down.
I was saying to him, "You let me down, you let me down."
"This is a very hard project. I can't do it on my own. It's too hard.
There's so much to do." I'd just come out of...
I was in the middle of, actually... Dealing with two other quite big things.
One was... I'd got involved with, Eric Clapton...
...and his, you know, recovery from the grave of the day.
But also we were preparing the Tommy film.
So I was really quite hard-pressed and really wanted...
Just needed a bit of help with...
Because it was kind of done, but it needed a bit of...
It needed Kit, really.
And, um...
Anyway, it would have been a different ball of string if he'd have been around.
But that was the last attempt that he had of...
At being, you know, part of things.
I went to collect Kit from a nursing home.
I think he was drying out from alcohol. I went to collect him from a nursing home...
...I think in Redding, to drive him to stay with us.
And he insisted on saying:
"I want to stop somewhere on the way."
And he stopped off at a wine merchant's.
And although he was not meant to be drinking himself...
...he brought us three bottles of some of the most wonderful claret...
...I've ever drunk in my life.
Kit's idea of Venice... He bought the palazzo. He would start to write there.
This was a bit of a idealistic dream, but he... That was his idea.
Track was gonna transship vinyl to Russia and to India...
...you know, which you couldn't do business.
Records weren't allowed to be sold.
So we would transship them for goods through Venice, right?
Which was just a very solid business idea.
It was before the Wall came down...
...and there was this whole market of rock 'n' roll that wanted it madly.
And we would give it to them and take all the money.
But we would then leave it in Venice.
And Kit's idea was to create all the money for Venice In Peril.
That's what Kit wanted. To save Venice, because...
...he considered it an incredible artistic creative center.
So his idea was to, sort of, do things that were socially, sort of, giving.
I'd offered all the four members of The Who...
...ten percent each of Track Records.
The idea was that Track Records would become, like, the bigger company.
They would be partners in it, and that they would come into the fold.
Our roles as managers and, sort of, day-to-day, sort of, studio producers...
...would fade into something else...
...as they become bigger, to be part of this thing.
And they refused this.
It was a gift to say to these guys:
"We are tired of this job and we're not so together anymore."
You know, "Come in and help us in a different way."
And, you know, what we weren't good at was we weren't good at the psychology.
Because, you know, we were saying to them:
"We don't want to be your managers anymore, come in to Track."
And they took it badly.
I've had conversation with Roger subsequently...
...and, um, I mean, he's just very emotional.
I mean, he'd created the band, more or less. He's the leader of the band.
He'd had a terrible time because that was taken away from him, you know?
The leadership, per se.
And he was really concerned...
...that, like, the way that Kit and I were, in our drug using...
...or whatever it was, that a lot of damage would be done.
The early '70s coincided with two things.
You know, one was The Who becoming a road war machine, and the other...
...with Kit Lambert becoming a heroin addict.
In 1973, he explained that he was in a bad way, and he admitted...
...he was taking a lot of drugs, and he wanted...
He asked me if I would represent his interests.
And I said, "Look, I really am not cut out for this kind of thing."
And I helped Bill Curbishley organize a European tour...
...sometime in sixty... In '74, I think it was.
I have to say I was not cut out for it.
Um, and it was difficult to talk to Kit about it at that time...
...because if I tried to ask him questions, "Now, what do you think?
How should we... What sort of percentage should we ask for The Who?"
He didn't want to talk about that. He wanted to talk about something else.
He didn't seem to want to talk about business at all.
In 19... Was it '74? I had to instigate...
...leaving them as managers, because it was so out of control.
Not, um...
Not an easy decision.
The Who have become a multimillion-pound corporation.
Their business empire is based here at Shepperton Studios...
...where their trucking, laser and sound equipment businesses are housed.
During the last few years, The Who's other interests have diversified so much...
...that people have wondered whether they're musicians or businessmen.
Director Ken Russell and producer Robert Stigwood...
...have made a film of Tommy.
Kit saw my betrayal as Tommy the film.
The unspoken deal was that him and... You know, Lambert and Stamp...
...would make the rock film. And when I went with Stigwood...
And I went with him because it was still difficult at that stage.
Elton John, Eric Clapton...
So Stigwood equals Ken Russell equaled Columbia, and that's basically it.
And then Stigwood said to me, um, you know, "But I can't have Kit around."
Your senses will never be the same.
And when Kit was going slightly mad, slightly off the wall...
...more eccentric than normal, he got very frightened of Kit.
Kit felt sort of rejected by me.
He felt rejected by Pete.
He didn't feel rejected by Keith.
Keith made it very clear that he was there for him, you know?
But he... But the two... The two poles in his life were Pete and me. Ahem.
If I tried to deal with him, he would be firing pieces of handwritten paper at me...
...which were the writs that he was gonna smack on the film.
He somehow let go.
This kind of classic addiction, alcoholic stuff.
Unable to hang on to reality, but just falling into...
...you know, deep, deep, deep anger and resentment.
You know, deeply felt resentment, which eats and eats and eats away...
...and in the end, you know, you're the one that gets it.
It's a drag.
I'm... I'm still functioning.
I'm the one who's functioning. Kit isn't functioning.
His life was getting incredibly complicated. He'd lost his house...
Um, being a ward of the court, he didn't have...
...the freedom to access his money and all those things, right?
Well, his view of me changed around...
Um, he was getting slightly paranoid.
He didn't think he was being confided in and respected in the way...
...he thought he should be by The Who, whatever, right?
He's paranoid. Paranoid is a paranoia. It's a type of mental illness, right?
It's the same as, like, being a mentally-ill alcoholic or an addict, right?
You're not quite in touch with reality, per se.
And at the end of that, Roger and I had to kind of...
...just face the fact that it was kind of up to us really.
You know, and that was hard, that was a hard lesson...
...because we'd never really established a proper, sort of, working...
You know, a way of working together.
Kit had been the intermediary, you know? He was who we worked for. Through.
You know, we struggled and I don't think we ever really found a way...
...of working together that was as good as having him there.
♪ I went to Dallas back in '82 ♪♪
Keith was in California.
I stayed with him in California, he was going through a bad time.
I stayed in his house, was there for him. I tried to get his record together.
I tried to like clean him up as best as I could, right?
Whatever it was. I was just there as his friend, right?
He moved in with Kit.
Right? At one time, and then...
...he also would come over to my house.
In the complaint from The Who to the various companies, right...
I mean, the time it was originally signed...
...it was only actually signed by Roger and John.
So Pete had eventually gone along with it.
But Keith had been the one member of the group...
...who refused to sign those legal documents...
...against Kit and I.
He said, "I'm not gonna sign anything to do with hurting Kit or Chris."
So we had one meeting where Keith and the whole group were there.
And Sam Sylvester was listing off the things...
...that were on the original complaint.
And every time there was something about Kit and Chris...
...Keith would answer.
When money was missing, "No, you don't understand.
Kit and Chris had to spend money getting me out of prison.
Kit and Chris had to..." You know?
He was the best defense lawyer on our behalf.
Um, so, when...
...um, he died...
The Who, with their lawyers...
...wanted to get together with me the day after the funeral.
They came here, right?
To Shepperton Studios, where Kit and I met.
The Who own Shepperton Studios, right?
And so... But that was the symbol of Keith dying...
...and then this meeting.
So when I walked in here, into this boardroom, at Shepperton here...
...that was my frame of mind.
And we waited about... It was over half an hour.
And the person who lived nearest to Shepperton was Pete...
...and he was the one that was late.
We're in the old house having this meeting...
...discussing the management, right?
I'm there with my lawyer, in a raincoat, my one lawyer.
There's a bank of lawyers on the other side of the table.
And this is going on and, like...
...I'm getting more and more crazy...
...that I'm being sued for mismanagement, right?
Kit isn't there, Kit didn't show up. I don't have my support around me.
Kit is not doing well.
My life is pretty fucked up...
...and my wife is... You know, I'm not with my wife.
And for me, in that state of mind that I was in...
I just didn't want to continue anymore. And so that was in my mind.
I'm looking at this place...
...this studio that, um, Kit and I met at, right...
...that The Who now own.
Right? And I stood up and I said:
"Do you call this fucking mismanagement?" Right?
You know, referring to... They own Shepperton Studios.
I mean, what is fabulous management?
This is mismanagement? Right?
Anyway, I was trying to do the best I could.
But the best I could...
...didn't include Kit...
...because I couldn't get him to the table.
I was a manager...
...and I wasn't able to hold my ground.
It's like, you know...
...you can't get the lighting right, and you're the cameraman.
That's what I was doing.
I didn't have film in the camera. You know.
I knew that there was no way...
...to, sort of, nicely move through this impasse.
So I just, as sensibly as I could...
...I tried to resolve a way to just sign off from these guys.
Because I was in the studio...
...and because this is where Kit and I first met...
...and it was just so... It was all overwhelming.
So this place of the beginning of all things...
...in my young life...
Becoming an assistant director at Shepperton for the first time...
...and all of that...
...it had all just ended up like this, you know?
When I thought about them, I... "Fuck them," you know?
I hated them. You know, "Scumbags." There wasn't any...
It was always like resentment.
I was angry, I was hurt, I was pissed off.
You know, I was full of self-pity. It was all this shit I hadn't done, right?
"These little fuckers," you know what I mean?
Like, I didn't get to make... I didn't even direct Tommy, you know?
Kit told me his father died...
...at 45...
...and that he thought he would die at 45 as well.
On my 45th birthday, um...
...I woke up in a detox.
Which I had gone to, right, you know, specifically.
And I was 45.
So, um, you know...
...from that point on, this idea of recovery...
...of being a sober guy, began.
It began.
- Should we walk down to Kit's? - Okay, fine. Fine, fine. Okay.
There's someone in the audience who is a really, really...
Man who's very special in my life...
...because The Who would never have been...
...I'm sure, ever successful without the help...
...of two special people.
In those days when we started, we were a little band...
...and two people joined us.
There was Kit Lambert and there was Chris Stamp.
Sadly, Kit isn't around anymore...
...but Chris Stamp is here tonight.
- And... - Sit down so he can see you.
I love him dearly and I've got to tell you...
...they were so important.
They were the fifth and sixth members of this band.
They formed the shell of the egg that you know as The Who these days.
They guided us in every way.
And what Chris was really good at, was he was the ideas man.
He was the juggler, he was the magician saying:
"They can't just do an album. We've gotta be on the ball.
We gotta do something that's ahead of the curve."
It was so lovely to see you out there.
- Yeah, no, it was fucking great, man. - It really was.
I was, like... You know, I was near tears all the time.
You know what I mean? Because I was full.
I'm not mentioning it, but I loved all the shit you said about me.
- Ha-ha-ha. I don't want to... - Really, mate?
- I don't want to appear... Yes, yes, yes! - True.
And then, okay, I got sober. Right?
I mean, and by the act of getting sober, whatever that means...
What it meant for me was, you know, I expanded somewhat...
...and started to sort of like, own myself, for what I was, right?
You know, and that was just a part of my life that was in the past.
I wasn't letting it live in me now, you know.
I wasn't, like, festering over it.
And then Roger called me.
Right? Roger called me. I think Pete called me.
I don't think they called me for any particular reason.
Roger was... Roger...
Roger, he had all sorts of ideas that he wanted to talk to me about.
You know.
So we talked about the ideas, right?
You know, he made amends with his part.
I sort of said, well, the same for me, you know?
I owned how I've left him behind. It wasn't one-sided.
And the first idea that came up between Roger and I...
...was he wanted to make a film about Keith Moon.
And that seemed a way to move forward.
It was a film, it was another film, you know.
And so, we got a script organized.
We got it out to Hollywood, you know?
We raised money.
Well, The Who are being honored...
...it's called the Kennedy Center Awards.
You're given an award...
...it's an outstanding contribution to the arts and culture.
You know, I can also say that I was still happy they got it, right?
I was genuinely happy they got it. I wasn't sort of like:
"Yeah the fuckers, they've sold out." I didn't think like that.
The invitation came directly from Roger.
He was very gracious and very loving.
You know, Roger has an understanding that this group of people, alive and dead...
...you know, where the centerpiece...
...is something bigger than all of us, you know?
And Roger understands that in a very, sort of, deep way.
And so he, with a lot of love and a lot of graciousness...
...insisted that I come.
And I was happy to accept, you know?
Because it's about something we were all involved with.
I mean, Kit is dead, Keith's dead, John's dead...
But overall, the people who were here today...
...the three of us here today, of that era... And Bill Curbishley...
...who's been here since, as the manager figure...
...have been involved in this process.
Pete said something which I loved.
He said, "As I wrote on what The Who performed for...
...the people who liked us felt seen and heard." Right?
He said, "Now that the fucking privileged understand and like my lyrics...
...why the fuck am I still writing them?"
I didn't want my life to be like, well, I didn't get to make Tommy...
...I didn't get to make The Who film, and I'm not making the Keith Moon film.
Right? So perhaps I shouldn't be making fucking films.
You know, perhaps that's not in the picture.
You know, I mean, it was obviously not working, right?
I hadn't pulled one out of the bag.
I hadn't directed this fucking great masterpiece...
...that I'd been carrying around me since I'm like 16 or whatever it was.
Isn't that wild? The White House.
A lot of things we could've done, and should have done, and didn't do...
...but we, you know, we did enough. You know, we spurred each other on.
We were sort of, like... You know, we were loving, man.
We were loving to each other, you know?
It's very difficult to, sort of, know, you know...
...the moments that you love someone a lot of the time.
Yeah, love is giving.
Get a bit of love in your life, you could give a little bit, right?
It's called intimacy, you know, and all...
We want to naturally back off from all that shit, right?
And Kit Lambert, Chris Stamp, Pete Townshend...
...Roger Daltrey, Keith Moon and John Entwistle...
...didn't quite back off for a long period of time, you know?
We all thought we were sort of keeping our so-called "individual cool"...
...but we weren't, you know?
We were there for each other...
...you know, in an un-heroic way...
...in a sensitive, frightening way.
Sensitive and frightening.
Just gonna pull your jacket so...
It's about to roll out.
- Is that the end of the roll? - Yeah.
That's the end of the night then.
♪ Every day I get in the queue ♪
♪ Too much, the Magic Bus ♪
♪ To get on the bus That takes me to you ♪
♪ Too much, the Magic Bus ♪
♪ I'm so nervous I just sit and smile ♪
♪ Too much, the Magic Bus ♪
♪ Your house is only another mile ♪
♪ Too much, the Magic Bus ♪
♪ Thank you, driver, for getting me here ♪
♪ Too much, the Magic Bus ♪
♪ You'll be an inspector, have no fear ♪
♪ Too much, the Magic Bus ♪
♪ I don't wanna cause a fuss ♪
♪ Too much, the Magic Bus ♪
♪ Can I buy your Magic Bus? ♪
♪ Too much, the Magic Bus ♪
♪ No ♪
♪ I don't care how much I pay ♪
♪ Too much, the Magic Bus ♪
♪ I'm gonna drive my bus To my baby each day ♪
♪ Too much, the Magic Bus ♪
♪ Every day you'll see the dust ♪
♪ Too much, the Magic Bus ♪
♪ As I drive to my baby In my Magic Bus ♪
♪ Too much, the Magic Bus ♪
♪ The Magic Bus ♪
♪ Give me a hundred The Magic Bus ♪
♪ She goes like thunder The Magic Bus ♪
♪ I won't take under The Magic Bus ♪
♪ It's a bus age wonder I want it, I want it, I want it ♪
♪ You can have her But this bus driving to hell ♪
♪ Onto my bus I wanted to sell ♪
♪ I wanna drive it ♪
♪ You can't have it ♪
♪ Thrupence and sixpence every day ♪
♪ Thrupence and sixpence every way ♪
♪ But I wanna buy your Magic Bus ♪
♪ Too much, the Magic Bus Give me a hundred ♪
♪ I wanna buy your Magic Bus ♪
♪ She goes like thunder Magic Bus ♪
♪ Won't take under Magic Bus ♪
♪ I won't take under Magic Bus ♪
♪ It's a bus age wonder Magic bus ♪
♪ I ain't got enough ♪
♪ I want it, I want it, I want it ♪
♪ What they going on about God knows ♪
♪ I want it, I want it, I want it ♪
♪ Why don't he give it to him I don't know ♪
♪ The Magic Bus Too much, the Magic Bus ♪
♪ Magic Bus Too much, the Magic Bus ♪
♪ Too much, the Magic Bus ♪♪
You've reached the voice mail of Chris Stamp.
Please leave a message. I'll call you back. Thank you.