(Credits: Far Out / Alamy / Olavi Kaskisuo / Lehtikuva)
Tue 10 February 2026 16:00, UK
At the peak of the summer of love, you weren’t going to find anyone taking rock and roll more seriously than Pete Townshend.
While he may have been in tune with everything that was coming out of the spiritual side of rock and roll, he wanted to make the kind of music that could help him reach a higher plane of existence without having to drop acid every single time he performed. He was focused on the songwriting behind all of the psychedelia, and he already had some of the best teachers to learn from when he started.
Then again, it wasn’t going to be easy to teach anyone how to write as Townshend did. The Beatles may have been encouraging people to think outside the box and make music that was from the heart, but making entire albums that told linear stories across their runtimes wasn’t something that came across the album charts every day. This was the dawn of a new age, and Townshend wanted to make his mark by making the first real rock and roll opera.
And it’s not like Tommy doesn’t earn its spot as an operatic experience. ‘A Quick One While He’s Away’ and ‘Rael’ had all been preparing the world for something more ambitious, but even if there were other concept albums out at the time, Townshend was the one who built characters within all of his songs. Paul McCartney could tell mini stories throughout his songs, but the tale of a deaf, dumb and blind boy had a lot more depth to it than meter maids named Rita or a bar brawler named Rocky Raccoon.
But even if Macca and Townshend were kindred spirits in some respects, The Who’s mastermind was looking for something different than the Beatle’s whimsical ditties. Bob Dylan had proved that lyrics could mean more than a silly love song, but when that kind of lyricism reached the other side of the Atlantic, Townshend was already interested in what The Kinks were doing on their records.
There was already a certain dangerousness behind ‘You Really Got Me’ and ‘All Day and All of the Night’, but when Ray Davies brought things down a bit, he was telling the kind of stories that everyone else didn’t have the guts to tell. ‘Waterloo Sunset’ may have been one of the finest pop songs of that decade, but looking at how far England had come in that time, Townshend knew that Davies was writing about a version of England that had been forgotten about for so long.
The lyrics were one thing, but even by the standards of live performance, Townshend felt that Davies was as good as any other rock and roll frontman, saying, “Ray Davies was almost as appealing as Mick Jagger, and for the same reasons: he was delicate, slightly androgynous and very sexy. The Kinks were playing quite a few of the same R&B songs that we did, and they somehow managed to be poetic, wistful, witty, wry and furiously petulant all at once. Along with the Stones, I will always regard them as a primary influence.”
But comparing Jagger’s dance moves to Davies’s lyricism was like comparing apples to oranges half the time. Both of them were fantastic at what they did, but if Jagger was electrifying the crowd by his dance moves, Davies was the one making people think a little bit harder. A tune like ‘Dead End Street’ certainly wasn’t the most “rock and roll” sounding song in the world, but the lyrics were taking the listener on a journey in a way that most of The Stones’ best work could never have matched.
Ray may have needed the help of his brother to bring those songs to life, but Townshend felt that the songs could stand on their own regardless of who was playing them. The crowd might have needed a little bit more excitement to get invested, but even after getting their ears blown out by tunes like ‘You Really Got Me’, albums like The Village Green Preservation Society were going to offer everyone something different than the usual peace and love approach everyone else was used to.