(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sat 14 February 2026 15:00, UK
Rock and roll has always meant something very different to Pete Townshend whenever he played guitar.
He loved the kind of energy that every one of his heroes created when he started performing, but after a few years of being one of the loudest musicians in the world, Townshend wanted his music to mean something more than a bunch of noise for the sake of noise. His music needed to be a lot more artistic, and by the time the band called it a day in the 1980s, he was already looking at what the new school of kids were doing.
Then again, there wasn’t a single soul on Earth that didn’t want to be Townshend when they first heard him blowing out his amplifier. Even if you’ve never played guitar in your life, there’s no way of watching footage ofTownshend doing the windmill strum or smashing his guitar back in the day and not wanting to do the same thing. But when The Who entered the operatic years, he didn’t want to create anarchy every time he played.
The excitement of those early shows was fun while it lasted, but Townshend felt like the true artists had to have some kind of inner meaning behind everything. He had already begun making some of the greatest rock operas that the world had ever seen, but looking at his own record collection, his favourite bands were the ones that had a message underneath all of the pop ditties.
He still loved bands like The Stones, but Bob Dylan was opening doors for what people could do, and while Townshend was becoming a bit more desensitised to rock and roll, he could at least respect what the next generation had to offer. Punk rock had brought everything back to basics, and while Townshend saw that as very healthy for rock and roll, he started to have his doubts when the new kids started to play up their looks.
He wasn’t interested in music being looked at as a fashion, and when the 1980s rolled around, he wasn’t quite as equipped for the MTV generation as everyone thought. The biggest bands of the time felt like they were making commercials for their songs half the time their videos came on, but Townshend was more than happy to talk up bands that actually had some substance behind them.
He might have had to look underground to find bands like REM, but he felt that bands like Def Leppard needed to be kicked out of the hit parade to make way for Athens’s finest, saying, “I’d trade 50 Def Leppards for…That’s not enough. I’d trade 150 Def Leppards for one REM. It’s as simple as that. To me, that’s just divine music; I like the sound of it, I think the words are brilliant, I think it’s just perfection, and the fact that none of them can kinda go [he mimics shredding] just doesn’t interest me at all, because if they wanted to, they could go out and they could hire any one of those guys.”
Granted, if you’ve been through the amount of rock and roll history that Townshend has, Def Leppard was always going to sound like a parody to some degree. They had some genuine hooks and are among the finest singers in the hard rock world to this day, but since every other song has the word ‘rock’ in it somewhere, it was much more interesting for him to parce out whatever the hell Michael Stipe was trying to say every time he heard records like Murmur and Reckoning.
But there is a way to find common ground between both acts as well. The crowd that was picking up REM records probably weren’t going to be blasting Pyromania the minute they got in their cars, but even if ‘Radio Free Europe’ seemed miles away from ‘Photograph’, both of them at least had a good ear for hooks whenever they made their masterpieces.