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Tue 12 August 2025 15:30, UK
Pete Townshend has been windmilling his way through rock history since back in the 1960s, but he has spent the vast majority of that time tethered to The Who, leaving him with limited time to immerse himself in the various side projects and collaborationswhich have arisen over the years.
From the moment The Who broke into the mainstream with the smash-hit success of their debut single ‘I Can’t Explain’ in late 1964, Townshend and the band worked tirelessly to uphold that level of success. However, the songwriter has never been solely driven by revenue.
Townshend was, at heart, an art school student, and his artistic aims for The Who became increasingly prevalent throughout the 1960s, with experimental, postmodern efforts like The Who Sell Out and the subsequent rock opera Tommy being perhaps the most overt examples of that fact.
As with any artist worth their salt, though, Townshend craved a sense of variety that The Who’s distinctive sound didn’t always afford him. What’s more, being stuck on a tour bus with the same three blokes for years on end is bound to cause tensions eventually. So, as the 1960s drew to a close, Townshend looked outside of the mod rock icons to scratch that insatiable itch for artistic expression. This creative journey resulted from the woefully short-lived group, Thunderclap Newman.
Townshend, along with The Who’s manager, Kit Lambert, originally set up the group in an effort to establish the songwriting skills of John ‘Speedy’ Keen, who wrote ‘Armenia City in the Sky’ from The Who Sell Out. Jimmy McCulloch, who would later find fame as the guitarist in Wings, was also a part of the line-up, and it was Townshend’s art school mate, Andy ‘Thunderclap’ Newman, who gave this newfound outfit their band name.
You will notice that Townshend is absent from the band’s line-up, but his presence on their recordings is undeniable. Not only did Townshend aid in the recording and production of all the band’s material, often from his home studio, but he also performed bass guitar for the band under the pseudonym Bijou Drains, presumably in an effort to distance the project from The Who.
Similarly to The Who, though, Thunderclap Newman landed a colossal hit with their debut single, when ‘Something in the Air’ spent three weeks at the top of the singles chart in 1969. However, the subsequent album release, Hollywood Dream, didn’t fare quite as well. After that sole album and a handful of tours, the group eventually folded in 1971, something which has been a constant source of regret for Townshend.
In the book Hollywood Dream: The Thunderclap Newman Story, the guitarist declared, “The tragedy is simply that there was only one Thunderclap Newman album.” He continued, “The beautiful Hollywood Dream, recorded entirely in my home studio, which was in a room meant to be a small bathroom. The saddest part of it all is that they don’t exist today.”
Thunderclap Newman’s legacy has certainly outlasted the band itself, with Tom Petty famously covering ‘Something in the Air’, and the project still clearly meaning a lot to Pete Townshend. Although the guitarist has had various other side projects outside The Who over the years, including a pretty lacklustre solo career, he affirms, “I learn more from working with other artists than I do working alone,” and Thunderclap Newman certainly taught him a lot with regard to production and collaboration.
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