But if anybody had the line-up, the chemistry, the attitude and the talent to be rock gods of the future, it was The Who. In 1965, ‘rock stars’ as we know them now did not exist. With three such battling egos continually colliding and erupting in one band, John Entwistle’s role as ‘The Ox’, the straight man, the strong, solid and utterly immovable bass player, was the crucial grounding force, the springboard from which all kinds of mayhem could spontaneously blow up. His extravagant, gurning, forward-drumming, cymbal-crashing bravado can be seen, retrospectively, to be right in character. His behaviour in The Who was equally child-like and attention-seeking, although hilarious at the same time. He was described in his Alperton Secondary School reports as ‘rather young for his age’, ‘idiotic’ and ‘retarded artistically’. Stirring up a whole bunch of mischief of his own, both on and off stage, was the baby-faced Keith Moon. On TV, even in the earliest days, Daltrey’s sullen glare was in startling contrast to the delivery of so many other grinning, goofy popsters of the era. On stage, he would react to Townshend’s rage with a furious energy of his own.
Daltrey was, of course, the ideal frontman for all of this boiling aggression. Townshend never loved Roger Daltrey, and their personal animosities would produce the final spark of frustration that made The Who such a combustible and tumultuous live band. In Pete Townshend they had an enormously intelligent thinker, a musical genius and an outrageously explosive performer.
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