Behind Blue Eyes: A Life Of Pete Townshend - Geoffrey Giuliano

Behind Blue Eyes: A Life Of Pete Townshend - Geoffrey Giuliano
Hodder & Stoughton

I avoided this book for years but eventually bought a very cheap copy on ebay, it wasn’t worth the effort.

Looking at Amazon - I couldn't be bothered scanning the cover, it looks as though this book has been republished at least 5 times.


John Hams, Q

That Pete Townshend has long deserved an exhaustive biography is beyond a reasonable doubt: few figures have exherted such an enormous influence on the passage of rock music from brash infancy to celebral adulthood, nor ruminated on its growth more eloquently. He’s a dream subject -given a wealth of supremely honest interviews, made yet more useful by his tireless propensity for piercing self analysis, someone with the requisite insight could do a beautiful job.

Unfortunately into the vacum has jumped Geoffrey Guiliano, the ghoulish New York writer who has given the world a welter of rock centric books that have rarely crawled above the level of opportunist hackery. Not suprisingly, this deceptively voluminous book (360 pages 100 of which are transparently flimsy appendices) is similarly dire. Small wonder assisting with the text is one Deborah Lynn Black whose most notable litery achievement hitherto has been her work on Gloria: The Autobiography of Gloria Hunniford.

That said Guiliano seems to be barely more qualified for the task in hand. His howling introduction lapses into indecipherable cod mysticism. (“ that secret swirling river of soul force that snakes invisibly through our lives and into the ocean of eternity”), his grasp of vital episodes in British cultural history is shocking (mod we learn began with the publication of Absolute Beginners) and he gets worryingly important facts a bit wrong, having neglected to even mention The Whos second album, he then gives the title of the ground breaking “mini opera” as You Are Forgiven, (even a casual Who fan will know that its called A Quick One, While Hes Away) and suggests that it was written two years after it was released.

So unless the ever innovative Townshend had access to a Tardis, youre forced to the conclusion that Guiliano doesn’t really know what he is on about. Worse still he glues a whole chapter together with the story about how he accompanied Townshend on a weekend of spiritual rejuvination and then nicked his home demos for Tommy, thereby experiencing an outbreak of guilt tinged regret. “As I struggled with my bags across the nearby common towards Richmond Tube I cried softly” he recalls.

Oh and to cap it all, theres no index.


Janet Street Porter, Sunday Times?


(This is probably one of the worst reviews I have ever read. I wonder if she even read the book? As it doesn’t seem to be mentioned too much.)

Of all the threadbare forms of journalism I have encountered in my 49 years of reading the most unspeakable is the pop interview. It takes several equally unrewarding forms, the pompous Radio One version aimed at spotty student musos listening in their bedroom at 10pm (usually focussing on studio equipment and remixes, yawn yawn), the vacous two minute chatorama on programmes such as Saturday morning childrens TV or the now totally gruesome Big Breakfast. Worst of all, the full blooded on bended knee grovel in one of the quality dailies supplements, a particularly useless example being a chat with Electronic recently in the Guardian. What do we learn from all these column inches of gunk about the songs themselves? Nothing.

Pete Townshend is now the victim of the next step in this canonisation of pop, the celebrity biography. Surely, it would be enough to write songs that millions the world over rush out and buy and spend their lives singing badly? Yet one of the crosses that a pop star has to bear is books such as this one.

Being a successful writer of popular songs means that you have enriched lives, given out anthems, created melodies that people have made love to, chant at big sporting events, weep to and hopefully play really loudly when trying to kick start a sexual encounter. Just where would be without Townshends best work? Like Elton John, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and the second generation of geniuses, which includes the Clash and the Sex Pistols, Townshend is an artist of the first rank, when it comes to discussing what life in post-war Britain was about for young people. The best pop musicians not only speak for their times through their music, they lead and inspire their generation to.

Geoffrey Giuiliano, according to the blurb on the dust jacket is a �Top celebrity biographer and popular music authority . . . and he is an accomplished actor, artist and animal rights advocate and 25 year student of Vedic culture. Get a life mate, as your actual ageing old mod would say. That fact is that Giuiliano met Townshend in 1976 through a mutual interest in the mystic and teacher Meher Baba. After Baba’s death Townshend decided to set up a study centre in Twickenham, dedicated to the master. Giuiliano wrote to him there and was invited over to help.

This book, like so many written by pedantic Americans who study pop music the way that other nations study the breeding habits of squid, is packed full of dates, facts, a decent index, a discography, a diary of events and endless quotes from a mysterious Who fan and long time insider codenamed Kathy. It does an adequate job of setting out Pete’s background (both parents were musicians) and the story of The Who, chronicling in inordinate detail the endless infighting, squabbling and permament war zone that constitutes life in one of the world’s most successful rock groups.

But whats new? The problem is that Townshend gives extremely revealing interviews. Toe curling almost . . . I admire him and his work immensely, but I can’t comprehend his need to be so painfully raw and willing to open up to anyone with a tape recorder or a notebook. In this case Giuiliano interestingly has not had that access and has had to write his book from cuttings and chats with mysterious insiders. For a Yank, his picture of growing up in West London in the 1960s isn’t bad at all; hes got all the right pub names, got the jargon, I was there, I saw the High Numbers - as The Who were originally called - at the Oldfield Tavern in Greenford and then at the Railway Tavern. I was a mod who stood in St Marys ballroom in Putney in 1963 and 1964 (my dates, unlike the authors are a bit hazy) and threw coins at the tragic Brian Poole and the tremeloes, screaming at them to leave the stage so that we could groove to Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. I got into Ready Steady Go when The Who were on and stood proudly in my fake eyelashes and hobble skirt, cool as hell.

I first met Townshend socially in Twickenham in the late 1960s, through Mike McInnery, his friend who designed the album cover for Tommy. McInnery, Billie Nichols, the song writer, and Ronnie Lane were all part of a Twickenham group of friends and Baba devotees who scarcely rate a mention here. The book is churlish too, about pete’s wife karen, describing her as dour. That’s about one thing that this intelligent long suffering woman isn’t.

Townshend’s best memorial will be his best songs, played at full volume when you’re drunk. No amount of analysis about the lyrics helps you enjoy them one iota more or less. Townshend himself has always been totally contradictory, depending on who is interviewing him - about what the lyrics are about or inspired by, anyway. What does it matter? With My Generation, Substitute, I Can See For Miles and Pictures of Lily, he has given us jewels. You may not like Quadrophenia or Tommy, nor find his later work, such as Iron Man, that catchy, but let,s not deny genius when we see it.

Sadly for Pete, the later 20th Century has spawned a pond life culture fed by media studies in the classroom, degrees in pop music at second rate universities and book publishers who want to cash in on baby boomer generation. This book is part of the general flotsam. Buy the music, marvel that you could ever get into those tiny dresses and try to decipher your old diaries. Old mods never die you know, two bars of My Generation and our eyes get all misty at the thought of those wild times. We really knew how to get trashed.