PETE TOWNSHEND

With The Who he wrote some of the great songs from the first wave of pop, then went on to conquer the rock world. In recent years he’s mostly been involved in solo work. In the 60s he famously wrote the lyric: ‘Hope I die before I get old.’ Thankfully he didn't.

- Ian Fortnam

As the Second World War lurched to its conclusion, Peter Dennis Blandford Townshend was born in Chiswick Hospital in West London. Pete’s early years were shaped by both the grim austerity that defined the immediate post-war era, and an insecure family background. His father Cliff was a professional musician, and was mid-way through a gig in Germany with the RAF Dance Orchestra when informed of Pete’s nativity. His mother Betty, a former singer who'd lied about her age to enlist in 1941 and had ended up singing with her soon-to-be husband’s band, was so livid at Cliff’s absence that she moved out of the family home.

The couple soon reconciled, but their relationship - and consequently Pete’s childhood - was marked by an ongoing volatility that culminated in Pete being sent away to live with his “quite bonkers” grandmother, a rash decision that would ultimately engender significant and lasting consequences.

Surrounded by music, Pete initially sought solace in his father's harmonica, but upon seeing Bill Haley’s Comets in Rock Around The Clock at the age of 12, decided that the guitar was “the only instrument that mattered”.

With skiffle arriving into the nascent British rock’n’roll zeitgeist in 1957, 12-year-old Pete took to the stage for the first time, plunking frantically at a banjo with dixieland jazz/skiffle hybrid The Confederates (who also included one John Entwistle on trumpet) at the Congo Club in Acton, West London.

A few months after enrolling at Ealing Art College in '61, Pete’s adept mastery of The Shadows’ Man Of Mystery saw him headhunted by bequiffed Teddy boy Roger Daltrey - a formidable old school acquaintance who'd been unceremoniously expelled for smoking - to join his band The Detours.