In common, I think, with most writers published by Faber and Faber I am proud for umpteen reasons to be associated with this august, 80-year-old, fiercely independent firm. But in my case a special gratification is that Pete Townshend used to work there. And if you’re a mad Who fan, as am I, then such a truth is golden.

It was in July 1983 that Townshend took up an editorial role at Faber, invited by the then chief publisher Matthew Evans. Townshend had always been interested in poetry and prose, and was increasingly worn down by the treadmill of his rock existence, especially so after Keith Moon’s sorry death. More recently he reminisced to the writer Simon Garfield (whose early work he edited at Faber) that he accepted the Evans offer because he ‘needed some dignity’, which is a shard of Townshend wit but also a considerable tribute to Faber.

Townshend’s brief was fairly free, and he oversaw a fair bit of new fiction and non-fiction, but one of his special enthusiasms was for books about rock and pop. Townshend has always been one of the most eloquent advocates of these musical forms as art, even if it be fleeting and possibly ephemeral ‘Pop Art’. As he told the Independent only a few years back, ‘Even Pete Waterman has had a moment or two. He is a bit of factory lad, but there must be people out there who remember a Kylie song as their perfect moment. That’s what makes pop so great…’

As I’ve heard it from folk who were at Faber round this era, Townshend believed that significant musical trends were worthy of more-or-less instant chronicle. Lee Brackstone, Townshend’s successor in publishing about contemporary music at Faber, has written:

‘Notable Townshend projects included Charles Shaar Murray’s award-winning Crosstown Traffic, Jon Savage’s landmark England’s Dreaming, The Rolling Stones’ Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus (a photographic record of the Stones’ ‘lost’ psychedelic performance movie when they were upstaged by Townshend’s The Who) and Dave Rimmer’s Like Punk Never Happened…’

That last title seems a strange anomaly: a study by a Smash Hits writer of Culture Club and the ‘New Romantics’, musically about as candy-floss-like as you could get, and ostensibly part of the reason why Townshend felt so estranged from pop in the early 1980s, at least as he told Simon Garfield:

‘We’d worn out the form. Punk had shaken everything, but what followed was computers and Linn drums and Heaven 17 and Scritti Politti. Interesting music, but quite manufactured and complex, and much less of the blood…’

But Heaven 17, too, is Pop Art. And it’s to Townshend’s credit that he was ready to give a hearing to and find a readership for writing about the sort of music that was drowning out some of the sounds he had loved.

Lee Brackstone’s music list at Faber remains a brilliant mix-tape on paper, open to any sounds that penetrate the head or the pop culture and stick there. Just consider the recently-founded journal Loops, in partnership with Domino Records, which shifts easily between passions for Prince and Nick Drake, Joy Division and Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Michael Jackson and Jelly Roll Morton. The magnum opus of the list in recent years has been Simon Reynolds’ much admired Rip It Up and Start Again, a study of the ‘postpunk’ of 1978-1984, in which key players are the aforementioned Scritti Politti: purveyors of politicised indie-label dub-skank who morphed into a byword for springy, breathy 80s electronic pop that nonetheless keenly name-checked Immanuel Kant.

I should confess my feeling for music writing waxes and wanes. A lot of it is personal (writers roughly your own age telling you how they feel when they listen to certain songs, a feeling we the readers tend to ‘get’ already.) A lot more of it is pseudo-sociological: rather straining for gravity by telling us what else was going on in the world when Dylan or Marvin Gaye or Frankie Goes To Hollywood (or whoever) released their celebrated recordings. I prefer music writing that tells you, ideally in the artist’s own words, how the record got made, what were the big decisions and happy accidents, such revelations being one of the many virtues of Bob Dylan’s celebrated Chronicles. There’s also a place for old-fashioned put-the-work-in-order scholarship, which is why the best book about The Who is Maximum R&B, a goldmine of trainspotter-information in chronological form, infinitely preferable to the ponderous liner notes that accompany most re-mastered Who long-players on CD.
It’s hard to write well about any art-form unless you know by experience how that form functions on a mechanical level. Music is the hardest challenge of all in that respect. The great George Steiner, in his 1989 study Real Presences, took up the contention of Claude Levi-Strauss that ‘the invention of melody is the supreme mystery of man.’ Steiner lamented:

‘When it speaks of music language is lame. Customarily it takes refuge in the pathos of simile… The messianic intimation in music is often manifest. But attempts to verbalise it produce impotent metaphors…. In music, at a more radical level than in either literature or the arts, the best of intelligence, interpretative and critical, is musical. Asked to explain a difficult étude, Schumann sat down and played it again…’

Steiner’s chief concern is for what we call ‘classical music’, what he tends to call ‘supreme music.’ But rock has its own answer to his critical contention, namely the cover version. How well we understand Bob Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watchtower’ when it is translated by Jimi Hendrix! How brightly does Tricky elucidate Chuck D’s ‘Black Steel In the Hour of Chaos’! What depths did Richard Thompson discover in the ‘Oops I Did It Again’ of Britney Spears!

And, by turn, we should not overlook or diminish the power of a seasoned critic, a close listener, a succinct observer, to show us the way music works. To read Greil Marcus’s massively influential Mystery Train, to hear him extolling the greatness in The Band’s reading of Holland-Dozier-Holland’s ‘Baby Don’t You Do It’, is to enjoy a beautiful mind at work.

Lest I forget, even George Steiner in Real Presences grants popular music its power: ‘[F]or many human beings,’ he writes, ‘music has been the religion which they believe in. In the ecstasies of Pop and of Rock, the overlap is strident.’ This takes us back to Pete Townshend, whose faith in something bigger is encapsulated by several major lyrics, most memorably ‘Pure and Easy’ from 1971’s Who’s Next, also a key song in the much-delayed Lifehouse cycle. Pure and Easy speaks of a sort of musical ur-note in a shared human consciousness (‘The note is eternal, I hear it, it sees me’). It speaks of ‘the simple secret of the note in us all.’ Roger Daltrey sings these lines, as usual, but Townshend’s own voice surges forward at the end over his trademark windmill power chords: ‘There once was a note, listen…’

Interviewed by Melvyn Bragg for a South Bank Show in 1985, Townshend reaffirmed his faith in rock as possessing a quasi-religious force through its particular poetry and extraordinary commonality. Yet almost in the next sentence he was dismissing himself and fellow ‘ageing rock performers’ as the equivalent of Morris Dancers, preserving a possibly moribund tradition by mere creaking repetition. (You’ll find it here).

I suspect Townshend retains the ability to be in two minds on the issue; and I also suspect he might take pride and joy in Faber’s latest music title, Rob Young’s Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music. Pride because of his instigation of the pop/rock list at Faber, and joy because Young’s book is both an exemplary piece of musical-cultural history/exegesis, and a special declaration of love for music’s deep-lying and deep-moving powers. To say Electric Eden is a study of folk music in the British Isles over the last 200 years is really to cramp the book’s style, for it has an even more generous embrace of our island dreams, our unsung and inspirational landscapes, our warring urges as peoples, to return to a sunlit garden sanctuary even while we hook up the power-lines that will propel us into the future.

From Vaughan Williams to Kate Bush, Young shows us how ‘phantoms of the agrarian past’ have been invoked and then ‘channelled via an electrified present.’ Folk often seems to evoke either some conservative Little England preservation project, or else some misguidedly utopian project for enlightening the masses as to the historical basis of their exploitation. In fact, as Young shows, it is all this and more: above all else, an anvil on which to strike sparks, a cultural well that never dries. Pete Townshend is right, as are many of us, to find Morris dancing a little ridiculous to the eye. But look at this pursuit through the lens of The Wicker Man or its embrace by Ashley Hutchings of Fairport Convention, and you see what else it means. Such are the truths of tradition, and their yet more truthful revisiting and reinterpretation.

Young quotes Richard Thompson as saying that ‘Nothing resonates like an old song’… Thompson’s reading of Britney Spears may one day be heard as a raiding of tradition no different or any less archival than Fairport Convention’s celebrated revivals of the folksongs ‘Tam Lin’ or ‘She Moved Through the Fair.’ Faber’s music list acknowledges this delicious heretical canon, just as Pete Townshend surely intended. There once was a note. Listen…

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