66/10/15          Record Mirror: Anti-Love. You won’t find any moon-June romance in songs from the Who. “I suppose you could say that we’re the most unromantic group around.” The speaker was John Entwistle, bass man with the Who and formerly the mystery man of the group. John continued: “We’ve never recorded a real love song. And we couldn’t do it now. It just wouldn’t be our image. The songs that we write, especially Pete, are very unromantic and we somehow can’t image ourselves singing love songs, especially at this stage. I mean, “I’m A Boy” is almost a queer song. I don’t know whether or not singing about love makes any difference to the fans. I don’t think so. But we do have quite a large following of blokes which may have something to do with this anti-love thing.” John’s musical career goes back a long way before the Who. He studied music for many years at school (he has been able to read and write music for thirteen years) and passed several musical examinations. He played in a 200-piece your orchestra at school, and leaned to play several brass instruments very proficiently, including the French horn and the trumpet. “But when I left school, I abandoned a lot of the things I had learned,” he explained. “You see, I had started playing bass at school and it was there that Pete and I started a group. We met Roger who was in the year above us, and we formed the Who – not that we were called that – with another drummer. We left school, and eventually turned pro, and changed drummers and names. Keith joined us just before we became the High Numbers, and we had been playing together, us three, for about three years. Keith fitted in very well though. Recently though, we’ve been experimenting with new sounds, and my musical background has come in useful, I think. I’ve been using French horn on some of the tracks on our new LP. It’s a beautiful instrument. It cost me about £200 and it’s very sensitive. The thing is though, that I can’t keep on playing brass for any length of time. My lip isn’t strong enough yet – when you play brass you have to develop your lip. When I was at school I could play trumpet for any length of time. Now I have to stop after about half an hour.” John has written two songs for the new Who LP. One is “Whiskey Man” and the other is “Boris the Spider”. In fact, all of the Who have written songs for the disc, and all of them are featured singing lead vocal on the LP. The Who are shortly off on a Continental tour, then they will be coming back to Britain for a package show with the Merseys. But they don’t perform as much as they used to. They are all too busy writing songs and thinking up ideas. John doesn’t take so much part in the smashing-up antics of the rest of the group. Does he disapprove? “Oh no. I like all the smashing up. But it’s part of the act. I stand there and look amazed and horrified as the others smash up valuable equipment. Then at the end of the song, on my last note, I adjust the feedback to keep the note going and drop the guitar heavily on the stage. It makes a terrific sound, and that’s the end of the number. I tried to smash my guitar up once, but I couldn’t. I think it’s impossible – I shove it into an amplifier, but it just went straight through and came out the other side. There was hardly any damage done to the guitar at all.” Don’t expect to see John playing any brass on stage though, even though there might be some bigger sounds on their newer records. The Who don’t intend to have brass on stage, and they won’t be having any other musicians on stage with them either. They pay out enough money on replacing instruments, without paying any more musicians … NORMAN JOPLING. (p. 6)

You know when I post stuff here, I like to share something rare or deepcut-ish, this is one of those.