One Hit No More, No. 32: Thunderclap Newman, Pete Townshend's Other Wild Vision

This will make sense by the end. Promise.

The Hit
If you weren’t fully sentient in 1969, or didn’t log enough time on a particular kind of “oldies/classic rock” radio programming, it’s likelier than not that you first heard Thunderclap Newman’s “Something in the Air” while watching something – e.g., Almost Famous, Kingpin, or an episode of My Name Is Earl. If I had to guess, I’d say you liked it. Some number of you probably asked the person next to you, “hey, who is that”?

The band was Thunderclap Newman. Yes, Thunderclap Newman.

It’s a pretty song, sounds a little like the Summer of Love, maybe with a bit of a hangover; the tinny (frankly pinched) quality in the vocals pairs with the twanging treble to create a bright sunny melody, so it sounds very late 60s West Coast. The bass and a spidery guitar sound creates a counter-melody that grounds that higher register, and there’s just a lot of fun orchestration going on. It’s just a nice song to listen to. Makes you feel like hugging strangers. Seriously.

The Rest of the Story
“I don’t quite know if that’s a fair description of it but I can tell you, for me, it was a bit sort of traumatic, except for having been a civil servant, and being used to dealing with the public.”

That’s what the actual Thunderclap Newman, aka, Andy Newman, had to say about backing into fame by way of a very famous fan-boy crush. The fan-boy in question: The Who’s Pete Townshend, who had seen Newman play a lunch-time show at Ealing Art School while he was studying graphic design. Newman wasn’t even scheduled to play, but, a mutual friend of Townshend and Newman’s named Rick Seaman suggested the latter to fill in. Unbeknownst to Newman (and for, like, literal years), Townshend left that lunch-time show he’d stumbled into the presence of overlooked genius. Newman had put out some recordings – importantly, recordings he made through multi-track recordings on single-track devices – and Townshend played one of them, Ice & Essence, something like into the ground. (This also files under “unbeknownst to Newman,” because he thought they sounded terrible.) He roped Newman into a couple projects over the years; Thunderclap Newman wound up being the last and largest of them. It’s worth pausing a second to talk about what Newman did at that lunch-time show (quote from Richard Barnes, Maximum R&B):

“He was a very strange and mysterious person who had never played to an audience before and he played and sung mostly his own weird compositions. He set a metronome going on top of the grand piano and just played for over an hour until he was stopped. He never looked at the audience once. The students went wild at the end.”

Pursuant to the quote at the top of this section, it’s also worth pausing to note that Townshend had to work on Newman to get him to buy into the project, who didn’t like the idea of giving up his General Postal Service pension. This was the man who adopted (and agreed to let Townshend borrow for said project) the stage name, Thunderclap Newman.

Over the six years that passed between that Ealing Art School lunch-time performance and the year Thunderclap Newman recorded “Something in the Air” (1969) and, honestly, some other quality songs, Townshend met a couple other musicians that he wanted to fit into something. Where Thunderclap Newman is concerned, the bigger name is John “Speedy” Keen, an interesting story in his own right. Based on what I’ve read about him, Keen played the role of a “personal assistant” to Townshend before that job really had a name (maybe; see Elvis’s entourage). While he originally signed on as Townshend’s “chauffeur” (a position that opened when The Who man flew off a motorway, and into a farmer’s field after a late gig and a long drive), Keen could play and write music – including The Who’s (impressive) “Armenia City in the Sky” and most of the songs for Thunderclap Newman. Keen also handled the vocals and, originally, the drums; once the band became a (short-lived) touring outfit, the band brought in Jack McCulloch, the brother of the band’s third founding member, to take over on drums.

That third member would be Jimmy McColluch, a guitarist who impressed Townshend when he opened for The Who on a quick tour of Scotland, playing in a band called One in a Million. McCulloch, though just 14 at the time, struck Townshend as a (very) young Eric Clapton, and that gave him three musicians that he wanted to work with, the only question was how to do it. Oh, and before leaving McCullouch behind, there’s this fun detail about how he wound up in London to work with the other two: “his father was actually working for a Scottish engineering firm that was actually making the transmission for the transporter that moved the Saturn rocket at the NASA headquarters for the moon shot.”

It’s somewhat important to step back (again) to talk about just how entirely goddamn crazy Pete Townshend went around this weird little snapshot in time. (I wrote a short history of The Who when I launched this site, and it contains the short version: “Things deteriorated until Townshend had a nervous breakdown and abandoned Lifehouse.”). In The Who’s timeline, it appears he was fairly deep into Tommy while working to get Thunderclap Newman off the ground. Unlike the rest of it, that part is pretty straightforward: Townshend dropped the band members into his home studio, one that happened to be equipped with the first 16-track tape recorder in the UK, and they hashed out some songs. Newman (in a really good, very long interview) talks about Townshend’s relatively hands-off approach. As noted above, Keen did most of the writing, but Townshend mostly offered tips on arrangements and orchestration; if Thunderclap Newman was his baby, he encouraged them more than he directed them.

To end with a coda, the entire project folded by April of 1971. While the band didn’t hate one another, they hardly came together organically and, given the age difference between, say, Newman and McCulloch, is it any surprise they never really got along? McCulloch later went on to play in Wings with Paul McCartney, so he did all right. Newman, meanwhile, got one more nudge from Townshend – a solo album called Rainbow that I haven’t listened to and that Newman calls unfinished (and not Rick Seaman’s fault!) – and Townshend also slipped his song, “Prelude,” onto his 1982 solo album, All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes (uhhh). Keen wound up…mostly as a session musician, but he also stayed hep enough to produce Motorhead.

About the Sampler
Because their material is functionally limited to 1969’s Hollywood, I’m just going to post a link to that album on Spotify when this post goes up. It has a couple good songs on it – not coincidentally – e.g., “Hollywood #1,” “The Reason,” “Wild Country” (which…reminds me of something more recent), and “Accidents,” which I only learned recently is like an Edward Gorey cartoon with a (really damn good) musical score.

Bottom line, unlike a lot of artists I’ve explored in this project, this was the rare one built on musician’s musicians – people who loved the medium more than they wanted to be famous. For what it’s worth, that’s kind of a treat.

Source(s)
Wikipedia - Thunderclap Newman
Pete Townshend, Official Site (2016; good for the key quote on Townshend’s man-crush)
The Who, Official Site (2016; Mark Wilkerson interview with Newman, BEST source)
Original Thunderclap Newman Promo Interview with Townshend (and lots of samples)
Wikipedia - Speedy Keen
Wikipedia - Jimmy McCullouch