Quadrophenia: 6 essential ingredients for The Who’s sixth studio album

Quadrophenia is BBC 6 Music's Classic Album of the Day. Pete Townshend speaks to Steve Lamacq about producing his classic rock opera.

You can listen to the exclusive interview in full here.

“We were kind of lost in 1972 and I thought we had lost touch with our audience. I wanted Quandrophenia to reconnect us with our audience”

“It was the days of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and I saw all the early synthesisers. Baba O’Riley isn’t exactly synthesis. It’s the sound produced from an arpeggiating analogue organ. I cut it up into tiny short lengths and made repetitive cycling passages”

“I wanted a quadrophonic studio and they didn’t exist at the time! I felt the record needed to be quadrophonic; it had four parts, four aspects to it. And it was costly! But it was also a good studio; we sold it to Richard Branson.”

“I remember drinking cognac out of a pint mug”

“It was tough, I was in the studio every single day from about 11 o’clock, midday, through until two in the morning”

“It ended with me and Bobby Pridden our sound man psychotically overworking and with the famous incident in which we were late for a rehearsal. Roger got pissed off and I got pissed off… We had an argument and he knocked me out. I probably deserved it and it was kind of tragic. But the record company wanted the album out before Christmas!”

Quadrophenia was released in time for Christmas, in November 1973, but ultimately the album wouldn’t be performed live in full for 23 years: “It didn’t work for us. When we went to America we tried to play Quadrophenia as well as we could but it wasn’t great and in fact we would never play the whole thing until 1996.”