Rock to the rescue: I Can See For Miles and Pete Townshend’s bid to save popular music

The Who’s Pete Townshend didn’t take well to late-’60s hippie culture, or at least to its impact on pop music. In a 1993 interview with Nick Dent-Robinson he recalled his disgruntlement with the music scene of that period, which he complained had been afflicted with “a kind of post-psychedelic wetness that seemed to be around and soaking everything up”. Evidently he felt particularly aggrieved that the Rolling Stones of all groups should have succumbed to this malaise: “You could write a song ‘Weeee love you, Weee love you’ and the bloody thing would get to number 4 in the charts instantly.”

Townshend said he had composed the album Tommy in an effort to “rescue the pop song” from its sorry predicament. But this also provided an insight into the thinking behind I Can See For Miles, the Who single released in the UK in October 1967, nearly a year before the recording of Tommy commenced. Completed over the course of several months at studios in the UK and US, I Can See For Miles was a major work that embodied Townshend’s ambition to transform and revitalise popular music.

Unfortunately for Pete, I Can See For Miles was not the massive game-changing hit that he had intended and expected. His resentment at a record-buying public who reacted with less than than total enthusiasm to his critically acclaimed masterpiece (Dave Marsh describes it as “quite simply the most exciting piece of music the Who ever recorded”) was made clear in an interview with Ray Tolliday, published in the October 1971 issue of Cream magazine. Tolliday listed the succession of Who top five hits between 1965 and 1967 — My Generation, Substitute, I’m A Boy, Happy Jack, Pictures of Lily — before continuing:

“Then came ‘I Can See For Miles’, a record I thought was superb. When Pete talked about this there was still some trace of bitterness. ‘That was a real heartbreaker for me. It was the number we’d been saving, thinking that if The Who ever got into trouble that would be the one that would pull us out. The Who did a marvellous performance on it, in my opinion. Kit [Lambert] did an incredible production, and we got a marvellous pressing of it. It reached number seventeen in the charts and the day I saw it was about to go down without reaching any higher, I spat on the British record buyer. To me, this was the ultimate Who record and yet it didn’t sell. After that we launched a series of singles that were all total disasters and this really brought us down’.”

On the question of its chart placing, the official figure is that I Can See For Miles reached #10, but that was on the chart compiled by the music trade publication Record Retailer, which is now accepted as canon for the 1960–69 period. At the time, it was the mass circulation popular papers New Musical Express and Melody Maker whose charts were far more influential, and I Can See For Miles failed to crack the top ten in either of them, peaking at #13 in the NME and #12 in Melody Maker. This was the context for Townshend’s angry comment about having “spat on the British record buyer” (aggravated by the fact that he misremembered the record as only reaching #17).

Townshend’s claim that after I Can See For Miles’ disappointing chart showing the Who released “a series of singles that were all total disasters” was a only a slight exaggeration. There were in fact two follow-up singles in 1968, neither of which managed to break into the top twenty. The quirky and entertaining but distinctly un-Who-like Dogs got no higher than #25, and although it has its admirers (this writer included) it is usually relegated to the status of an obscure anomaly in the Who’s catalogue. By contrast the other single, Magic Bus, became a live staple for the group and is now recognised as a Who classic. But in 1968 it did even worse than Dogs, charting at a lowly #26.

It wasn’t until the success of Tommy’s lead single Pinball Wizard, which occupied the #4 position for four weeks in April-May 1969, that the Who’s commercial fortunes saw an upturn. This revival was cemented by the release of Tommy itself, which reached #2 on the official BMRB-compiled albums chart (#3 and #4 respectively on the Melody Maker and NME charts). Like the Kinks, whose popular appeal similarly declined from late 1967, the Who had suffered from the persistence of their earlier image as a singles-oriented pop group. Billed rather pretentiously as an opera and spread across two LPs, Tommy enabled the Who to put that image behind them and attract the growing number of fans who rejected pop music in favour of album-based rock, with its claims to seriousness and authenticity.

If I Can See For Miles had been released in the same year as Tommy, when rockism was in the ascendant, it would probably have done much better. In 1967 the bifurcation of popular music into pop and rock was in its early stages, and pop was still predominant. The charts that year were also marked by a proliferation of MOR ballads such as Engelbert Humperdinck’s Release Me, which notoriously kept the Beatles’ Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields off the top spot. At the same time as I Can See For Miles was struggling to win an audience for its tougher, more challenging approach to popular music, blues singer Long John Baldry was making a successful move in the opposite direction, having turned his back on R&B to score a #1 hit with the sentimental ballad Let The Heartaches Begin.

In those circustances a loud, aggressive, guitar-driven recording like I Can See For Miles appeared rather incongruous. While in retrospect it can be seen as anticipating the coming wave of hard rock, at the time it sounded more like a throwback to an earlier period — which was perhaps unsurprising, given that Townshend later revealed that he’d started writing the song in early 1966. So the record’s commercial underperformance can be explained by the fact that it came both too early and too late. (John Atkins’ observation in The Who on Record that I Can See For Miles “was perfectly in tune with the times” misses the point entirely.)

Another aspect of I Can See For Miles worth examining is the record’s influence on Helter Skelter, the Paul McCartney composition from the Beatles’ White Album which is itself sometimes hailed as a precursor of hard rock or even heavy metal. In Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now Barry Miles recounts how “Paul came up with the idea for ‘Helter Skelter’ in Scotland after reading an interview with Pete Townshend in which he described the Who’s new single, ‘I Can See for Miles’, as the loudest, rawest, dirtiest and most uncompromising song they had ever done.” He quotes McCartney as saying:

“I was always trying to write something different, trying to not write in character, and I read this and I was inspired, Oh, wow! Yeah! Just that one little paragraph was enough to inspire me; to make me make a move. So I sat down and wrote ‘Helter Skelter’ to be the most raucous vocal, the loudest drums, et cetera et cetera…. I went into the studio and said, ‘Hey, look, I’ve read this thing. Let’s do it!’ We got the engineers and George Martin to hike up the drum sound and really get it as loud and horrible as it could and we played it and said, ‘No, it still sounds too safe, it’s got to get louder and dirtier.’ We tried everything we could to dirty it up and in the end you can hear Ringo say, ‘I’ve got blisters on my fingers.’ That wasn’t a joke put-on: his hands were actually bleeding at the end of the take, he’d been drumming so ferociously.”

The problem with this account, based on McCartney’s recollections a quarter-century or more after the event, is that nobody has ever been able to locate the interview in which Townshend supposedly made those comments. It is also contradicted by McCartney himself in the interview he did with Radio Luxembourg in November 1968, on the eve of the White Album’s release, where he presented a rather different version of how Helter Skelter came to be written:

“I’d read a review of a record which said, ‘And this group really goes wild, there’s echo on everything, they’re screaming their heads off.’ And I just remember thinking, ‘Oh, it’d be great to do one. Pity they’ve done it. Must be great — really screaming record.’ And then I heard their record and it was quite straight, and it was very sort of sophisticated. It wasn’t rough and screaming and tape echo at all. So I thought, ‘Oh well, we’ll do one like that, then’. And I had this song called ‘Helter Skelter’ which is just a ridiculous song. So we did it like that, ’cos I liked noise.”

McCartney didn’t name the record or the group. Taken in conjunction with his later reference to Pete Townshend, though, this certainly sounds like it was a review of I Can See for Miles that he had read. But which one?

It’s sometimes suggested that McCartney was referring to Chris Welch’s article in the 14 October 1967 issue of Melody Maker, where I Can See For Miles received the following rave review: “In a town without end, with a moon that never sets, there is a fire burning. It is the fire of The Who, once thought diminished or dying, but obviously glowing with that renewed heat. Forget Happy Jack sitting in sand on the Isle of Man, this marathon epic of swearing cymbals and cursing guitars marks the return of The Who as a major freakout force. Recorded in America, it’s a Pete Townshend composition filled with Townshend mystery and menace, and delivered by the emphatic Mr. Roger Daltrey. Nobody could deceive him because there is magic in his eyes and he can see for miles. And The Who are going to see their way back into the chart.”

However, it is also possible that McCartney had read another article, by Tony Palmer in the 15 October 1967 issue of the Observer, where I Can See For Miles was described in no less hyperbolic terms: “The Who have a sensational new record out this week, ‘I Can See For Miles’. It has all the rowdy exuberance that one always hopes their music will contain. Somehow their last few records, such as ‘Pictures of Lily’ and ‘Happy Jack’, have been just too clever, too self-consciously articulate. But now the Who’s instinctive violence has broken loose with brilliant effect….. A pounding ostinato bass is used to batter quite a simple lyrical motif into an endless stream of chordal frenzies; the lead guitar, meanwhile, screams away with a falling counterpoint of relentless fury, whilst Keith Moon, astride his 14 drums, gives a breathtaking demonstration of free rhythmic drumming.”

Given that the Beatles didn’t start work on Helter Skelter until July 1968, eight months after the publication of the Welch and Palmer reviews, McCartney’s story about immediately rushing into the studio to record his response to I Can See For Miles obviously doesn’t hold up. However, there is no reason to doubt his general point that it was the Who’s record that provided the inspiration for Helter Skelter. To that extent anyway, I Can See For Miles definitely did serve Townshend’s aim of shifting musical culture in a more hard-edged direction.

Sources

John Atkins, The Who on Record: A Critical History, 1963–1998 (2000)
Nick Dent-Robinson, “Pete Townshend — Interview” (1993), Penny Black Music
Dave Marsh, Before I Get Old: The Story of The Who (1983)
Paul McCartney, Interview with Radio Luxembourg, 20 November 1968 (transcript at Beatles Interview Database)
Bob Pitt, “Fifty years since ‘Something Else’ (Or the decline and fall of the Kinks)”, Medium, September 2017
Bob Pitt, “Why did Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields fail to top the charts in 1967?”, Medium, July 2023
Ray Tolliday, “Well, what would you have done after Tommy?”, Cream, October 1971
Pete Townshend, Who I Am: A Memoir (2012)
Chris Welch, “Magic in the Who’s eyes and a big hit”, Melody Maker, 14 October 1967

First published on Medium in August 2025