Mod Man: Jack Lyons, The Who’s ‘fifth member’

A who's Who of the Sixties through Irish Jack’s eyes

ONE EVENING, in the early 1960s, a teenage Jack Lyons, from Cork, found himself at a floodlit football match in Stamford Bridge. The floodlights impressed him.

But he was soon jolted by electricity of a different kind.

“This instrumental came on at half time,” explained Lyons, on Irish Jack (Saturday’s sparkling episode of The Curious Ear), “It was The Shadows’ Apache.

“And I don’t think I’ve ever heard any piece of music as blood-curdling”. Those “magic moments”, Lyons said, changed his life. Though not, perhaps, as you’d expect.

Lyons was, at the time, living with his aunt and uncle in a council flat in Shepherd’s Bush, while working as a postboy for the London Electricity Board.

“You’d imagine that would have been the point for me where I’d say, ‘Right. I’m going to learn to play guitar’. But I didn’t. It did something else to me instead”.

What it did was awake in him an appetite for this new music.

WINKLEPICKERS

He needed to hear more. And so, the following Saturday night, he turned up at a local dance hall, resplendent in “a pair of winklepicker shoes, red nylon socks” and “check dogtooth trousers”. On his head “was perched a green Robin Hood hat with a feather”.

The outfit may have been extravagant, but Lyons was cripplingly self-conscious.

He hated his curly hair. He was all too aware of his accent. His workmates told him that ‘Jackie’ – the name he went by at home in Ireland – was “a girl’s name”.

He felt ashamed of his height, or lack thereof. “I went to bed thinking about them,” said Lyons of these “complexes”.

“And none of them seemed likely to change.”

But things did change. As he sat in the dance hall feeling sorry for himself, he began focusing on “this one guy in the band” on stage. The band was The Detours (very Shadows-like, Lyons thought).

Their arresting guitarist was tall, with a nose that looked, Lyons said, like a “classical displacement of the face”. The gig ended. Lyons introduced himself to this intriguing figure, and thus began “a 50-year friendship”.

That guitarist? Pete Townshend.

And The Detours? They soon became The Who.

Lyons’ account of his time touring with the band (and becoming The Who’s de facto “fifth member”) was a delight.

Songs were named in his honour. The character of ‘Jimmy’ in Quadrophenia was, apparently, based on him (he had, by that time, become a high-profile Mod).

But Irish Jack offered more than, merely, a nostalgic portrait of an iconic band.

It movingly illuminated Irish life in 1960s London and, through Lyons, the expat struggle.

Lyons later moved back to Cork, got married and became a postman. But he never lost touch with Townshend, Daltrey et al.

And now, when they talk, they “never talk Who”.

“It’s all about grandchildren”, said Lyons. “So it’s . . . lovely . . . that after all that time our friendship evolved into that.”

THE WEEK IN RADIO