Even in the early days when they were the mouthpiece for Mod, a relatively short-lived flowering of narcissism and violence among the kids of London’s East End, The Who had style.

They had style and they had power. Surrounded by high-powered amps, their music poured forth in thunderous waves of electronic sound.

It was loud and violent and exciting. It assailed your ear drums and made your head spin.

The Who were never like the plastic manufactured “image” stars of the time. They were moody and uncompromising—they played to kill.

Townshend would buffoon around savagely battering the amp with his guitar; Daltrey swung his mike like a lassoo and Keith Moon, eyes popping and sweat pouring down his face, drummed like a madman.

They were sustained by the intellectual Townshend who wrote hit songs like other kids write letters to their mums. The songs were the songs of the modern urban teenager—angry, frustrated, confused (“Substitute,” “My Generation”).

Just developed

They haven’t changed, I thought, when I saw them at Trentham Gardens on Monday — they have just developed.

Everything that has happened to The Who in the last two or three years—America, “Tommy,” New York Met, Woodstock—has confirmed the promise of the early sixties. Townshend is now writing as well as anyone; their stage act is the most exciting experience going.

No-one has yet mastered electronics better than The Who. They know what they want and their hand-picked crew of technicians give it to them. It’s part of the act and it’s got to be right.

On Monday the musico-electronic experience that is The Who filled the vast, cavernous ballroom of Trentham Gardens in a way nothing has ever done before.

That superb climax of “Tommy,” where Daltrey groans “See me . . . feel me . . . touch me . . . heal me” — for me the most memorable sequence in “Woodstock”—had me and a few thousand others enraptured.

When I described it to an older colleague, he wondered how anything that depended so much on electronics could be termed “music.”

Well, the Oxford Dictionary defines music as “the art of combining sounds with a view to beauty of form and expression of emotion . . . sounds so produced.”

The Who combine sounds

Pop Spot with ALAN COOKMAN

just as Mozart did, but with the aid of devices that were not available to Mozart. Does that make the end product any less valuable, musically? I think not.

At any rate, my own estimation of The Who as musicians was considerably enhanced by Monday’s experience.

I am sorry I haven’t the space to say too much about The James Gang, whom everybody agreed were great. They are clearly one of the best rock bands around and North Staffordshire was lucky to get a hearing.

Townshend said they were “destined to be one of the major names on the American Rock Scene.” They are.