A Band With Built-In Hate
Peter Stanfield Reaktion Books £15.99
In a recent interview, Pete Townshend said he sometimes feels like he ended up in the wrong band. The mythology of The Who tends to accentuate the craziness: the smashed guitars, inter-band feuds, chemical excess and Keith Moon as a constantly ticking time bomb.
Meanwhile, Townshend has always striven to introduce more rarefied concepts from visual art, film, literature and technology into rock ’n’ roll.
If Roger Daltrey’s 2018 autobiography was a prosaic foot soldier’s telling of the Who story, here is the view from the high plains. A Band With Built-In Hate is a cultural thesis in which the group sometimes appear as little more than bit-part players in a story covering Mods, Pop Art, French New Wave, Gustav Metzger and, in particular, the writings of pioneering music journalist Nik Cohn, who gets more page time here than anyone save Townshend.
The mythology of The Who (above) tends to accentuate the craziness: the smashed guitars, inter-band feuds, chemical excess and Keith Moon as a constantly ticking time bomb
Readers seeking reheated tales of Moon dressing in Nazi regalia and picking fights with Steve McQueen should shop elsewhere. A professor of film, Stanfield specialises in pop culture and presents The Who as a band that ‘dissembled pop and made our understanding of the 1960s art scene more multifaceted’.
He’s good on the artifice of their beginnings. Aspiring auteurs Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp picked The Who (then called The High Numbers) as a vehicle for an anthropological study of the Mod ‘fad’.
The band played the part as a Pop Art experiment, regarding Mod as a folk devil that served their antagonistic purposes.
The best parts of the book mirror the best of The Who, fizzing with ideas and connections. Trawling the mid-1960s London scene, Stanfield draws links between the Tate and the Marquee, the ‘tight and clean’ opening of I Can’t Explain and Robert Fraser’s vogueish art gallery.
The Who were both high- and low-brow, ‘delinquent mischief-makers and radical aesthetes’.
For Stanfield, ‘their mutinous stance’ made them ‘recusants for the new pop age’. He notes the subversive intent of singing My Generation while ‘dressed in jackets made from flags and shirts with rows of medals worn without entitlement’.
Their abrasive, oppositional live performances verged on avant garde anti-music.
Like the band, Stanfield occasionally over-reaches, granting every casual flex cultural significance. When Townshend grumbles about The Who’s debut album shortly after its release, it’s not simply routine artistic dissatisfaction – ‘as with the guitars and amplifiers he trashed on stage, [he] was practising a form of auto-destruction’.
The author is sometimes so preoccupied with the subtext he misses the obvious: Daltrey’s scream at the end of Won’t Get Fooled Again is as eloquent as any thesis.
The post-1971 period is given fairly cursory attention, as rock’s rebellion becomes commodified and Stanfield increasingly resorts to critiquing the critics. A nostalgic opus, Quadrophenia in 1973 marks the moment ‘The Who’s past became their present’ – as it has remained.
Dutifully performing the old hits, they long ago became part of the establishment, but the first half of this book vividly reanimates the nasty, transgressive, scene-shaping thrill of their beginnings. Perhaps Townshend was in the right band all along.
Consent: A Memoir
Vanessa Springora HarperVia £12.99
Rating: 
Does literature really excuse everything?’ asks Vanessa Springora in her memoir, a searing indictment of an overly permissive era that has triggered a national reckoning in France.
Consent chronicles Springora’s teenage affair with Gabriel Matzneff, an author whose brazen exaltation of sexual relationships with adolescents earned him fame as a provocateur.
In the 1970s, some liberals petitioned for the decriminalisation of adult-juvenile sexual activity. Matzneff exploited this cultural context, and the veneration of art over morality, by enshrining his predilections in literature; Springora argues that he wrote to secure impunity.
Vanessa Springora’s teenage affair with Gabriel Matzneff (above), an author whose brazen exaltation of sexual relationships with adolescents earned him fame as a provocateur
His books – featuring letters proving the consent of his ‘muses’ – are ripostes to paedophilia accusations but fail to recognise that the vulnerability of these minors negates their consent.
Starved of paternal love, the 13-year-old Springora was intoxicated by Matzneff’s attention when they met at dinner with her mother. ‘G.’, aged 50, bombarded ‘V.’ with letters and invited her to his flat, where they became lovers when she was 14.
Her mother – who sometimes invited G. to dine à trois – and the police, although alerted, failed to intervene.
Suffering acute anxiety, V. broke with an increasingly manipulative G., aged 15, yet he haunted her, publishing distorted retellings of their relationship. The rape was twofold, a theft of adolescence and identity.
It took years of psychoanalysis to accept that she had been a victim, to rebuild trust.
Books were tainted yet inescapable, and Springora is now director of the Paris publisher Julliard. In dialogue with literary history, she reclaims her story – threaded with allusions from Nabokov to Proust – challenging the elite on the very turf that shielded Matzneff.
Shattering a prolonged, collective silence, Springora’s fierce and controlled account of systemic negligence has launched a rape investigation. Metzneff’s diaries have been withdrawn from bookshops.
Finally, the predator is muzzled, caught ‘in his own trap’.
Madeleine Feeny