Pete Townshend Originally Joined The Who Because the “School Bully” Asked Him to, but He Didn’t Think It’d Last

Schoolyard dynamics can be brutal, and sometimes, the best way to protect yourself is to get in the good graces of the toughest kid in the class—at least, that’s the tack Pete Townshend took when the school bully asked him to be in his band. Townshend was tall, but he was a thin, somewhat shy art student. His future bandmate was a bold, brash, stereotypical “bad boy” who could bump up Townshend’s street cred (and immunity from other bullies).

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That school bully was—who else—the future microphone-swinging, scream-singing frontman of The Who: Roger Daltrey. “He’d been thrown out the year before,” Townshend revealed in a 2025 appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. “He’s a year older than me, and he came up to me in the corridor and said, ‘You! I hear you play the guitar.’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Do you want to be in my band?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ And I thought, ‘I’ve got protection.’”

Townshend was perfectly willing to accept Daltrey’s offer of camaraderie. But he didn’t think he was making a lifelong commitment by any means. Townshend was a visual artist, not a musician. He figured the band would last “two months” and then fizzle out, which he said is likely why he was so quick to smash his guitar. “I’ll just borrow some money from my dad and buy another one,” Townshend assumed. (Somewhat ironically, given that it was his dad who likely served as an impetus for the guitar smashing.)

These Two Songs Changed Pete Townshend’s Mind About the Who

While on the Late Show, The Who’s guitarist, Pete Townshend, admitted that he kept his new project under wraps. “I didn’t tell my arty-farty art school friends,” he said, “until one day there was this college dance thing, and we were hired to do that, and all these fabulous-looking hippie art school girls were pretending to be Beatles fans and were screaming at me. I thought, ‘This is great!’”

Even after receiving the squealing adulation from the hippie arty-farts, Townshend was still of a mind that The Who wouldn’t last. That all changed when he was driving his mother’s car one day and heard his band’s track, “I Can’t Explain”, on the radio. “That was it,” Townshend said. “I thought, ‘Wow, I’m communicating. I have an audience. They were committed to what I was writing. Then I wrote ‘My Generation’, which was just huge. I had an audience, and then, in a sense, I left art behind.”

“There was magic happening,” the arm-windmilling guitarist continued. And indeed there was. The Who would continue to rise in prominence until they were one of the biggest bands of their native U.K. and beyond. What Townshend believed would be a two-month endeavor has since gone on to last six decades. Suffice it to say, Townshend has now developed plenty of “cool guy” street cred on his own, even without the help of the school bully.

Photo by Chris Morphet/Redferns