Despite the disaster of the aborted 'Lifehouse' project, the highlights of which were condensed onto the stellar 'Who's Next' album, Pete Townshend presented The Who with another concept idea in 1973.
More rooted in real life than the often bewildering ideas behind 'Tommy', 'Quadrophenia' centres around Jimmy, a mod who has four split personalities. These personalities are represented here musically by the four members of The Who.
The album begins with 'I Am The Sea', which opens with the sound of waves crashing - a motif repeated throughout the album. Another device used frequently is the coda of closing track 'Love Reign O'er Me', which seems to represent the spiritual awakenings that occur periodically.
The brash 'The Real Me', along with the likes of '5.15' and 'Doctor Jimmy', embody Roger Daltrey's part of the character the swaggering, pilled-up Jimmy, out with his tribe and out of his mind. The singer screams the chorus, "Can you see the real me", as a gesute of defiance to various authority figures - mother, doctor, preacher.
By contrast, the Townshend-sung 'I'm One', despite its lyrics affirming commitment to the cause, is more of a sober reflection on identity. 'The Punk And The Godfather' places the iconic figures at the head of the youth hierarchy on a pedestal, which is destroyed when Jimmy returns to Brighton on the '5.15' to find his idol working as a 'Bell Boy'.
Those two songs are classic Who '5.15' with its melancholic opening passage where Townshend sings "Why should I care" before launching into a piledriving rock song that crashes back to earth, "Inside, outside/Leave me alone", and then pulls itself back up with the battle-cry "Out of my brain on the 5.15".
By contrast, 'Bell Boy' juxtaposes a confident Daltrey vocal in the main passage with Keith Moon's hilarious "geezer" role as the Ace Face - "I've got a good job/And I'm newly born/You should see me dressed up in my uniform".
'The Rock' and the titanic 'Love Reign O'er Me' provide the climax. The latter is a sweeping epic, with the synthesisers that form such an integral part of the album's sound driving the song on. A suitably dramatic ending to a superb album, 'Quadrophenia' stands as the most fully-realised of all of Townshend's great schemes, arguably because he was so close to his subject matter. It shows.
by Simon P Ward