“Did he really?,” a breathless and clearly amazed Newman remarked as I finished reading the quote. I read the preceding quote to Mr Newman, and he was positively floored. But he was surprisingly oblivious as to the impact his little lunchtime performance had apparently had on Townshend. …Pete played constantly.Īll these years later, Newman didn’t come across as “strange”, or “mysterious”. Pete became slightly obsessed with him and regarded him as a sort of undiscovered genius. He set a metronome going on top of the grand piano and just played for over an hour until he was stopped. He was a very strange and mysterious person who had never played to an audience before and he played and sung mostly his own weird compositions. The resulting concert by Thunderclap Newman (real name Andy Newman) on piano and kazoo was an incredible experience. Dick arranged for him to play at the Art School in the lecture theatre on lunchtime. In his 1982 book Maximum R&B, Richard Barnes recalls Newman’s lunchtime performance at Ealing Art School and the influence it had on Townshend:Ī student friend of Pete’s called Dick Seaman used to go on about this mysterious person that he knew who was a post office engineer by day and some sort of lonely undiscovered genius musician at night. I just played, as I say, solo piano, and apparently Pete was in the audience.” It’s quite fascinating… Anyway, what happened was that I actually did a performance at the college one lunchtime – I just played piano solo for about an hour in front of the audience – it was just to fill some time in because they’d had some very important artist, I think it was Shake Keane and his band, but they’d had to drop out at the last minute and so I came in and took over. ![]() Newman didn’t think much of this collection of recordings, which were called Ice & Essence: “To me it wasn’t that good, but everyone else seemed to think it was alright.”ĪN: Anyway, I kept hearing about Pete’s career, he had a band that had all sorts of names, one time I heard it I think it was called ‘Us’, U-S, the name kept changing, and finally they ended up with the name ‘The Who’ and that sort of stuck. Rick and myself had been playing a bit of music together and doing a bit of recording onto an old Grundig tape recorder and Rick played the recordings to Pete, and for some reason he liked them. But apparently they eventually sort of came into contact with one another through various other people including early members of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band. ![]() I think they were on a different art course – I think Rick Seaman was doing fine art, and I think Pete might’ve been doing graphic design. They had a mutual friend named Rick Seaman.ĪN: “ went to the same art college as Pete. In 1963, Pete Townshend was in art school, and Andy Newman was a telephone engineer. I’m heartened that I have a record of my conversation with this fascinating man which, thanks to Richard Evans, I’m able to share with you now.ĭespite the fact that I’ve edited out the detours into cricket, Muhammad Ali, The Beatles, Benny Goodman, rugby, etc., it’s still rather long… I was saddened to hear that Andy had passed away. Newman had kindly mailed me a CD of the BBC ‘Baroque and Roll’ interview with Pete Townshend, with a kind note written on ‘A. We talked again a few weeks later, this time about baroque music, as Mr. We talked about the obvious things – Thunderclap Newman, Pete Townshend, The Who, multi-track recording – but then veered off into territory such as jazz, boxing, cricket and rugby. He clearly loved talking about music and culture and was impressively knowledgeable about an array of subjects. Newman possessed an engaging, warm personality, and was a great conversationalist. This was one of the most enjoyable interviews I’ve ever done. The interview was one of several I did that year in the hope of being able to revise my Pete Townshend book one day, but that revision never came to be. On JI had a long phone conversation with pianist Andy Newman, of Thunderclap Newman, the unlikely trio that rocketed to fame in 1969 with their number one hit (released on The Who’s label, Track Records) ‘Something In The Air’. ![]() Many thanks to Mark for sharing it with us. It’s a fascinating conversation with a very special person and I’m delighted to be able to post it up here. Mark Wilkerson got in touch with me recently, shortly after hearing of the death of Andy ‘Thunderclap’ Newman and subsequently sent me an interview he had conducted with Andy back in 2009. A CONVERSATION WITH ANDY ‘THUNDERCLAP’ NEWMAN
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