I was surprised, I’ll admit, when I dug into Thunderclap Newman. For years I’d assumed they were American – the name sounded it, for a start, and Something in the Air had that cinematic, widescreen quality that seemed more California than Croydon. You half expect Dennis Hopper to wander through the second verse. So when I discovered they were not only British but practically home-grown from Pete Townshend’s spare room, it stopped me in my tracks.
They weren’t even a proper band, more a benevolent experiment by Townshend: a pub pianist, a teenage guitar prodigy, and his ex-flatmate on drums. It reads like a joke setup – “An electrician, a schoolboy and a Who guitarist walk into a studio…” – yet somehow, for one perfect moment in 1969, it worked.
Something in the Air wasn’t just another track about peace and love. It was a soft-spoken revolution – a call to arms delivered with English politeness, like a manifesto slipped under the vicar’s door. The honky-tonk piano gave it a faint whiff of seaside nostalgia, the brass sounded as if the Salvation Army had gone rogue, and the lyrics promised a moral uprising wrapped in a lullaby. It’s the only protest song you could hum while queuing for a cup of tea.
The timing was uncanny. Britain was restless but restrained – a nation still ironing its trousers while plotting the overthrow of everything. Students were occupying colleges, strikes were rumbling, and the post-war dream was looking moth-eaten. Meanwhile, America was in full technicolour turmoil: Vietnam, civil rights, assassinations. Over there, the revolution was televised; over here, it was discussed over a pint.
When Something in the Air floated across the Atlantic, the Americans barely noticed. It reached No. 37 on the Billboard charts – respectable, but not the stuff of legend. Perhaps it was too civilised for them. U.S. radio was drenched in Hendrix, Dylan and Jefferson Airplane; this curious little British anthem arrived like a cup of cocoa at a riot. No screaming guitars, no righteous fury – just the calm insistence that “we have got to get it together now.”
Part of the problem was that Thunderclap Newman didn’t really exist in any tangible sense. They never toured, never gave interviews, never built the myth that America demands. Townshend had plucked them from obscurity, shepherded them through one transcendent session, and sent them back into the ether. By the time anyone asked for an encore, there was no band left to play it.
Still, the song refused to die. It’s been resurrected endlessly in film soundtracks – The Magic Christian, Almost Famous, Kingpin – whenever a director needs to summon that fleeting moment when idealism still seemed rational. It’s the sound of 1969 bottled: the last sweet breath before cynicism took over.
The fates of its creators only deepen the melancholy. Speedy Keen retreated to modest solo work before dying young. Jimmy McCulloch blazed through Wings before a heroin overdose silenced him at 26. Andy Newman went back to his drawing board, literally – an electrical draftsman who occasionally revived the band’s name for old time’s sake. Townshend, of course, carried on dismantling rock stardom for sport, but he later called Something in the Air “the best single The Who never made.”
And perhaps that’s true. It was The Who’s idealism without the racket – the revolution whispered rather than shouted. It suggested change could be graceful, rebellion could wear a waistcoat. For a few shining weeks in 1969, Britain believed it. Then the dream ebbed away and Thunderclap Newman dissolved like morning mist.
But every so often, when the world feels jammed in the same old loop of greed and grift, I hear that line – “We have got to get it together now” – and think perhaps it’s time we did.
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