17 Jan 2025

Happy 60th birthday to ‘I Can’t Explain’ says Irish Jack

It’s always good to hear from Irish Jack, be it an email, a text or a phone call. If it’s a phone call I can guarantee the next hour will be written off as Jack has the gift of the gab and can, and will, talk for hours, days, weeks – and always, always about The Who. It reminds me of a chat I once had with Richard Barnes (Barney to you and I) and Barney told me that one time Irish Jack asked if he could stay with him for a couple of days. Barney said, “Yes, of course, but on one condition, Jack. You cannot talk about The Who, not even once.” Well, of course, that rule went out of the window within five minutes of Barney opening his front door.

Anyway enough of all that. Jack got in touch this week to remind me that 15 January was the 60th birthday of the UK release of The Who’s very first single, namely ‘I Can’t Explain’. (We’re not counting ‘Zoot Suit’/’I’m the Face’ by the High Numbers!). And of course Jack has written one of his lovely soliloquies to celebrate the occasion. And so, without further ado . . .

‘We’re Back In the Charts’ by Irish Jack

IN EARLY January 1965, Mike Shaw the scooter riding production manager of The Who played me a rough demo of the song ‘I Can’t Explain’, this was in the main drawing room of the posh residence 84 Eaton Place in Belgravia  –  the most expensive street in London. I thought the song was quite Kinky . . . that is until I got to the line :  ‘I know what it means but . . .’  Roger Daltrey pauses on ‘but’ and there follows a suspension and then Christ Almighty!  the making of the record comes next . . . six rifle shots from Keith Moon’s drum sticks take the whole thing out of any perceived similarity to The Kinks because no, this is not The Kinks, this is The Who. I simply fell in love with the song and every time I’d hear it on the radio or play it on my wonderful mono box record player I’d wait for  ‘I know what it means but . . .’ Then the rifle shots and the magical chorus ‘I can’t explain’.

I come from a family of sign writers and because of that I have always felt, or sensed, an absurd affinity with special words or letters. ‘Excalibur’ always had an affect of perfection on me in the way I always felt drawn to the appearance of that word. So imagine my deeply repressed creative feelings when I first read the song title ‘I Can’t Explain’. A bomb went off in my head when I studied the word ‘explain’ and the ‘x’ played havoc with my mind’s eye. Yes, this was hip, this was subversive. On the 15 January 1965 with Georgie Fame’s ‘Yeh Yeh’ toppling The Beatles’ ‘I Feel Fine’ at number 1; I was working for George Wimpey construction in Hammersmith Grove as a filing clerk and living with my uncle and aunt at 194 Flora Gardens a five minute walk away. Our telephone was Riverside 7999.

Kit Lambert handed me my free copy of ‘I Can’t Explain’ up at number 84 Eaton Place, he was so proud of it.  Some of the lesser-informed pirate radios were making a bollocks of the song’s title by amateurishly inserting unwanted gaps between the words as in ‘I—Can’t—-Explain’. Pete Townshend had never intended it as some kind of dragged out title, he wrote it as street talk like when you would say in automatic conversation about something you didn’t know  :  “I dunno, I can’t explain!” Also because the record was on the American Decca’s British subsidiary label Brunswick people thought The Who were an American group. I looked at the record in my hands with a measure of pride and immediately noticed that Decca had typically misspelled Pete’s name leaving out the ‘h’.

So, the party got into full swing on 15 January. Only it didn’t. Nothing happened. I bought every music paper that printed record charts on Friday 22 January but there was no sign of The Who. I bought posh Sunday papers for reviews. Still nothing. A week later ‘I Can’t Explain’ was listed at number 47 in the Top 50. Then two weeks later and now we’re in February! the record peaked at number 25 and my heart was crushed a week later when this brilliant fucking piece of music died and dropped out of the charts. I had a Cork friend who had moved to west London, John McSweeney, or Max as everyone knew him. He lived in Brook Green and worked at Cadby Hall food producers. Unlike most of the Irish diaspora Max rightfully regarded himself too hip to go to the meat market of Irish dance halls preferring to spend hours listening to blues on a juke box in the 2i’s coffee bar in Soho and Alexis Korner at the Marquee. I would invariably bump into him every Friday just after work at the old Hammersmith & City tube station on the Broadway. There was always a news vendor standing with his wares at the station entrance. Whether or not he read the crestfallen look on my face I’ll never know but about a week after the band had appeared on Ready Steady Go! he saw me and called out “What about The Who, eh?”  I looked at him and mumbled something about maybe the next record release will do better. He had a funny look on his face. “What? You don’t know?”  “Know what, Max?” I replied, I wasn’t in the mood for jokes. “They’re back in the charts, Jack. ‘I Can’t Explain’ is at number 8 !”  I thought I was hearing things, “WHAT?”, I replied, visibly astonished. I walked down King Street toward home feeling like a mighty weight had been lifted from my shoulders and as well as that, as if a member of my family had just become a pop star. The virtual miracle delivered was, of course, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp’s invitation to Vicki Wickham, the head of Ready Steady Go! the Friday night teenage TV pop show, to be their special guest at The Who’s Tuesday night residency at the Marquee and see for herself what exactly the group were about. Wickham was stunned by their 40-minute Marquee performance and immediately booked The Who for Ready Steady Go!.

Anybody reading this who most likely has seen director Matt O’ Casey’s film documentary Quadrophenia – Can You See The Real Me, round about 17 minutes in will have seen me enter the door of the Shepherd’s Bush Club (where the Goldhawk Friday and Saturday nights happened), the camera follows me to the old dressing room door where I pause and say, “On Friday 12 March The Who had played ‘I Can’t Explain’ three times and the crowd was going mad and I thought ‘God almighty, what’s going on? Because ‘I Can’t Explain’  is probably my all-time favourite song. I elected myself as some kind of delegate and I knocked on this very door (I knock on the door for the camera) with me that night would’ve been besides myself the three other members of The Shepherd’s Bush Miming Who :  Martin Gaish (Roger); his brother Lee (Keith); Peter Campbell (John) and of course the tom-boy mod Jeanette who went everywhere with us. We walked into the dressing room, I said to Townshend  “there’s something I want to tell you.”  And I said, “Look, that song is exactly what we’re trying to say. You’ve said it for us, ‘I Can’t Explain’ because this was what Mods were about, they couldn’t explain None of us could explain, we didn’t have the articulation. So, in words, Pete Townshend became the Song Laureate for the Mods of Shepherd’s Bush, Hammersmith, Acton and Ealing.”

In his autobiography Who I Am, Pete Townshend has described this incident you have just read about as being memorable :  “Without my art-school training I doubt that this moment would have touched me the way it did. But it changed my life. I had been set up at college, especially in my last days doing graphics, to look for a patron, to obtain a brief, to find someone to pay for my artistic excesses and experiments My new patrons stood before me.”

And here’s that single of ‘I Can’t Explain’ given to Jack by Kit Lambert sixty years ago.