"Nobody's gonna tell me that a hunk of wood with strings stretched across it is sacred": Pete Townshend reveals all about why he became a guitar smasher

Pete Townshend is quite the quote machine this week as he promotes Tommy The Musical opening on Broadway, as he is whenever he speaks to the media – these times simply aren't used to musicians who speak their minds so openly and consistently. And while he admitted to the New York Times about how he doesn't really enjoy touring with The Who anymore, his visit to The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon saw him opening up about his past reputation for smashing guitars during live shows with the band.

He may be mostly reformed now, and suggested in the past it was a marketing ploy, but Townshend's ideology about the place of guitars that fuelled his onstage antics hasn't changed.

"Young kids that get their first really good guitar end up in a love relationship with it – I've never had that," the songwriter explains. that hasn't changed either, though at Townshend's destructive peak there were practical concerns to consider. 

"I'd fix them with glue," he confirms to Fallon in the clip above when asked what the protocol was if The Who had back-to-back shows featuring guitar smashing. "When we first came to New York we did this thing called the Murray The K Show [in 1967] and you had to do four shows in a day. And I only had the one guitar so I had to break it and fix it four times in a day. In the end it was more glue and string than guitar."

Townshend is unrepentant about it all over 50 years later – and maybe he shouldn't be as he's still the most iconic example of it ever being done. "You know I don't apologise for this," he tells Fallon. "I should do but I don't. I think a lot of people struggle to buy their first instruments, they build up a relationship with them but I never had that but I don't know quite why that is.

"In those days it was every kid wanted to be Elvis Presley and they all wanted these cheap guitars – and they were trash guitars, to be honest," Townshend reflects."The kind of guitars your grandmother would buy you for Christmas and they'd be unplayable."

Then Townshend began to dig into his first guitar-owning experience that may have prevented him from romanticising about the instruments themselves from then on – because it's not a positive one.  

"My dad was a professional musician – clarinet player and sax player – and I said to him, 'Please dad, you buy me my first guitar' but he said, 'No your grandmother wants to buy you your first guitar.

"And she bought me a guitar from the Greek restaurant in Ealing where we lived – off the wall!" recalls Townshend to laughter. "Nobody's gonna tell that a hunk of wood with strings stretched across it is sacred. Not to me."

During his appearance on Fallon's show he joined the Tommy musical's cast for a medley of songs that you can see below. 

• The Who – Tommy: Pete Townshend guitar lesson