Can You See the Real Me?

I stumbled accidentally on yet another fabulous BBC documentary that I felt obliged sharing with you all...

Instead of rewriting what as already been so well written, I'll just rep-post Andy Markowitz's post made on musicfilmweb and leave you with a great documentary of, IMHO, one of the greatest albums of all time!

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Posted on July 2, 2012 by Andy Markowitz

Source: Musicfilmweb

Pete Townshend conceived the Who’s second rock opera with an eye to replacing Tommy as the band’s live centerpiece. Upon release in 1973 his allusive tale of a disaffected and unstable teenager adrift in mid-’60s Britain’s mod movement won critical plaudits and charted well (better than Tommy, in fact), but between its pre-digital synth ‘n’ loop complexities and drummer/lunatic Keith Moon’s increasing unreliability, Quadrophenia toured disastrously. Despite being musically and thematically richer and more layered than its predecessor (or perhaps because of it), the story of Jimmy the Mod never caught on like the deaf-dumb-and-blind pinball wizard. Only years later did songs like the pulsing “5:15″ and the symphonic “Love Reign O’er Me” return to the Who’s set list, and today Franc Roddam’s cult film version of Quadrophenia is probably more imprinted on the public imagination than the album that spawned it.

This BBC music documentary wisely avoids that after-story to focus on Quadrophenia the record, examining the drama of both its narrative and its production, which very nearly blew the Who apart. The tropes of the form are here – the enthusiastic talking head critics, the knob twiddling engineer breaking songs down into component parts – and sufficiently enlightening. What separates this from the usual run of making-the-record docs is the number and variety of secondary themes rockumentary veteran Matt O’Casey packs into its 70 minutes, among them an illuminating primer on fashion-obsessed mod, a detour into the London council estate where the Who built their studio, and a thorough exploration of the illustrated lyric book that accompanied the original release. The starkly beautiful photos by veteran rock shooter Ethan Russell (he of the Abbey Road and Who’s Next covers) clearly influenced Roddam’s film, and they give Can You See the Real Me? a cinematic quality unusual for such exercises, as O’Casey juxtaposes them with the record’s formative and evocative landscapes of Battersea and Brighton.

Underlying it all are the internal dynamics of the Who, that most combustible of bands – the constant push-pull between Townshend’s artistic ambitions/pretensions and his mates’ (and his own) street-fighter volatility. That comes through here in particularly sharp relief, perhaps because the canvas is relatively small. We see closely how those tensions informed a specific piece of work as Townshend, with his typical mix of acuity, self-absorption, insecurity, and wit, recounts a growing alienation from the band that mirrors his anti-hero Jimmy’s fall from mod. It’s mainly Pete’s story, but Roger Daltrey, who has aged into dinosaur rock’s most generous elder statesman, is the down to earth yin to his cohort’s sturm and drang and offers an affectionate but knowing counter to Townshend’s slagging of the long-gone Moon, who drifts through the proceedings like a cackling poltergeist. (Interviewer: “What was Keith like in 1973?” Daltrey: “Just a little bit drunker than we was in 1972.”) Just as Quadrophenia is not the place to start if you’re a Who novice, this is a documentary for aficionados – but if you’re one, it’s a thoroughly engrossing trip into the heart of a record that still feels under-appreciated

Full BBC Documentary

In his home studio and revisiting old haunts in Shepherds Bush and Battersea, Pete Townshend opens his heart and his personal archive to revisit 'the last great album the Who ever made', one that took the Who full circle back to their earliest days via the adventures of a pill-popping...

But in 1973 Quadrophenia was an album that almost never was. Beset by money problems, a studio in construction, heroin-taking managers, a lunatic drummer and a culture of heavy drinking, Townshend took on an album that nearly broke him and one that within a year the band had turned their back on and would ignore for nearly three decades.

With unseen archive and in-depth interviews from Townshend, Roger Daltrey, Keith Moon, John Entwistle and those in the studio and behind the lens who made the album and thirty page photo booklet.

Contributors include: Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, Ethan Russell, Ron Nevison, Richard Barnes, Irish Jack Lyons, Bill Curbishley, John Woolf, Howie Edelson, Mark Kermode and Georgiana Steele Waller.