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The Who legend pictured next to a Tommy hoarding in the early 1990s (© Steve Goldstein/Corbis)

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Back in 1990, Guitarist magazine caught up with The Who guitarist and songwriter Pete Townshend, who was characteristically frank and revealing. 22 years later, we look back at this classic interview.

What originally influenced you to become a player and a writer?

"My father had played the guitar when he was young and my uncle Jack had worked for Kalamazoo, before the war, developing guitar pickups. So there was a kind of family thing about the guitar, although it was considered something of an anomaly then.

"My father was in a dance band and I wanted to do what he did, play the saxophone, but I couldn't blow a note so he suggested the guitar. Chromatic harmonica was actually my first instrument and I got very good at it – not quite Stevie Wonder, but very good. Then I hit eleven and decided I did want to try the guitar, so my grandmother bought me one.

"Then I started to examine what was happening, listening to Elvis Presley like all my friends. But to be honest I never really liked him, and also I think Scotty Moore was an aberration – it's not my idea of great playing.

"Feedback is just an extraordinary sound, like an enormous plane. It's a wonderful, optimistic sound."

"I think he was someone from another era who'd been drafted into rock and roll; he was competent but not brilliant. I know that's sacrilege to many people and I wouldn't want to slight him as an individual or as a player, because he's cited as a seminal influence by so many people, but for me it was more the sound of Nancy Whiskey."

Do you mean Freight Train?

"Yes, the sound of strumming guitars; such a glorious sound. And I like flamenco music and used to listen to a lot of that, and that's really where my style was born.

"I got my guitar for Christmas but I didn't learn it. Instead I bought myself a banjo, because in my class at school we had quite a good trad band – we even had a tuba player – and [The Who's bassist] John Entwistle was on trumpet. We were all very left-wing, or they were – I didn't know what politics was about. And they were always disappearing into sleeping bags with girls.

"So I picked up the banjo. And the players I looked at were the guys who played with Acker Bilk, Ken Collier and Kenny Ball. English banjo players really were a law unto themselves – you don't find that kind of brisk banjo playing on the original Louis Armstrong or Bix Beiderbecke records.

"But Acker Bilk's banjo had this very vital, bright sound. He used a G banjo with along scale and played it with lots of flourishes, and I copied that, until I went back to playing guitar a couple of years later.

"I didn't start to collect records and listen to guitar players properly until I went to art school, when I'd already been playing for five years. So my style was already formed and that's why I think it's so unique. I did start copying Chet Atkins when I was eighteen and I can do quite a good impersonation – not quite as good as Mark Knopfler, but I could give him a run for his money on Lambeth Walk, for example.

"But they're not in my blood, they're things that I learned but rapidly got tired of, and I became interested in the intuitive style that seemed to be R&B – like Jimmy Reed, who just played two shapes, but it was the depth in those two shapes that created the poetry."

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