Pop
impresarios are often the hidden power behind the biggest acts, now two films
turn spotlight on Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp.
In the
telling of rock’n’roll history, managers rarely claim centre stage. That is
about to change with a documentary about the relationship between Kit Lambert,
the aristocratic, homosexual son of the classical composer Constant Lambert,
and Chris Stamp, the son of a tugboat captain, as played out through the
creation and management of the Who.
The band
has never shied away from crediting the pair – described by singer Roger
Daltrey as “the shell of the egg” – but their role in guiding the group from
their early days as guitar-smashing mods to their peak of 70s rock indulgence
has never been examined so clearly.
The
documentary, called Lambert & Stamp, is a reminder of the energy of social
upheaval that found expression in pop music. “We were both marginalised, him in
gayness and me in my class,” Stamp, who died in 2012, tells the film’s
director, James D Cooper. “It was a powerful bond defined creatively in the
Who.”
Described
by his brother, the actor Terence Stamp, as “a rough, tough fighting spiv”, Stamp
and the Oxford-educated Lambert had sought careers in film. Lambert had already
been a cameraman on an expedition to the Amazon during which the party had been
ambushed by natives and one of their number killed.
The pair
resolved to make a film about a band in the documentary style of the French New
Wave. What they found in the Who – “four complicated, difficult guys”, Stamp
recalled – met their needs. They filmed several concerts, but later abandoned
the film and became the band’s managers. Stamp says: “We didn’t know what we
wanted, but we knew what we didn’t want. It was really about us – some mad
concoction of stuff that looked like us.”
While
Lambert encouraged the band’s destructive antics, he also provided them with
intellectual cover. Sections of Lambert & Stamp are taken from their
would-be documentary and Lambert is filmed philosophising about the era’s
“beautiful and powerful” youth.
“Nobody
knows for sure where they are going. In 20 years, these young revolutionaries
could be arch-conservatives. But not me,” he says.
As Andrew
Motion noted in his biography The Lamberts, Kit fashioned the Who so that they
would speak for their audiences’ own sexual feelings.
Lambert
later said: “They have to have a direct sexual impact. They ask a question: do
you want to or don’t you? And they don’t give their public a chance of saying
no.”
The cost
of the band’s routine destruction of their equipment – encouraged by Lambert –
necessitated new streams of income. They turned to recording and established
Track Records, the label that signed Jimi Hendrix and the Crazy World of Arthur
Brown to its roster.
Lambert
fostered Pete Townshend to become the band’s resident composer, instilling him
with confidence to reach for grander goals, among them the rock operas Tommy
and Quadrophenia. Townshend says it was Lambert who understood the band’s
audience. “You don’t give them what they want – you allow them to be,” the
guitarist says. “You don’t try to change them – you affirm them.”
Lambert
& Stamp is not the only project looking at the role of managers at the time
when the rock’n’roll business was still forming. Mojo magazine editor Pat
Gilbert, and Orian Williams, producer of the Joy Division biopic Control, are
working on a feature film of Lambert’s life that is expected to start filming
later this year. “Rock management was a new profession, and an interesting
thing for forward-thinking people to get into,” Gilbert said.
Robert
Fearnley-Whittingstall, a contemporary of Lambert’s in national service and
university, recalls that Lambert was interested in the Who from a creative
point of view. It was Lambert who suggested Daltrey’s stutter on My Generation
to mimic young fans on amphetamines. “He was a bit self-conscious standing
there in a suit, but I think he found there wasn’t such a gap between them.”
While
managers such as Elvis Presley’s Colonel Parker, the Sex Pistols’ Malcolm
McLaren or Led Zeppelin’s Peter Grant became well-known, their influence is not
always clearly acknowledged. Among the forthcoming studies is Barney Hoskyns’s
Smalltown Talk, a portrait of Albert Grossman’s creation of the Woodstock music
scene in the 60s.
Groups
tend to be a reflection of their managers, Yardbirds, T-Rex and Wham! manager
Simon Napier-Bell acknowledged to the NME in 1984: “The Beatles were really
Brian Epstein’s brushed-up, middle-class gay presentation of some pretty rough
boys, and Jagger was so fascinated by [Andrew Loog] Oldham’s campness that he
started adopting his mannerisms. The Who were of course an extension of Kit
Lambert’s manic attitude to life.”
Lambert’s
life rose and disintegrated chasing these visions. His wayward lifestyle
contributed to both him and Stamp being sidelined by the band in the mid-70s.
His London home burnt down; and his palazzo in Venice was also damaged by fire.
Clearly unfit to manage his own affairs, he was made a ward of court to escape
a prison sentence after being arrested for drug offences.
“Life was
not good,” recalled Fearnley-Whittingstall. “Everyone said he was bankrupt. He
said he was owed a lot of money from publishing. After his death [in 1981] that
was found to be so.”
Lambert
and Stamp may now begin to acquire equal standing with Epstein and the other
behind-the-scenes architects of rock and roll.
Writer Mat
Snow, currently penning a new illustrated book on the Who, said Lambert’s
self-implosion contributed to his being written out of the narrative. “The Who
were never as big as the Beatles or Stones, nor, unlike Oldham or Napier-Bell,
did Lambert write his memoirs,” he said. “Still, Townshend does not stint in
stressing how important he was as an artistic and cultural mentor, and
visionary for the group.”
