“The guitar head poked through the ceiling. When I brought it out, the top of the neck was left behind... They were laughing their heads off”: Pete Townshend's guitar-smashing became a controversial onstage ritual, but it started by accident

Back in 1993, the great John Hiatt sang, “Oh, it breaks my heart to see those stars/Smashing a perfectly good guitar.”

Whether allegorical or not, Hiatt – in his song, Perfectly Good Guitar, from his album of the same name (which, by the way, rips) – put to words and music a sentiment felt by many, players and otherwise, since the Who's windmilling, creatively restless guitar-slinger, Pete Townshend, first made a ritual of reducing his guitars to hunks of wood onstage six decades ago.

It's not like it made things easy for Townshend.

“When we first came to New York, we did a thing called the Murray the K Show and we'd play four times a day,” Townshend told Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show in 2024.

“I only had one guitar, so I'd have to break it and fix it [by gluing it back together] four times a day. In the end, it was more glue and string [than anything else].”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Townshend's guitar-smashing antics didn't start intentionally – rather, they were a byproduct of something else he helped put into the guitar lexicon; wild feedback odysseys. Oh, and an unusually high stage, and unusually low ceiling.

In 1964, the Who were playing a gig at the Railway Hotel in London when Townshend began one of his – always very physically involved – quests for feedback and noise.

“I started to knock the guitar about a lot, hitting it on the amps to get banging noises and things like that, and it started to crack,” Townshend told author Richard Barnes. “It banged against the ceiling and smashed a hole in the plaster, and the guitar head actually poked through the ceiling. When I brought it out, the top of the neck was left behind. I couldn’t believe what had happened.

“There were a couple of people from art school I knew at the front of the stage and they were laughing their heads off,” he recalled. “One of them was literally rolling about on the floor, laughing, and his girlfriend was kind of looking at me, smirking. So I just got really angry and got what was left of the guitar and smashed it to smithereens.”

Though Townshend and his sole surviving Who bandmate, frontman Roger Daltrey – now both in their 80s – continue to play their 1965 angst anthem My Generation live (with its epochal line, “I hope I die before I get old,” unchanged), the former's guitar-smashing days seem to be long behind him.

“I haven't smashed guitars for a long time - for me, it was an expression of youth,” he told BBC Radio 2 in 2019. However, he caveated, “I am prepared to smash a guitar for charity.”