Give Me A Mandolin And I'll Play You Rock N Roll

John!! ♥

"I do most of the comedy or sinister numbers in the opera. We all do little bits – the sort of things that suit us individually. My songs are all fairy tale thing. I don't know why really – it's just that my songs seem to appeal to the seven-year olds and upwards. I don't write particularly for children – they just seem to like it. I like writing fairy stories though – I do a lot in the Grimm's tradition, but they tend to be either a bit frightening or a bit sick, so we don't use most of them. We were going to do an EP for children at one time, but EP's seem to have become unfashionable, so we never got round to doing it. I wrote 'Silas Stingy' for that record but we used it on our last album instead."

1968 Record Mirror Interview

New york — "I'm not really into black humor," John Entwistle said with a hint of a wink, "I'm just different." The Who's bassist, who more and more is getting into solo albums as the band's future becomes a question mark, was in New York to attend the bar mitzvah of a friend and to buy equipment for his band, Ox, for its upcoming tour.

Entwistle is a dapper six-footer with a trim beard, an expensive hotel suite overlooking Central Park and a sly smile that lets on that he would savor the idea of become a solo artist permanently.

The Who will tour next year, he said, and after that he's not certain, although he's sure that Ox will be around for awhile. He's just edited Odds and Sods for the Who and issued his fourth solo release, Mad Dog, in January.

Odds and Sods came about," he said, "because we knew we had a lot of unreleased material, mainly from singles that had fallen by the wayside. We didn't know how good much of that material was till we started seeing it on bootlegs. The task fell on me 'cause everyone else was too busy with the Tommy film or something. It could've been a double album, there was that much material. It's all more or less new material. I tried to arrange it like a parallel sort of Who career — what singles we might have released and what album tracks we might have released."

Entwistle is much more interested, it's obvious, in his band than in the Who. "After my first solo album," he said, "I really didn't think of any of my songs as Who songs. The only songs that they have used of mine since my solo albums started have been 'My Wife' and 'When I Was A Boy.' I started realizing there was no real outlet for my songs because the Who were more or less based on Pete's style of writing and Roger sang Pete's compositions best. I'd written my music for me to sing, really; I couldn't see Roger singing them. So I realized it was a choice — I was getting so frustrated that it was either leave the band or do a solo album."

That resulted in Smash Your Head Against the Wall, his first step alone. That, as with subsequent albums, sold well in the United States although it barely made a splash in England. "Basically," he said wryly, "I'm best at naming albums and designing album covers. That's one of the main reasons I do albums. I enjoy compiling the covers. For Smash Your Head it looks like a ghost of a pharaoh but it's just me with a plastic mask staring through a heart disease patient's X-ray. I went to my doctor and asked for some X-rays for an album cover and he thought I was mad but he dragged out dozens of them to audition."