Baked bean baths, Tina Turner and Elton John on stilts: the story behind The Who's rock opera 50 years on

Independent

26-03-2025

A 20ft tall Elton John topples from gigantic Dr Marten boots, defeated at the flippers by the brand new pinball wizard. Roger Daltrey, in crucifixion garb, grins and shivers as a silver sci-fi iron maiden closes around him, its spikes the needles of blood-infusion syringes. Eric Clapton delivers a blues sermon from the pulpit of the Church of St Marilyn Monroe. And Ann-Margret, playing the rich but guilt-stricken and alcoholic matriarch of the piece, writhes erotically around a plush bedroom suite in the torrents of detergent foam, chocolate sauce and baked beans gushing from her broken TV set.
From messianic hang-gliding scenes to riots in spiritual holiday camps, the striking imagery of Ken Russell's screen adaptation of The Who 's rock opera Tommy, which hit cinemas 50 years ago this week, is burnt deep into the memory of rock'n'roll filmmaking.
In bringing the story of Tommy, the titular deaf, dumb, and blind pinball hero, to the big screen, Russell drew together the surrealist set-piece threads of music-based films of the psychedelic era – from Help! and Magical Mystery Tour through to The Monkees' Head and Frank Zappa's 200 Motels. Equally, he embraced the eye-grabbing, fantastical nature of 1970s album cover art, and by doing so crafted the then-definitive rock film experience – albeit one that would face plentiful criticism over the coming decades for its paper-thin characters and dodgy singing. As well as some wonderfully sly malevolence, Oliver Reed brought the vocal range of an undercooked pancake to his role as Tommy's murderous stepfather, possibly an early influence on a young Ian Brown.
'It was a visual thing [Russell] was interested in,' Just Good Friends star Paul Nicholas tells The Independent. Nicholas – a friend of The Who drummer Keith Moon from their teenage years in Wembley bands – was plucked from musical theatre to play Tommy's sadistic Cousin Kevin, having appeared in producer Robert Stigwood's stage productions of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. Happily, Nicholas was also 'physically not too dissimilar' to lead actor Roger Daltrey, allowing for a familial likeness. 'I'm not sure how deep [Russell] got into the characterisation in terms of the acting,' he continues, '[but] it was quite daring and visually interesting. I think they found the right director who was dangerous enough to give it the rock'n'roll character that it required.'
The film looked at once breathtaking and disturbing – the vision of Daltrey spread-eagled against a rising sun at the climax very much juxtaposed against his cruel and manipulative treatment at the hands of Tina Turner 's Acid Queen, Nicholas's Cousin Kevin, and Moon's cartoonishly perverse and abusive Uncle Ernie.
And yet it almost fell at the first hurdle. When Russell was approached to direct a movie version of Pete Townshend's rock opera – in which Tommy is struck deaf, blind and mute as a child by witnessing the death of his father (Robert Powell) at the hands of his mother's new lover – his first stop was the original 1969 album. 'I took it home and played the first side, and I thought, 'It's the most awful rubbish I've ever heard,'' he confessed.
But the idea of rock'n'roll cinema appealed to Russell, a director whose first inspiration was an urge to put pictures to Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet. And Tommy's journey via therapy and abuse to his ultimate awakening to become a superstar cult leader reminded Russell of a script he'd previously abandoned for a follow-up to his 1971 film The Devils starring Vanessa Redgrave and Oliver Reed. Called The Angels, the sequel was intended to star Mia Farrow as a singer turned false messiah figure. Tommy was only an echo of the story, but at least they had funding. 'I was told The Angels was uncommercial and I couldn't get finance,' he told film critic Mark Kermode in 2004. 'This could be an amalgam of the two.'
Repurposing scenes from The Angels for Tommy, Russell insisted on casting Daltrey in the titular role. The Who frontman threw himself into the part, doing most of his own stunts – including running barefoot through a glass-strewn, burning pinball machine graveyard (in later takes you can see him nursing a burn on his arm) and being plunged underwater (at one point the crew had to dive in and save him from drowning). 'I'd do anything for Ken,' he said in 1975. 'He brings things out of me that no one else can.'
Daltrey deeply related to the character's troubled arc due to his own uncertain years with The Who in the lead-up to recording the album; in 1965 he was thrown out of the band after he beat up Keith Moon, reportedly after finding out Moon was supplying drugs to the other bandmates. 'They'd invited me back but I had to come back on a promise that I would change my ways,' he told Ultimate Classic Rock radio in 2019. 'I psychologically lost my own identity, because I was struggling to find out how to get through life in a different way … I suddenly realised that I'd been that deaf, dumb and blind kid for three years. That's who I'd been – I'd been Tommy. So, I totally identified with it.'
Dripping with blood I was quickly wrapped in a blanket and carried off the set, and then rushed to the hospital
Ann-Margaret
Nicholas recalls Daltrey's stoic immersion in the role. As Cousin Kevin – a proto-punk biker character and one of Tommy's several ill-advised carers – he drenches, drowns, burns and irons Tommy, with Daltrey planking his way through the torment with saint-like fortitude. 'It was very easy for me, because all I really did was drag Roger around,' Nicholas says. 'He was the one who had to suffer, I just dished out the punishment. He's great, Roger. He just gets on with it.'
It's surprising, then, that it wasn't Daltrey who sustained the worst on-set injury. During her legendary baked bean mud-bath scene, Ann-Margret – as Tommy's mother revelling in the fame and fortune of her newly 'aware' son – caught her arm on a sliver of TV glass she'd earlier shattered with a champagne bottle. The suds turned crimson. 'Dripping with blood, I was quickly wrapped in a blanket and carried off the set, and then rushed to the hospital,' she recalled in a later DVD commentary. 'Doctors took 27 stitches to close the wound... [then] I shot a scene with my arm hidden under a table.'
Other stars had a significantly better time. 'God of Hellfire' Arthur Brown was called in at the last minute to play clerical assistant The Priest, energetically stealing a scene set in the church of a Marilyn Monroe cult after The Preacher – played by a blank-eyed Eric Clapton, then in his heavy heroin phase – failed to finish his performance of 'Eyesight to the Blind'. 'I never quite got to the depths of why he wouldn't do the last verse,' says Brown, who cavorted through 22 increasingly energetic takes of blues rock communion.
Even Jack Nicholson stopped by to play the seductive doctor – dubbed The Specialist – on his way to the Cannes Film Festival, filming his part in just one day because, as Daltrey would explain, 'it was all we could afford'. 'In my whole career there was only one time when a director said to me, 'OK, come right down the pike and just look beautiful, Jack,'' Nicholson would later say. 'That was Ken Russell on Tommy. '
Tina Turner relished her lascivious role as the Acid Queen, having beaten several rock legends to the chance of treating Tommy to a memorable night of hard drugs in that Maschinenmensch iron maiden. 'I understood later that it was between either me or David Bowie, and I won,' she said later – in fact, Mick Jagger had been offered the role, but it was swiftly withdrawn after he insisted on singing three of his own songs. 'I can't imagine anyone doing it with the energy and drive that [Turner] brought to the role,' Russell said, and Turner's 2018 autobiography revealed that she was trembling with genuine excitement throughout. 'I was thrilled,' she wrote. 'Ike [Turner] kept me on a very short leash, so it was exciting whenever there was an opportunity to get out from under his shadow.'
Elton John, meanwhile, played the part of The Champ – overthrown as pinball supremo during the dazzling 'Pinball Wizard' sequence. His role largely consisted of simply staying vertical. 'It didn't really involve acting, just trying not to fall over while wearing a pair of 4.5ft Doc Martens,' he wrote in The Guardian in 2019. John initially rejected the offer, and it had subsequently done the rounds of other major Seventies names, including Stevie Wonder and David Essex.
'They contacted Rod Stewart and I told him to turn it down as well,' John wrote. ''I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole, dear.' Then [Townshend] rang me, and I felt like I couldn't say no. Rod was absolutely furious: 'You bitch! You did that on purpose!' I've obviously spent a significant proportion of my life deliberately trying to annoy Rod Stewart – that's very much the nature of our friendship – but that time it was completely accidental.'
It captured all the surreal energies that were around at that time, both in music and in the movie world, and it was an astonishing thing to master in the rock field and not make it look like a pantomime
Arthur Brown
For all its starry rock'n'roll cast and corny cinematic homages (the newly penned opening overture referenced A Matter of Life and Death and Brief Encounter), Tommy subliminally tackled an array of serious issues. Lifted from another shelved Russell project called Music, Music, Music (about a composer frustrated at being forced to write advertising jingles to get by, inspired by his own early work on commercials), the notorious bean scene both nodded to the cover of The Who's 1967 album The Who Sell Out and acted as a satire on commercialism: Ann-Margret was literally smothered in products spraying out of her TV.
Tommy's trials touched on drug dependency, punk rebellion, religious exploitation, and sexual assault. His scenes as a post-pinball messiah, meanwhile, confront celebrity obsession, corporate megalomania, wage slavery and false propheteering. For Brown, Tommy reflects the very real fascination with cults and spiritual teachers in the Seventies. 'Strangely enough, there was a huge audience there,' he says. Of all its sly comments on Seventies British society, only one stands out as wincingly misjudged today. After having his foul way with the helpless Tommy while singing the deeply unsettling 'Fiddle About', Uncle Ernie is punished by having his copy of Gay Times set alight.
Though it would solidify a blueprint for rock films to come – surreal vignettes, stylistic jumbles, and a serious commitment to the ludicrous as seen in the likes of Pink Floyd's The Wall – Tommy landed in 1975 in the oddball cult arena of The Magic Christian, or its plastic-booted cousin The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The next Who movie, 1979's Quadrophenia directed by Franc Roddam, would come to be considered the superior adaptation. Yet this strange, rich, disconcerting, and challenging piece of avant-garde filmmaking did blockbuster business.
From a 22-week shoot and a $2m budget, Tommy earned $27m (equivalent to $119m today) and picked up several Oscar nominations, for Ann-Margret and Townshend himself. Overwhelmed contemporary critics were split: The New York Times called it 'the last word in pop art'; 'spectacular in every way,' gushed Variety; 'banal' trumpeted The Washington Post. Later commentators would class it as arguably the first modern screen musical. Today, it still retains a solid cult following among Who fans.
'I do think it's a brilliant movie,' says Brown, who still plays 'Eyesight to the Blind' in his current multimedia show A Human Perspective. 'It captured all the surreal energies that were around at that time, both in music and in the movie world, and it was an astonishing thing to master in the rock field and not make it look like a pantomime.'
Russell, who would carry the surrealist musical rush on to his next film (the self-penned folly Lisztomania, also starring Daltrey) would call Tommy both the most commercial and 'one of the easiest, most pleasurable films I've ever had to make'. And his opinion of The Who's music had clearly changed since that first listen. 'It was a great joy to do this film because of my two favourite things,' he said, 'finding an amazing image and putting it with some amazing music.' Viewing it afresh 50 years on, there's still excitement at its feet.