# In 1964, Pete Townshend heard the best songwriter ever. Decades later, he still worships the ground he walks on

- URL: https://talkfuse.com/story/in-1964-pete-townshend-heard-the-best-songwriter-ever-decades-later-he-still-worships-the-ground-he-walks-on/
- Published: 2026-11-11T08:00:00+00:00
- Updated: 2026-11-11T08:37:28+00:00
- Original publisher: Far Out
- Original article: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/1964-pete-townshend-heard-the-best-songwriter/
- Topics: Music

## Key points

- Ray Davies’s songwriting influenced Pete Townshend from the start.
- Townshend praised Davies’s poetic language and originality.
- The Kinks’ songs captured a changing English landscape.

## Summary

Pete Townshend has credited Ray Davies of The Kinks with shaping his approach to songwriting, particularly its poetic language and narrative focus. The article argues that Davies’s influence helped inspire Townshend’s later ambitions to make rock music more expansive and conceptually ambitious, including works such as *Tommy*.

Townshend praised Davies as “our only true and natural genius” in British rock and said Davies invented a new kind of poetry for pop writing. The article points to *The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society* as an early conceptual work, and describes Davies’s songs as elegies for places and ways of life that were disappearing.

---
Summarised by TalkFuse (https://talkfuse.com/). Quote the original publisher for the reporting and link this page for the summary and discussion.