The British Invasion Had Three Leaders; Only One Is Still Hard to Explain

Deadline frames the British invasion of the mid-1960s as a multi-pronged attack, led above all by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Who, whose seismic impact on American and world culture it treats as settled history. Look at the people in charge, though, and the three bands stop being symmetrical: of those leaders, Deadline says, the Who's songwriter, Pete Townshend, is perhaps the most mysterious. It is a neat way of pointing at a gap in how the era gets told — the bands are canon, the man who wrote one band's songs less so.