It was, however, their only successful single and the band split up two years later. “People would come up to me as though I was the person who knew how to pull hits out of the stratosphere.” “To us it was absolute bedlam,” recalled Newman. In July 1969 the song went to Number One in the British charts where it remained for three weeks. The song, with Keen’s lyrics, chimed with the rebellious mood of the time : “Call out the instigator/ Because there’s something in the air/ We’ve got to get together sooner or later/ Because the revolution’s here. On his barrelhouse piano, however, he delivered a stomping Dixieland bridge for Something in the Air that blended perfectly with his bandmates’ psychedelic rock. He looked like a professor taking his students on a class outing. Performing in a trilby, spectacles, braces and bow tie, the bearded Newman provided a dapper counterpoint to his younger long-haired bandmates. Townshend himself played bass, under the name Bijou Drains, on their only album, Hollywood Dream. Townshend recruited Newman, a pipe-smoking GPO telephone engineer whom he had known at art school, to play keyboards and Jimmy McCulloch, a 15-year-old Glaswegian guitarist, who later played in Paul McCartney’s Wings. The band, who went by Newman’s school nickname, was formed by Pete Townshend, guitarist with The Who, and the music impresario Kit Lambert to demo tracks written by the singer/drummer John “Speedy” Keen, Townshend’s occasional chauffeur. Andy "Thunderclap" Newman, who has died aged 73, was a jazz pianist and founder member of Thunderclap Newman, a cobbled together session band whose anthemic Something in the Air was the surprise hit of the summer of 1969.
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