Pete Townshend on the ‘Magic’ Era of Thunderclap Newman, ‘Tommy,’ and 1969, the Year That Saved the Who.

The only thing less likely than Thunderclap Newman, the strange band masterminded by Pete Townshend in 1969, having a No. 1 single is the notion that a 400-plus page history of them would be published 55 years later.

Yet both of those things happened: The group’s Townshend-produced first single and only hit, the generational anthem “Something in the Air,” topped the British charts in July of 1969, at the same time the Who’s “Tommy” and “Pinball Wizard” were also making their first impact; and “Hollywood Dream, the Thunderclap Newman Story: Pete Townshend, a Band of Outsiders, and the Birth of British Indie Music,” an exhaustive history of the band, its members and its milieu by Mark Ian Wilkerson, was released last month on Jack White’s Third Man Books.

Make no mistake: Thunderclap Newman were a one-hit wonder, a group consisting of three completely dissimilar musicians who Townshend had thrown together: his friend, singer-songwriter-drummer John “Speedy” Keen; wiz-kid guitarist Jimmy McCulloch, who’d just turned 16; and Andy Newman, a jazz pianist and genuine eccentric who looked more like a post-office clerk than an accidental pop star. And as Townshend says below, he himself was a member of the band as well, even though the Who’s career was beginning its skyrocketing ascent on the back of “Tommy,” which had been released in May, and he was on the road for weeks on end.