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CHRIS STAMP, who has died aged 70, helped launch The Who in the mid-1960s, identifying in them the potential to be as incendiary - and thus successful - as The Rolling Stones; he was also the brother of the actor Terence Stamp.
His co-manager was Kit Lambert, the gay, wild, Oxford-educated son of the composer Constant Lambert. Stamp, by contrast, had once been described as an East End hard case looking for a fight, and could have opted to trim The Who's more outrageous excesses with some down-to-earth common sense. Instead, stunned by the group's musical power, he lost no time in encouraging them.
Stamp saw the potency of the group's self-destructive streak as he watched the volatile guitarist Pete Townshend and drummer Keith Moon wreck their equipment live on stage. "They smashed through the door of rock and roll," noted one admiring musician, "leaving rubble and not much else for the rest of us to lay claim to."
Nor did their records disappoint. With Townshend's thundering opening riff and lead singer Roger Daltrey's searing lyric of teenage angst, The Who's first hit single, I Can't Explain, in 1965 led to a spot playing live on the television show Ready, Steady, Go! and a weekly residency at the Marquee Club, the jazz and blues venue in Soho, which cemented their reputation as the country's pre-eminent Mod band.
Both Stamp and Lambert lived the rock and roll lifestyle as much as their proteges, but at the outset neither knew anything about pop music, the pop music business, or any other business, for that matter. "They were a couple of chancers who became fashionable in the era of Swinging London and who made and lost fortunes," observed the pop writer Ray Connolly.
Stamp's background, like Lambert's, lay in film. His older brother, Terence, had rocketed to fame as an actor, firing the younger Stamp's own creative ambitions. But when Chris Stamp first set eyes on The Who (then called the High Numbers), he was still a small-time assistant director.
Less flamboyant and earthier than his partner Lambert, Stamp was financially naive but understood the gay world (which constituted a large raft of the pop music Establishment) and applied a degree of streetwise savvy and self-possession to their...