This was music that was changing the world. It burst into life like a fire. It was new and it was dangerous and, unlike the music it was replacing, it was all about energy and sexuality. Growing up in the 1950s, we were hearing some of the greatest and most exciting records ever made … in real time. Like all of us, Pete was an Elvis fan. He also bought Eddie Cochran’s singles – famously recording his song ‘Summertime Blues’ on

the Who’s Live at Leeds album in 1970 – and he loved black rhythm and blues. But most of all, he loved the music of Buddy Holly. Pete loved the rawness of Buddy’s early records and admired the fact that he wrote and produced his own songs – very rare in those days. Buddy’s independence and DIY ethos inspired Pete to insist on always having artistic control of his own work.

There was a tone and an expressive freedom about Buddy’s technique that touched Pete’s soul. He was massively inspired by the unusual combination of strumming and picking that characterised Buddy’s playing and, as his own style evolved, he began to weave Buddy’s rhythmic patterns into the Who’s early music, fuelling the power chords that became their statement sound.

He worked with the great Jim Marshall to make the turbo-charged amplifiers that boosted the stage volume to 11 and the feedback to the limit. The result was the huge, violent wall of sound that underpinned the anarchic chaos of the band’s mid-1960s gigs. They were incredible, and I know. I was there.

Pete and Roger Daltrey are founders of the Teenage Cancer Trust and Teen Cancer America and they are still touring with the Who. And now, all these years later, Pete has become an ambassador for the Buddy Holly Educational Foundation and been presented with a personalised guitar. A proud moment for the Foundation and for a musician who has been inspired by Buddy since those amazing pioneering days of the 1950s.

Bob Harris