I remember standing with the band of our college production while the actor who played the Tommy part essayed "See me, feel me..." in an entirely inadequate voice but carried it. I remember leaving the cinema with my girlfriend when the Ken Russell version hit the big screen a year or so later. But I remembered hardly anything about the film.

Our stage version had to make a story from meagre material - the album was one of the catalogue of concept albums that made you realise that none of these rock people was capable of delivering a work of that scale (and then somebody came up with the halfway-decent Quadrophenia). Russell had the same problems, but more money.

So we had the romance and the wedding and the baby and the death of the father and the grieving of the mother and the taking up with the dodgy guy and the return of the father and the murder and the child who witnessed it being screamed into submission. With Oliver Reed's spit in my face I might have gone deaf, dumb and blind too.

Then we had the gratuitous violation and the salvation through pinball and the fatuous breakthrough by breaking a mirror and the clambering over junkyards and the cheap fascist-scientologist setup (Oliver Reed was good at that) and the rebellion which turned out not to be a rebellion but then it was and Roger Daltrey climbing a mountain in his bare feet to stand - always with his right arm higher than his left - against the sun.

And of course Ann-Margret's ludicrous wrestling with the long pillow while wallowing in baked beans and chocolate. Ludicrous, but no more than the rest.

So, a valiant attempt to pull a story together from inadequate leavings, and a load of symbols which add up to little more than the Avengers or the Prisoner on drugs and a biggish budget. But NO DIALOGUE! ALL SONG! Now that was brave.

In our stage version we did include the spoken word, and probably dozens of other groups across the world were making their own attempts. It was one of the things you did at the beginning of the 70s, but "See me, feel me..." That should have been me. Now where did I put my green velvet cloak?