Pete Townshend

39:03and hearing the demos the demos are as good as the finished songs and that's not to say that i prefer one over the other because i think they're both great but it's like there's a sensitivity to your performance of songs that are on for instance who's next that when it comes to the band it gets the treatment from john and from keith and from from roger and but also from me as a member of that band yeah and you write the way you're playing is is it it's like a cover version of the song i don't know how to explain i mean maybe this that's not your relationship with the music but that that's my impression i think i think when i when i was working whenever i worked in the studio i worked partly for fun you know i knew that we would take the songs in and the band would do their band thing on it but i was writing for the band of course i wasn't writing for myself but when I came to do my own albums the difference between my demos and the finished thing was much less so yeah the band was definitely an aggressive powerhouse machine and you know in some sense we replaced musicianship with machismo and with athleticism in my case I spent more time up in the air than I did playing the guitar yeah you had real hops some of those photos are incredible in the in the i'm in this box set here of you um in there one of the other things i've wondered is to me it felt like there was a shift in the songwriting between tommy and and what the stuff that came out of the lifehouse project like some of the stuff the stuff tommy and before felt like it had a specifically british lilt and who's next had this sort of like American-ness to it, this boldness like this?

40:53Well, I think I abandoned my old approach of writing. And I decided what actually happened was that when I was demoing before, I used to go from machine to machine, stereo machine to stereo machine, got very good at it and made very fine sounding demos. But when I started work on Lifehouse, I got a studio tape machine, an 8-track machine. It was one of the first people to use Dolby, so I could do lots of bounce downs and, you know end up with equivalent of 16 to 20 performances with backing vocals and stuff but the band that i modeled my demo sound on was the band and it was because the album the band by the band who had spent a lot of time then supporting dylan was recorded by them in a barn and their previous album big pink was done in a house called big pink and was again recorded so not in a conventional studio so i felt it was possible for me if i had the right equipment to make up demos where i played the drums the bass the guitar did the backing vocals played the you know the lowry organ at the time ham and organ was on everything and ham and organs have this wonderful sound but every they all sound the same whereas garth hudson was a magician you know he used to take this organ is old Lowry organ and make it sound like all kinds of things.

42:17And so I had a Lowry organ, which is how I stumbled on the sound for Barbara O 'Reilly. It was built into the organ. I just modified it a bit with synthesizers. So that was my reference track, was that album. That was what I was listening to. And when we got in with Glyn Johns, eventually after the failure of the recording in New York where we did some good recordings, but we never got very far because Kit Lambert was not really with us anymore. Glyn took those tracks and I think actually he sort of anglicized them again a little bit. He gave them a bit of the kind of, you know, the Olympic Studios reverb-based airiness that he was so famous for.

43:02My demos are certainly funky. Your demos are amazing. They're really beautiful. they're really beautiful and it's a testament to your songwriting that it can work as well as they did with you know in the way that you recorded them and that they worked as well as they did with the group and then that even hearing being able to finally hear these um record plant sessions from new york that they worked as well as they did with leslie west playing over them really bringing like i mean it's just like incredible like the versatility of the songs is wild yeah that was fun working with leslie leslie was always a huge fan of of the who but particularly of me he used to compare me to every other lead guitarist and i because i used to run myself down a little bit and say i can't play like eric clapton and i can't play like jimmy page but i'm the best rhythm player in the world and he used to say yeah you can play they're all playing fucking cliches and um he was a good buddy and and so he he happened to be there working with felix papillardi on a mountain record by their band mountain and uh i invited them to break in the studio for us kit was away he arrived the second day we were there so that first day we played that track with them and by the time you got back to london and recorded at olympic and i think you did a at least one track in the rolling stones mobile mobile bus it just didn't feel right to bring someone else in again no we brought we brought in a violinist for the end of barbara o'reilly but that was all right yeah no we would we were not a band that collaborated with other musicians you know John Edwards when he started solo touring John did the Ringo all-star band tours he I think he did it four or five times when the who were inactive for whatever reason probably because I was writing and he loved performing John he loved playing he loved playing and I was never crazy about it I was never crazy about touring I was never that crazy about performing.

45:08I knew I was good at it, but you know, I didn't know why I was good at it. And I still don't. I still don't know why I'm so good at performing. I suppose I have to put a lot of it down to the history of my childhood because of growing up with my dad's band. You know, I feel very comfortable on stage. I feel very comfortable backstage, but I don't get that excited. It feels like a job to me, feels like a job that I do well, that I don't have any arguments with, but it doesn't set me on fire. You know, when I see some artists about to go on stage at Glastonbury or somewhere like that, they're so excited and so thrilled that they almost like, you know, they could go up in the air like a balloon.

45:50I don't get that. Is there anything that does set you on fire in that way? Well, I really like being in a recording studio. Yeah, to some extent. Yeah, yeah, of course there are things but I think I think musically speaking I feel like the whole picture the whole you I mean when we opened up this conversation you you talked about you know in a sense the idea of me as a as a renaissance man being able to do various things and so there are moments in everything that I do where I I get a kick it's just that thing that some performers get that they just love it you know who i talked to a lot about this was tina tina turner you know she yeah wow and i said what fucking happens to you on the stage and she just looked at me and she said pete what fucking happens to you same thing she didn't know who that person was she was quiet shy sad would walk onto the stage you know and i look at myself on the stage and i don't know who that person is do you remember the first time that person appeared on stage yeah i think i do i think it was we were doing a little we were just a school band and we were doing some show and it was we did the gig and then i got off stage and went into the crowd and we'd been playing the new dance of the era was the twist chubby checker song the twist which is really significant because it was when men started to dance on their own.

47:25Super, super important. Because there was this whole group of people in the male brigade who would pretend, I don't dance. I could, but I don't. I just wait till the end, and then I go and pull a bird and take her home. And I'll marry her, maybe. You know, that kind of stuff. But then there were the boys. Like, John Emerson was a great giver. He was really good at it. And anyway, I started to dance. and I remember being surrounded by this group of boys and girls who were clapping because I was dancing I was thinking wow I should do that on the stage it was a bit like a scene from you know a corny movie yeah exactly like the end of Footloose or something yeah um your dad was Cliff Townsend who was quite an accomplished musician over in the UK and had a solo career briefly nori paramour who had discovered the artist cliff richard signed my dad to a series of of solo recordings playing it was cliff townsend and his singing saxophone wow yeah he did a recording of unchained melody that nearly got in the charts but it had been recorded by about four other artists wow your relationship with him musically would you say there was a strong bond between you guys, musically speaking?

48:43No, it was terrible. He really didn't think that I would ever be a musician. He encouraged me to look at journalism because I'm a good writer and art because I could draw. And he steered me away from music. When he realized that I could play the guitar well, he did start to encourage me. He tried to get me to join a small band that he ran and do a summer season with him. But by that time, I was at art college and I was already in the Who band that was starting to develop. So it was sort of too late. Whereas my mother was really supportive. You know, she got the school band that I was in, the detours with Roger and John.

49:29She got us auditions. She got us some really great shows. She'd been an agent for a while, a music agent. She met my dad and she was a singer. He had a beautiful voice. And my dad had a lovely voice too. I'm very proud of the fact that me and all my three brothers have got something of their vocal nature, there's something about the voice which is nice. And it's nice to have. But no, he wasn't useful. But he was a huge influence because of his discipline. You know, he used to drink a lot. He was pretty wild, really good-looking guy, but he was a bit of a wastrel. You know, he used to bet on the Greyhound dog racing a lot.

50:13He fritted away a lot of money, you know. I bought him his first car. I bought him his first house. Really? Wow. Yeah, he was, you know, he was always broke. Wow. Yeah, but he would get up in the morning and practice the clarinet for two hours. And I remember teasing him saying, you know, you're playing all this fucking Prokofiev and God knows what. and then you're going to a dance hall and going

50:41and I always used to do this to my dad used to go and here dad comes the really exciting bit that you have to spend two hours a day playing you know everything that they played was really basic and simple did he take that in a good natured way he used to laugh but you know he he had a couple of phone calls i remember when i was still living at home i would have been about 15 because i left home when i was 16 maybe 16 and a half i came back home for a while as well in my middle years my middle teens but um he was one day got a phone call from a guy who said have you got a bass clarinet he says yes i do have a bass clarinet he said could you play the prokofiev bass clarinet concerto and he said is it written he said yeah he said i can play anything you put in front of me went to wigmore hall and did this bbc broadcast of a prokofiev bass clarinet cantata or something i can't remember what it was but it was a prokofiev thing that's beautiful so he was a brilliant reader and interpreter but he was in a swing band you know and the swing band world was like punk because you know glenn miller in america and the squadron airs my dad's band then they were there to raise spirits, you know, of people that would probably be dead in two weeks.

52:03You know, they weren't forces sweethearts, but they were providing, and they were considered, you know, because in those days, military music was brass bands. So the people that put together the Glenn Miller Orchestra and the squadronaires in the UK were Air Force. The Air Force people were not serious military. They were like, you know, the Navy was the Navy, the Army was the Army, but the Air Force were these stupid fuckers that went up and flew planes about and crashed them, and they cost millions of dollars. I remember I did a thing in Chicago recently when Tommy was on there, and I told this story, and somebody in the audience told me the name of the guy who allowed what he called pop music.

52:43They called it something, that music, to be part of the military exercise. I grew up with that. I grew up with the fact that my dad was part of this. Would it have been a big band? Yeah, big band. Yeah, super cool. Super cool. Sort of smoochy music and really beautifully written. And then, of course, as I got older, I realized that bands like the Basie Band and Duke Ellington and Woody Herman and all these people were people that had influenced my dad's playing and his music, but were also people that I really got into and loved. And particularly Ellington, who was kind of crazy genius composer.

53:25So I grew up with that, and it was just the most wonderful place to be. The main thing, being able to go and be a little kid and go and be part of the dance hall world. And I remember once a story I often tell. It's a great story. My dad was doing a summer season in a holiday venue up in the north of England, and there was this beautiful big ballroom, and I was 11, I think. so I was 11 I may have been just starting to think about girls seriously and I got myself a milkshake and I sat up in the balcony which was a big square balcony not like a theater balcony and these two girls came and sat outside me they were about 18 and in those days would have been from 58, 59, something like that, girls used to wear these big flowing frocks and decolletage, you know, bosoms hanging out, beautiful hair, lots of makeup.

54:25And they went, what are you doing here, little boy? You know, and I said, oh, I'm here because my dad's in the band. And they went, oh, your dad's in the band. And I said, which one is he? And I said, that one there. And she went, she said to her friend across me. They sat either side of me, sat across me. Oh, damn it. he's married, he's got a son, oh damn it, he was the one I liked. And I remember thinking, wow, I get this. I really fucking get this. And then the other one said, I want the drummer. This is a guy called Don Cairn or something. He was a Scottish boy. He was really handsome. And I realized that he was handsome and that my dad was handsome and that these two girls wanted to have sex with these two boys.

55:11and there I am with my milkshake. I also saw some dark things. I was telling somebody today about being at this particular ballroom and a whole bunch of teddy boys coming in and suddenly starting to beat up certain boys and two police officers came in and these teddy boys pulled out iron bars and they practically beat these two policemen to death and ran away and there was blood on the pavement and these guys were helped out And I remember being there watching it and thinking, what the fuck? You know, so there were ups and downs, but most of it was glorious. You know, and it made me confident that this business, this show business, this music business that I'm still a part of is a wondrous place to be.

55:58You know, it's not about being rich and famous. It's a place where you're dealing with the mystery of music and the wonderment, the magic of music. And also the way that music in those days, the function was to bring people together to dance, to make love, to kiss in a back alley, maybe for the girl to get pregnant, to have children, to start a new life after the misery of two world wars. Yeah. and the music was designed for that the atmosphere was designed for that and then suddenly there i am you know in this place where i'm looking at why don't i have a value why don't i have a meaning like my father why you know i wasn't asked to fight i've not been asked to join the army i'm grateful to be free but then you know i knew that the war had ended with the nuclear bomb with the atom bomb the glorious Oppenheim is now making loads of money and I suppose jacked into rock music after me being a big jazz fan jacked into rock music as the way to express that disenfranchisement it's big words about silly stuff really we have to pause quickly for a break and then we'll come back with more from my chat with Pete Townsend In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

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1:01:23He said, you know, you can do anything with a musical instrument. And he got his bow and he started to bang the bass with the bow. And my friend Dick Seaman went up to him and said, you can do anything, can you? And he said, yeah, anything, anything at all you want to do with a bass, you can do it. And he put it on its side and he sat on it and he turned it back to front and banged the back of it. He said, this is a machine, you know, you can do anything with it. So Dick Seaman went and got a saw, a wood saw, and Malcolm Cecil sawed through his strings. And as the saw went through the top, it hit the belly and made a notch in the belly of his bass, which I used to see.

1:02:04I used to go and see him at Ronnie Scott's, and he had his bass with a saw notch in the belly of it. The same damn bass. He was fucking radical. He was radical. so me smashing guitars was partly inspired by him as well as gustav metzger who was a considered you know auto-destructive artist who wanted us all to save the planet by stopping flying and stopping being so bourgeois as to need big cars and television sets and all of that stuff anyway he wrote to me about a year before he died he wrote me a letter wow so just a couple of years ago then yeah yeah because it's only recent isn't it yeah he was he he was with uh robert margaleff wasn't he he worked with yeah they built that big synthesizer that tonto yeah were you aware of what he was doing with that stuff at that time like in the you know it was after me it was after me he he was still in a jazz band he was in a band called the johnny something quintet the flautist in that band was going out with a girl in my class a thing that i fell in love with and kind of crazy.

1:03:09Anyway, the interesting thing about the synthesizers was the Beatles had already got hold of a Moog synthesizer. It was being operated for them by a guy called Chris Thomas, who was working for George Martin. Chris Thomas became my record producer. I had produced Chris Thomas's first record in a band called The Cat. So I knew Chris. So I heard stories about this amazing thing that they were working with. And then the Beatles came out with Maxwell's Silver Hammer. Bang, bang, then with a bit of some weird synthesizer noises. And so I knew about synths. But in the UK, a guy called Peter Zinoviev, who was an electronic music musician, decided to make his own synthesizer.

1:03:56and he made one called the EMS, Electronic Music Studios Putney, because they were based in Putney, a small box. So I bought one and it made me realize that there was a language there that I could tack on to, in a sense, tack on to rock and roll. Right. And then I heard that he had a music computer. It was a punch paper computer. I met him a few years before he died and he told me that he never got it to work. But anyway, I then started to meet other people like Roger Powell, who was working, went on to work with Todd Rundgren, who was working for ARP. A guy called David Friend was a marketer for the ARP.

1:04:39Alan Perlman made a Moog-like synthesizer, and I bought one. So I was a great believer in the fact that synthesis would not just be about music, would not just be about making funny noise for electronic music. Mort Sabotnik or whomever, but would be able to jack into a computerized system to produce very, very tailor-made musical harmonies and stuff according to data that could be produced by analyzing people's minds, bodies, temperaments, and stuff, which is at the heart of the experimental side of the Lifehaz project. It was in two phases. I mean, so much of that sort of that concept to me seems to obviously resonate today with making music with AI, right?

1:05:29AI applications potentially for making music, I guess, is what's sort of starting to occur now, what you had envisioned in some way? No, I don't know. I mean, what's really interesting is one of my counselors, one of my supporters when I was working on Lifehouse was a guy called Tim Suster. He was a friend of Karl-Heinz Stockhausen. I met Stockhausen when I was working on Lifehouse. And I met the people in the BBC radiophonics workshop as well. But Tim Suster said to me, one day, Pete, I'll have a tab behind my ear. You'll have a tab behind your ear. I'll be able to send you the melody and you'll be able to send me the counterpoint.

1:06:08And I said, what, through the air? And he said, yeah, through the air. But in my story, it was all tubes and wires running through the streets. And I didn't get the Wi-Fi bit. I didn't see that happening. Didn't see that. No, I didn't see that coming. So the thing about the AI issue of today is that we're in a very, very strange place at the moment. And it's not like the internet at all. It won't have the same, I don't think, I can only say what I think. A lot of it is based on search engines, very much like exotic Google and Bing and God knows what, gathering data and gathering images. But if you go to Adobe Max and you say, I want a picture of a dragon holding a nude girl in its mouth, you know set in an ice field with snowmen and pixies it knows what to do it knows where to gather those images but that has got to be junk however beautiful it is however extraordinary it is it's come on the other hand what's so extraordinary is that when we challenge ourselves as artists we'll often use that kind of shorthand we'll often say i want to write a rock song.

1:07:32I want it to be sexy. I want it to be something you can dance to. I want it to have a bit of an edge. Have a groove like this song. Yeah, groove like this. Yeah. So in a sense, AI at the moment is only looking backwards. It's when AI starts to look forwards. For example, supposing AI, which will be wonderful for international translation, it could save the planet you know while the dictator in china is talking to the dictator in america whoever happens to be in power at the time about what's going to happen with taiwan you and i could be having street level conversations with cantonese kids yeah we could use our jargon they could use their jargon we'll be sitting at our computers zooming backwards and forwards and we'd be hearing each other heart to heart at a level which is so familiar you know we could actually say you know what flavor of ice cream do you like and they're going to say well i'm not keen on vanilla you know that kind of stuff low level high level whatever it happens to be it will completely disable the manipulating dictators who say americans are your enemy you know or in our case the chinese are our potential enemy you know you meet them you talk to them and you think well hey they're just like us They just have a different language.

1:08:55So I think in a sense, AI can conquer that. But it's when you say, for example, you know, chat GTP, write me a CV. I want to be a guitar player. I want to be in a band. I want to play R &B music. I want to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I've done a, you know, I've got a music course. I did a course at a university, but it was literature and so, so, so, so. and I want you to write my CV for me. And Jack TP actually says to you, Pete, you're making a big mistake here. If that ever happens, if it just does what I fucking asked it to do, then I'm very happy to have AI. I used it for the first time last night.

1:09:40It's been built into an organizer that I use called ClickUp, which is a task manager, which I use because I've got so many projects I'm juggling with. Of course. It's not the most popular, but I really like it. And they've just introduced AI. And one of the pages is a long, long, long essay about my project, The Age of Anxiety, which is a young musician who hears the anxiety of people in his audience, gets distressed, quits, meets an old rock star who has gone through a similar experience of disenchantment with rock music and become an actor, and then that hasn't worked out either. And just says to him, listen, if you're feeling crazy, embrace it.

1:10:27The reason why I just did that chat was because yesterday, I gave this six-page description of my thesis for my play and said, summarize it. And that's what it said. And it's a really good summary. Wow. I don't know you personally, but having followed your career, knowing a bit about you from afar, you're far from a technophobe seem to have embraced technology wholeheartedly throughout your career yeah you you do see some practical useful application of ai oh yeah absolutely yeah i do i do i think it will help in all kinds of ways that that will surprise us when they happen just like the internet has and of course the internet has its dark side very very dark side but then so does social media and social media could actually be described as having a dark side in the music industry because in a sense what's actually been happening is that very very few artists have started to monopolize the majority of streaming to the extent where the long tail which was predicted when the internet started there will be a long tail which will be the interesting part will be all the people that are doing all the interesting personal stuff is become so clogged up you know you go on to you go on to spotify and go into some of the apple is the same title is the same you go into an area which nobody else is listening to and you hear the most extraordinary stuff you hear it on you know soundcloud you hear on bandcamp you'd make discoveries and you think who the fuck is this they're brilliant they're a genius but they've got 12 followers you know it's sort of tragic what's actually happened because not that all of those people could ever have been famous you know we're used to the star system being a place which they you know which that guy i can't remember his name but he called it black swans you know where a black swan is somebody that's just extremely lucky to be in the right place at the right time yeah so no but with respect to ai i'm hopeful but i'm not going to say it's inevitably going to be a good thing because I think it's when it becomes what drives a machine that we have to be careful.

1:12:45That's when you're worried. I think I have to get, personally, I have to give the credit for my ability to bounce off new ideas. It's because of my training at art college. The team of people that were running the course when I was 16 were radical thinkers, you know, and they were predicting the imminence of personal computers, which took 30 or 40 years to arrive. You know, they were warning their students, you know, don't learn to draw because you don't need to, that kind of thing. You know, what you actually need to do is you need to learn how to start a conversation, to create communication, but most of all, to understand that the most important thing about art in the modern world is creating a channel for feedback.

1:13:29feedback from your client feedback from your audience feedback from other artists conversation with other artists so that art becomes bigger than society and bigger than small chunks of society and what's interesting now right now you know i've got the chuck d book he's he's a great drawer mine's signed which is very cool oh shit yeah i was working on some theater piece and the kid that lived opposite my studio. His bedroom was right opposite my window. So when I was sitting at my keyboard, I could see him. Young kid, he was about 15. The wall was plastered with public enemy posters. So one day I thought, I've got to check these guys.

1:14:12They were really hard to find. They weren't easy to find, but I found them. And it felt like, yes, there's some black guy who's very, very angry with me.

1:14:25and um he's shouting at me a lot and he's making stuff up on the spur of the moment a lot of it sounds pretty threatening but now of course i kind of look back at it and i think you know the whole journey of it has been through holes you know from jay diller quest love and all of that stuff it's turned it into a high level art form yeah but also also a political success story so you follow hip-hop you are interested in the production of hip-hop yeah I read the Diller book which is cool so you get his life story my friend Dan Charnas wrote that incredible book I'll tell him I love it I will it's because he was such an interesting young man and I wish he'd been around and of course the Who's bass player Pino Pino, yeah.

1:15:16Yeah, and Pino played based on the miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Shit, man. Do you talk to Pino much anymore these days? I had this thing recently where I met a young guy on Instagram who'd done a beat every day for a year, because I'd tried to do that a few times, tried to write a little song every, or even a verse of a song every day for a year, and I would get to sort of 5th of January and give up. And he did a whole year, and I just wrote to him, sent him a dm and just said it was fantastic and got to know him helped him with a few things and brought him to my studio and he wanted to look at a wallets of piano that was his thing he i want to see a world i said i've got one to come and see it he lived fairly nearby so he came very shy young man and he started to tell me about you know i said where did you learn about this slack beat thing that you do because it's really fucking slack sometimes it's so slack that you can't work out where the rhythm is and he said oh i'm a fan of quest love so i said sort of rings a bell and um i got my computer out and i did it jay diller and quest love and saw pino's name so i got pino on a zoom and pino was so thrilled to meet this young guy who was such a big fan of jay diller and quest love and this guy brin morgan who's a welsh boy pino's welsh is now sending beats to to pino whether anything will happen who knows yeah so it was a really nice coincidence that's amazing i liked pino's last record at all the yeah it was good so fucking cool so interesting it was yeah yeah i'm so glad you heard it it was good really cool stuff and i think they're gonna make another one and he's such a charming guys he got into the who by you know we we were about to do a big tour.

1:17:08John Episal decided to kick the tour off. It was starting in Las Vegas with a, with a cocaine binge in a hotel in Las Vegas. He was, he got into bed with a prostitute who is professed to have said, I'm taking your friend into bed and I'm going to fuck him to death. And she did. She fucked him to death. and we had this big tour set up happening the next day and i said i wonder if i can find pino so i got pino on the phone and he was just getting on a plane from florida he'd just been working on the lauren hill album and i said will you come over and he just came over and we did three days in a rehearsal studio we cancelled las vegas in three days in a rehearsal studio he was with the band for quite a long time.

1:17:58I think he got fed up with it, but he was good while it lasted. I got to see him with you guys a couple of times. It was a, that was a great show. Yeah. I mean, your example of you bringing the guy doing a beat a day to your studio. I mean, just cool because, you know, I'm sure you guys didn't get that. No. I'm sure there was enough of a disconnect between what you guys in the mid-60s were doing, you know, when you were 18 or whatever. There were exceptions. you know when we did Tommy at the Fillmore Leonard Bernstein came and got a hold of me afterwards he brought his daughter to see the show and got a hold of me and shook me and said Pete you've got to do more of this you've got to do more of this it's such great work you know the storytelling you know the vivacity of the music the lyrical sensibilities of it it's just wonderful you must do more and you must bring it to Tanglewood and we took it to Tanglewood he was the director there wow yeah so there have been exceptions and i think even as a young man too in fact i've recently written a song about it about chris barber and humphrey littleton who were two jazz players so crossover from what we call traditional jazz which would have been louie Armstrong basically inspired jazz and bebop and they were just in between those two stalls they invited artists like the Who and many other acts in London at the time and the Stones who were playing R &B onto their stages which were jazz stages they invited us in and they gave us airtime and they were encouraging and chris barber who was a jazz musician his wife otterly patterson was a really great jazz singer they were married and they they were twosome and and they were national treasures as it were you know they they ran the marquee club and they invited us in and he used to sometimes get on stage with his trumpet and join in to you know R &B songs that we were playing, I'm a Man and Smokestack Lightning and stuff like that.

1:20:09And Humphrey Littleton, who knew my dad, was another trumpeter who did lots of stints at Ronnie Scott's club in London. And Ronnie Scott, we premiered Tommy to the press at Ronnie Scott's club, and we were very loud for the club, but he was a sax player like my dad a tenor player and um he came afterwards and he said pete that was fucking great you know you must do more and at that time you know i was dabbling with the idea of doing more concept work but i was so encouraged by lots of lots well not lots of people but certain key people there were people that were did the validation meant to mean something to you from those from those people yeah yeah yeah particularly for me because they were they They were from my dad's world, you know.

1:20:59And my dad had been unable to give me that validation. Yeah, yeah, right. That makes sense. I don't know that he even came to see us when we were a school band. Jeez. Did he see you once you became the who ever? Now and again, he wasn't keen. Yeah. He used to say, as a joke, he used to say, you know, you guys have put us out of work. You know, we need 14 musicians on stage minimum, you know, to raise 75 decibels. You know, you guys come in with your big amplifiers and there's only four of you making a noise, you know. It's like, come on, dad, put you in a car, put you in a home. Well, the car was the best thing.

1:21:40The first car I bought him, he'd had an old banger, you know, but I bought him a brand new Series 1 Range Rover, the very first one, which was like a big high car. And it only did nine miles to the gallon. So I used to have to send him money for petrol as well. But then I bought the house that they rented, that they lived in. And my two brothers now live in that house. So two flats above each other. So it's still a family home. But yeah, he was lovely, my dad. And we went boating together. We bought a boat together. And we used to go out on the River Thames. And we both drank a lot. So we were drink buddies.

1:22:17That's fun. Yeah. Man, Pete Townsend, thank you so much for all your deep writing over the years, songwriting, all the music, sticking together all these years, putting out incredible music. And thank you so much for this beautiful package. It was lovely to talk to you. Thanks again. Thanks to the legendary Pete Townsend for sharing so many incredible stories from his career. The Who's new box set, Who's Next, Lifehouse is out now. You can hear a collection of all of our favorite Who songs and other songs mentioned in this episode on a playlist at BrokenRecordPodcast.com. Subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube.com slash BrokenRecordPodcast where you can find all of our new episodes.

1:23:00You can follow us on Twitter at Broken Record. Broken Record is produced with help from Leah Rose and Eric Sandler. Our show is engineered by Echo Mountain. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad-free listening for$4.99 a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcast subscriptions. And if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. Our theme music is by Kenny Beats. I'm Justin Richmond.

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