Pete Townshend from The Who: Farewell tour doesn’t mean the end

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1:27to be Lady Gaga. Only the things that you can't solve with government and private sector is where you bring philanthropy in. There's no place in the world where women are equal. Every generation, every generation has to fight to maintain democracy. For this interview, I met Pete Townsend, songwriter and guitarist of British rock band The Who at BBC Broadcasting House in London. While studying at art college, Townsend was earning more money than his lecturers through his teenage band The Detours. Ten years later, they'd become The Who, one of the biggest and loudest rock outfits of the 1970s. As the band's main driving force, he wrote stadium rock anthems like Baba O 'Reilly and pioneered the narrative concept album with Tommy and Quadrophenia.

2:14This brought worldwide fame for the band and acclaim for Townsend as a songwriter. You're going to hear how this caused tension with singer Roger Daltrey, who didn't share the same vision. Notorious for smashing up guitars, Townsend always considered The Who to be more of an art project than a rock outfit. The Who is a clumsy machine for us because we're missing two members and we've been missing them for a long time. We're very, very dependent on each other, but we're getting old. Yes. So we have different needs. It was always me that said, you know, I reserve the right to stop. I think Roger holds the cards now.

2:54Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Pete Townsend. You were born in London in 1945 into a very musical family. Your mother and father, Cliff and Betty, were both working musicians. Just give us a sense of what were they playing and how big an impact they had on you. Well, my dad was a professional musician, a clarinetist in little jazz groups. My mum was a young Irish girl, I think you would call her, living with her grandmother. and I was born right at the end of the war in May, right when things were winding down. And my parents did their best to run a family, but it was difficult because my mother wanted to be a singer and my dad was really busy.

3:39If you were in an Air Force orchestra, you were still in the Air Force. And my mum was left behind and tried to build a career. And then my parents started to take me on the road. And that's when the good stuff started to happen. So this is a post-war jazz band or swing band? They were a dance band. The Squadron Airs, they were called. They were a very famous and very popular dance band. Did you see your parents perform on stage a lot? Oh, yeah. They would take you along to the shows? Yeah, I travelled with them from the age of around 13 months. I started to travel with them on the band bus. And that's a glamorous life, I guess, through the eyes of a young child.

4:16It was glamorous. And when I was a little older, from about 13 months old, I've got an extraordinarily clear memory of many big events, like being on the band bus, passing out beer bottles to trumpet players, riding at the front, pretending to drive. When The Who first started to tour in the UK, I knew my way to all of the gigs because I'd done it so many times with my dad. That's extraordinary. And did you at that age, did you want to emulate your parents, do you think? I think it was too early for me to really tell. I think the hiccup that happened to me was that my mother got a job with a guy called Leslie Douglas, who was doing shows for the American Air Forces, and he was in love with my mother.

5:02And she started to tour with him, and she sent me to my grandmother, who had abandoned her when she was seven. Why she sent me to live with this woman, I don't know, but I went to live with this woman. I left my friends at school behind. I left the gang from Acton behind. And you were living, this is by the sea? Yeah, I went to live with her in Margate and it was just horrible. And I don't remember, and I kind of black it out. I tend to black it out. It was so horrible. You described it in your memoir a few years ago as the darkest part of my life. Yeah, I think dark is the right word because I don't remember a lot about it.

5:39She was nuts and abusive and cruel and surrounded by extremely pervy men all the time who interfered with me. I had no friends. I wasn't allowed to have friends. In the end, somebody reported my grandmother for abusive behaviour. My mother and her lover, she had a new lover as well, they came down and rescued me and they brought my friend Graham, who had been my best friend. So I came back to Acton and at that point, my father stepped in and said to my mother that she couldn't take me away. Right. And had to rebuild the relationship. And as far as I was concerned, that was where my childhood began.

6:25So this is a childhood of great uncertainty. Did music offer some kind of escape for you? Having seen your parents on the road and audiences cheering them, when did you start thinking, I want to make music myself? I think that happened when I was in my early, like 10, 11, 12. Were you getting any musical encouragement from your father? No. Do you think he worried that if you followed in his profession, it would be too precarious? He knew that it was an uncertain life to be in? No, I don't know why. I think it may be that my parents knew that I was damaged because I do feel that I'm damaged. you know I've done all of the things that people do that have fallen into addiction and bad behavior and you know all of the counseling and the AA and the psychotherapy and and inevitably I feel like a diamond with a floor you know I feel in a sense that some of the suffering that I had when I was really small with my grandmother shaped me and gave me real edge when I work I am charged and I feel that that came from the time with my grandmother where I had to build up some level of resistance.

7:45You know, I was saved by my parents. You know, they did in the end save me because they got together for my benefit and eventually after a while I had two brothers but it took a long time. You say got together because they'd split up. She'd gone off with the other musicians. And he had a girlfriend too, of course. He was a very handsome fella. And they remained together then? Yes, and seemed to be quite happy. Did your father, I think he died in the mid-80s, didn't he? Yes, yeah. So did he watch your career from afar, or was he encouraging when you got that huge global success? You know what's so interesting?

8:16It was my mum that was the most encouraging. He just thought that I had no musical talent, but my mum was the one who, when the school band started with Roger Daltry and John Embersole, which was when I was 15, swung behind us and started to help us deliver gear, got us auditions for gigs, and used some of her old romantic connections. She contacted Leslie Douglas, and Leslie Douglas, who's the man I think who was most in love with her, got us a job at the American Air Force canteen kind of place in Kensington. and we were paid about probably the equivalent in today's money of about a thousand quid.

9:04Wow. It was huge. We bought gear, we bought guitars, we bought a van. In my case, we drank. You know, we were wealthy because of that. And then it also gave us a contact with an American audience. But your dad could clearly see your enthralled to rock and roll. Do you think his indifference to your musical ability was because he saw rock and roll as a threat to his own life? He said so. He said so in so many words. You know, with three lads and these big amplifiers that we had, we could make an equivalent noise of a 20-piece dance band and we could fill the halls. So it was inevitable that we were going to put them out of work.

9:42And it was in that period that the shift happened. And the shift happened with my generation. I often say, with pride and with bombast, I drew the nine. with my generation because I was so conscious of it with my dad there was this music which was his generation yeah which was about rebuilding about falling in love about finding romance about finding something in life which was better than war I suppose and on my side it was you know we don't have that reason for being we are kind of useless we need to reinvent ourselves and have a new future and that turned out to be the case. You know, rock and roll replaced the dance music of the previous era in every respect.

10:32You overthrew your father? Yeah. As you say, you were already playing in the band The Detours, which became The Who with Roger Daltrey, John Entwistle on bass and then Keith Moon joined on drums. To what extent was your art school education informing the identity of The Who and the sort of mission statement of The Who? To begin with, not at all. What actually happened is we were still the pub band. you know we were doing parties as well and jewish weddings and things like that we were making good money but i kept it secret and i pretended i was in a jazz band i never let any of my friends come and see the band you're embarrassed by it uh i was earning more money than the lecturer in charge of the course so no not particularly i just felt i was juggling to be honest and i wasn't sure which way I was going to go.

11:21I was really, really, really affected by this idea that one day we would have these things called computers, which would do for us what we couldn't do for ourselves. And of course, this is 1961, 62. And of course, it took to 1985 before I had my own personal computer. And yet, 10 years after you were in these lectures, you recorded the Who's Next album, on which you were using synthesizers as a compositional tool, which was really kind of ahead of the game in many ways. And we hear that most obviously on Won't Get Fooled Again. The synthesizer felt to me a way that I could, in a sense... In fact, I think at the time I said, I will be the computer.

12:06I will feed back what I see in my audience members. I was one of the proponents of rock and roll as a... What would you call it? A philosophy.

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12:59For this episode of The Interview, I'm speaking to Pete Townsend. When we met at BBC Broadcasting House, I was struck just how proud Townsend is of his musical achievements and the legacy of The Who. But for somebody so associated with the violent energy of his stage performances and for often being a spiky interviewee, he was surprisingly reflective and really thoughtful, far more than just a rock star. Townsend, I think, is an artist who's keenly aware of the diverse array of influences that have shaped his songwriting and his playing, from painters and conceptual artists to novelists and classical composers.

13:37OK, let's return to my conversation with Pete Townsend. Your earliest songs Can't Explain, Any Way, Any How, Any Where, My Generation, The Kids Are All Right, all of those songs expressing ideas of teenage rage and frustration. Were they autobiographical lyrics or were you writing about and for your audience? I think more for my audience than about my own. There was a bit of rage there, but I don't think very much. I think where I started to explore the inner darkness that I spoke of that was instilled in me when I was an infant was on stage, where I became somebody, I dare say, somebody that I'm not.

14:19I would prefer not to be that person. I don't know who that person is. The theatrical performer. Yeah, I don't know how I do it. I don't know if I do it well. I don't know if I'm acting or whether it's real. It's just I don't know who it is. Well, you're talking in particular about your stage persona, somebody who in the public imagination gets on stage, turns the guitar up very loud and at the end of the show smashes the guitar. And from what I understand, Roy Ascot, who's one of your key creative influencers, had also introduced you to the artist Gustav Metzger, who had come to Britain in the 30s as a refugee from Nazi Germany.

14:54And he established himself as an artist, a proponent of what he described as auto-destructive art, as a man so well-known for smashing guitars on stage yourself. How influential was Metzger? Hugely. If I had a sense that what I was doing on the stage was driven by animal instincts, I don't think I would do it. I was very detached. I never enjoyed doing it. I never felt... Because, of course, as soon as I'd done it, I would have to buy another one or repair the one that I'd smashed. It was a very expensive stage act. Yeah, but it felt to me part of my own manifesto. When I was at art school in 1963, I moved from the ground course into graphic design.

15:38I wrote myself a manifesto, which was that whatever I did with the band would last six months. It was a punk manifesto. It was my first public statement to Fabulous Music, which was a teen magazine, was The Who are a band that are chopping away at their own legs. An auto-destructing man. So Gustav Matzka was interesting because, of course, I read him wrong. I thought that what he meant was that artists should destroy the tools of bourgeois art, which in my case was my guitar. In fact, he was a climate change advocate. he believed that art was responsible in part for creating pollution and creating too much travel and it definitely was an anti-bourgeois manifesto that he had.

16:29Did you regard The Who as an art project as much as a pop band? Yes. And what was difficult was that the other three members and Roger still today, they didn't and they don't. Did he see it as a pretentious view of the band? Yeah, and of course that was a theme that I had to live with and still have to live with to this day about my own work. You know, I think if you're lucky enough to be a rock star, you're supposed to put up and shut up. So Roger Daltrey sees it as a rock and roll band. He puts up and shuts up. He also sees it as his band to this day. You know, he started it. And I feel in a sense that, yes, of course that's true.

17:11I accept that. and I'm very grateful for him giving me this job because it's a great job to have and it's extremely well paid. But for me, the beginning of my life as a musician and an artist was when I wrote the first song for The Who Can't Explain and I'm driving home in my mum's little yellow van for her antique shop and I heard it on the radio and I thought, my manifesto is not going to work. You know, I'm not going to get past this. I want this band to stop. I badly, badly don't want it to last for the rest of my life. This is not what I want to do. I don't want to be in a rock band. 60 years later.

17:53Yeah, and hearing that record on the radio, you know, the creative in me just thought, wow, you know, people are listening to this. And you say you were writing about the audience and it wasn't about yourself, but that recurring theme of those songs, that frustration, is that something you recognised, that you felt you then had to write about? There was an expectation. There's a story which signifies this so well. Can't Explain was on the radio. We had a regular gig at a mod club called The Goldhawk in Shepherd's Bush. A guy called Irish Jack, Jack Lyons, who's been a constant fan of The Who, is still alive, still proselytising to this day, summoned me and said, can a group of us come back and talk to you after the show?

18:38And I said, so what's up? and they said, we just want to tell you that we really love this song. And I said, well, that's great, thank you very much. Can't explain. Yeah, can't explain. We like it because it is how we feel. And I said, well, how do you feel? And he said, we feel we can't explain. And about a week before, I'd had a conversation with the head of the commercial art course saying, the most important thing for a commercial artist is having a client and having a brief. And I thought, there's my client, there's my brief. You were writing to a brief from then on then? Yeah, yeah. You were writing, giving voice, in effect, to people who couldn't explain their lives.

19:22Yeah, I mean, it sounds patronising, doesn't it? But that's what I suppose writers do. It felt like a commission. In 1973, you released the album Quadrophini, another song cycle. This one sort of going back a decade earlier to your original subject, the mods, and this was about a young guy suffering an identity crisis and mental illness as well. What was the initial inspiration for Quadrophenia? It was pretty basic stuff. You know, the band had turned into a prog rock outfit. Lifehouse had turned into Who's Next with Barbara O 'Reilly and Won't Get Forward Again and Behind Blue Eyes, these big, big songs which had actually affected our transition transition from an arena band to a stadium band.

20:06We were playing stadiums a lot of the time. You were writing anthems. Yes. And we lost ourselves. I looked at the band and I thought, you know, who are they? Who am I? What are we doing here? You know, we're just going out. And I felt I had to reconnect the members of the band with their roots. And so it was a neighbourhood stunt, really. And the neighbourhood that I thought of was was Shepherds Bush, Hammersmith, Acton, where we grew up. Your stomping ground. Yeah, and morphed the four members of the band into one kid who looks at himself in them, and my counsel was that we look at ourselves in him.

20:43That was a tricky one. I don't think the other guys in the band identified themselves inside Jimmy at all. I don't know that the band cared about the manifesto that was buried in the middle of it all. They just let me get on with it. It was the first album that the Who had allowed me to produce. Technologically and musically, I touched everything. I did everything. It led to the only incident in which Roger and I have actually had a physical fight, which was that I'd been working all night on stage tapes and was late for rehearsal. And we had an argument and I behaved badly and he helped me out.

21:22But when I finished it, I thought, wow, you know, they've let me do this. They trusted me. 58 years after you first toured America, you're heading out to America on a farewell tour. Yeah. So this is the end of The Who then? Well, whether it's the end of The Who, it's certainly the end of touring in America. Will it be followed by a farewell UK and Europe tour? You know, that's another question. I asked Roger that and he said, we'll have to wait and see. So it's down to Roger then? Oh, yeah. The Who is a clumsy machine for us because we're missing two members. You know, we're missing John Entwistle and we're missing Keith Moon and we've been missing them for a long time.

22:02We're very, very dependent on each other, but we're getting old. Yes. And so we have different needs. So if Roger Daltrey says to you we carry on touring as The Who until one of us keels over on stage, you're quite happy to go along with it? He has said that often in the past, but I think the needle has shifted. It was always me that said, you know, I reserve the right to stop. And I have stopped, of course, twice in The Who's career. Once for 11 years, I didn't work with The Who. And I went to work for Faber & Faber as a book editor. So I think, you know, I've always felt that I was holding the cards.

22:39I think Roger holds the cards now. Because I think if he wanted to perform my music, if I can put it as bluntly as this, I would be honoured. So I don't think it's about there being an argument between us. It's just about the fact that we're accepting our current situation. And we've never agreed really on very much. But it's not to suggest that there's a war on because there isn't. I hope I die before I get old is one of your most famous lines. Do you feel old now? No. I've just got a new knee. So age was a state of mind in that song then? No, it's nothing about a state of mind really. It's a threat, isn't it?

23:21It's one of the songs that made you a global star, made The Who one of the biggest, certainly the loudest band in the world for many years. Looking back, what is the legacy of The Who as far as you're concerned? What are you most proud of? I think it's the fact that in the chaos of the 60s, all of these fantastic creative people that we were able to help create a form of music which seems to have lasted. You know, I might have five years left, I might have 10 years left, I might have 15 years left, if I'm really lucky, of being able to work with music and work with art. And with this swerve that I'm taking, what I'm actually doing is I'm telling myself that nothing is off the map.

24:00Nothing. I may actually do some dancing when I get my other knee done.

24:10Thank you for listening to The Interview from the BBC World Service. If you enjoyed today's programme, you can listen to The Interview wherever you get your BBC podcasts, and you can hear more in-depth conversations with leading artists and creative people with me, John Wilson, on the BBC's This Cultural Life. Until next time, bye for now.

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