Pete Townshend

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0:32Hello and welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which some of the world's leading artistic figures choose the most significant influences and experiences that have inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is Pete Townsend, songwriter and guitarist with The Who. The band first stormed the pop charts 60 years ago with teenage anthems including I Can't Explain, Substitute and My Generation. People try to put us down. Talking about my generation. Broader songwriting ambitions led Pete Townsend to create the rock opera Tommy in 1969 and the concept album Quadrophenia four years later.

1:11Both projects were adapted as films and now Quadrophenia has been staged as a ballet by Sadler's Wells. Throughout the 70s and 80s, The Who were regarded as the biggest and loudest live act in the world. They played at Woodstock, at Live Aid, at Live 8, and the 2012 Olympic Closing Ceremony. Despite the deaths of drummer Keith Moon and bassist John Entwistle, Pete Townshend and singer Roger Daltrey continue to perform as The Who.

1:43Pete Townshend, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you. You were born in London in 1945 into a very musical family. Your mother and father, Cliff and Betty, were both working musicians and you've chosen both of them as your first creative influence for this programme. 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.

2:21And 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. If 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.

2:59Did 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. It 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.

3:39That'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. And 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.

4:19And 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. So she 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. Anyway, it was a really shitty time. And in the end, somebody reported my grandmother for abusive behaviour.

5:03My 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. So 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, lucky 10, 11, 12.

5:48You've talked before about an aunt called Trilby who had a piano. That's right. Who would allow you to play, but it was an out-of-tune piano, so it created strange resonant tones. Yeah, she was fabulous. She was fabulous not because she encouraged my meanderings, but she was just fabulous anyway. One day I was playing the piano just clunking away and I went off into a dream, a fantasy. I could literally hear the most incredible music. It wasn't what I was playing. I was hearing something else. Channeling, I suppose. Anyway, I finished and I went very quiet and she was knitting or something and she said, that was very nice, Pete.

6:24And I said, I know. And I wondered how she knew. So she encouraged you then? Yeah, of course she did, yeah. And that was a place, a great haven of love and safety for me. 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 behaviour and, you know, all of the counselling and the AA and the psychotherapy and inevitably I feel like a diamond with a floor.

7:15You 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. You know, I'm a dangerous fucker. There's no question. You know, 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. You 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. They'd split up.

7:52She'd gone off with the other musician. 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? It 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 Daltrey 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.

8:40She 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. Wow. 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. One, two, three o 'clock, four o 'clock, rock. Five, six, seven o 'clock, eight o 'clock. Your next choice for This Cultural Life, Pete Townshend, is seeing Bill Haley and the Comets in London in 1957.

9:27Of course, Bill Haley's hit single, Rock Around the Clock, had been the first big international rock and roll hit in, I think, 1954. so do you remember hearing that song on the radio? Yeah, yeah. You know, funnily enough, for a lot of people like me who had dads that liked the Goon Shirt, that was where we heard the first attempts at rock and roll. Very well, pay your ransom of a thousand golden splonders or hang. Ye gulp. Give me till the end of Ray Ellington's number. Not a moment longer.

10:00Because Ray Ellington, who was the MD, a drummer, He was a big fan of black rock music and he used to play rock songs on the Goon Show.

10:14And had you seen Rock Around the Clock, the movie spin-off? I saw that on the Isle of Man. My dad took me to see it with my best friend Graham Jimpy, his nickname was. Seeing Bill Haley in person, though, must have been a really life-changing event. You know, it was scary. My dad dropped us off. We got tickets at the very last minute, so we were right at the back of the Odeon. Where was this? This was at the top of Edgeware Road. It's gone now. The building was falling down when we were in it. And the chairs that we were sitting on were going up and down like this because the people were jumping and jumping and jumping.

10:52and I remember the bass player had a proper double bass and he would turn it on his side and ride on it like a horse and it had this thumping swinging. And I remember when my dad took us to see the film, which would have been the summer before, I remember saying to him, do you like this, Dad? And he said, sort of quite politely, he said, well, it swings. It swings. That's all he would say. Did it encourage you to get your first guitar, seeing Bill Haley? Both of us, both me and Jimpy. And Jimpy got the first guitar. His dad made him one. And Graham would stand in front of the mirror. And standing in front of the mirror is a big part of rock and roll.

11:34You know, it's a huge part of it. You have to do a lot of standing in front of the mirror. And one day I was with him and I picked up the guitar and I played a tune on it. And Jimpy's dad said to my dad, Cliff, he's playing this thing I made and he's making a tune. and my dad went, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, literally dismissed it. But that Christmas, he persuaded my awful grandmother to buy me my first guitar and she found one on the wall of a Greek restaurant which she pulled down. And I had that for about two years and eventually I got my own guitar. But your dad could clearly see your enthralled to rock and roll.

12:12Do 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. And 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 line. with my generation. I drew the line. With that song? Yeah. People try to put us to death Talking about my generation Because I was so conscious of it with my dad, there was this music...

13:04Which 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. You overthrew your father. Yeah.

13:46Your next choice of creative influence for this cultural life, Pete, is the artist and academic Roy Ascot, who taught you at the Ealing School of Art, where you were a student, I think 1961, 1962. Were you planning a career as a visual artist at that time, do you think? Yes. And I thought that the band that I was in at the time was the band... So I started in September of 1961. I was 16. And in that summer, just at the end of the school term at Ealing, Roger Daltrey came back. He'd been expelled. He came back in his rocker gear, took me aside and said, I've heard from your buddy, John Entwistle.

14:31I was in a band with John playing jazz. At school? At school. And I want you to join my band. And I went for an audition with him and he included me in his band. So I'd spent the summer playing at pubs with Roger and his band, which was called The Detours. The Detours. And we were good. We were really good. And we got lots of gigs at pubs. And we made a bit of pocket money. But for me, it was a game. It was a hobby. It was nothing to be serious about. I didn't see myself as being creative. I wasn't the lead guitar player. Roger was the lead guitar player. He wasn't a particularly good player, but he was the lead guitar player.

15:09I was the rhythm player. I was a gawky kid with a big nose that sat at the back and strummed. And Roger was tough and cool. Yeah, he was the anchor. And we had a singer, a glamorous sort of Cliff Richard-type singer who the girls liked. And so you went to Ealing Art College expecting not to be a musician but to be an artist. Who was Roy Ascot and why was he so influential? He was the shock because I'd been at art classes and those classes were very conventional. What followed with Roy Ascot was a much, much, much more orderly course of breaking down students' preconceptions, yes, but also of setting us up for a future in which communication was almost more important than artistic expression.

15:55So he was a pioneer of the understanding of digital art as well. Digital art, but also the way that digital art, when it came, and it was many years ahead, would change the function of art. Roy Ascot was far more than a lecturer then. He was a kind of a... He was absolute visionary. He was like a philosopher. Yes, a visionary, and still is. He's still alive. He was only 10 years older than I was. He was only 26. 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?

16:36To 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 were embarrassed by it? I was earning more money than the lecturer in charge of the course, so no, not particularly. I just felt... I felt I was juggling, to be honest, and I wasn't sure which way I was going to go. I 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.

17:21And, of course, this is 1961, 62, and, of course, it took to 1985 before I had my own personal computer. And yet, ten years after you were in these lectures with Roy Ascot, 1971, 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.

17:53To what extent was Roy Ascot responsible for those experiments? Sort of directly responsible. Yeah, directly responsible. Because he opened your mind to the possibility of, or your mind in particular, about the possibility of technology? Yeah.

18:19the 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 i 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. Your earlier 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. I can go anywhere, won't you? I can live anywhere, won't you? I can go anywhere, or something new, Any way, any how, any way I'll choose Were they autobiographical lyrics or were you writing about and for your audience?

19:10I 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. I 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.

19:51Well, 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 and 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.

20:36I 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. I 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.

21:14An auto-destructing band. 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 Did 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. If Roger and I were sitting together and I was doing an interview about this cultural life, he would spend most of his time laughing.

22:11Did 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. 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. He started it. And I feel in a sense that, yes, of course that's true. I 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.

23:08You 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. Yeah, and hearing that record on the radio, you know, the creative in me just thought, wow, you know, people are listening to this. Can't explain, I think it's love, trying to say it to you. When I feel blue, girl, can't you believe? Can't explain to you 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?

23:53There 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, has been a constant fan of The Who, who's 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? And 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.

24:31And 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. Yeah, I mean, that sounds patronising, doesn't it? but that's what I suppose writers do. It felt like a commission.

25:14Your next choice for this cultural life, Pete, is a collection of short stories called Labyrinths by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. When did you first read this collection? I read it on tour in 1967, our first tour of America, when we were supporting an artist called Herman's Hermits, who, he was a number one star. Peter Noon. Yeah, Peter Noon. And I carried this book with me, and I read it slowly but surely all the way through the tour, and it was towards the end of that tour that I started to think about writing something that was rather more esoteric, I suppose is the word, than the kind of songs that I'd been thinking about before.

26:01It was on that tour, for example, that I first wrote the song. It's a girl, Mrs Walker, it's a girl about a plane crash. All you wanted from me All I had to give Nothing matters, you'll see When in paradise you live The plane is diving faster Which I suppose was about reincarnation. and although Borges didn't refer to reincarnation, all of his stories were refutations of time. He didn't write it like a quantum physicist, he wrote like a writer, but he wrote a lot about time being something which is abstract. So a lot of the stories are non-linear. That's right, yeah. But he actually talks about time as well, he describes time, he tells stories about time and I had a quick look back at it before I came today just to remind myself I was surprised how bloody difficult a lot of it was, but I really loved it and I really was inspired by it and I carried it.

27:04I've still got the book. And so those ideas then started to directly influence your songwriting? Absolutely. I started to feel that he was a storyteller with a unique mandate. I needed, in a sense, something outside the music world. I needed something that was difficult and I think his writing is difficult. I think if I recommend this book to people to read and they buy it, they're going to hate me because it's bloody difficult to read. So 1967, you read this book whilst travelling across America and this is the time when your songwriting is changing with the Who Sellout album. The Who Sellout album, but also the fact that I was definitely working on opera, without question.