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This Cultural Life - Season 4 Episode 6 - Pete Townshend
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00:00Pete Townshend, songwriter and guitarist with The Who.
00:14In the mid-1960s, his songs, including I Can't Explain and My Generation,
00:20became anthems of youth identity and rebellion.
00:24And in 1969, Townshend created the groundbreaking rock opera Tommy,
00:29later filmed by Ken Russell.
00:34Four years later, Quadrophenia, his concept album about the mod movement,
00:38was also made into a film and more recently has been adapted as a ballet.
00:45In the 70s and 80s, The Who were one of the biggest and loudest live acts in the world,
00:52with Pete Townshend infamous for his destructive performances.
00:59In this episode of This Cultural Life, the Radio 4 programme,
01:03he reveals his formative influences and experiences,
01:07and how, at the age of 80, he's as driven as ever.
01:12The idea that I could today, for example, just retire,
01:16go sailing or something, and just stop writing music at all,
01:20it feels to me like a waste of time.
01:24I'm telling myself that nothing is off the map.
01:27Nothing.
01:28Nothing.
01:58Pete Townshend, welcome to This Cultural Life.
02:02You were born in London in 1945 into a very musical family.
02:06Your mother and father, Cliff and Betty, were both working musicians
02:10and you've chosen both of them as your first creative influence for this programme.
02:15Just give us a sense of what were they playing and how big an impact they had on you.
02:19Well, my dad was a professional musician, a clarinetist in little jazz groups.
02:24My mum was a young Irish girl, I think you would call her, living with her grandmother.
02:30She falsified her age to get into the Air Force during the war and became a truck driver.
02:37And they met through another band leader in the Air Force.
02:43And so they worked together for a while.
02:46And I was born right at the end of the war in May, right when things were winding down.
02:50And my parents did their best to run a family.
02:57But it was difficult because my mother wanted to be a singer and my dad was really busy.
03:03If you were in an Air Force orchestra, you were still in the Air Force.
03:06So he was sent to Berlin quite a lot, several times, to perform to the troops there.
03:13And my mum was left behind and tried to build a career.
03:19And then my parents started to take me on the road.
03:21Right.
03:22And that's when the good stuff started to happen.
03:23So this is a post-war jazz band or swing band?
03:28They were a dance band.
03:29Dance band.
03:29Squadron Airs, they were called.
03:30They were a very famous and very popular dance band.
03:33From the age of around 13 months, I started to travel with them on the band bus.
03:50I've got an extraordinarily clear memory of many big events, like being on the band bus,
03:57passing out beer bottles to trumpet players, riding at the front, pretending to drive.
04:03When 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.
04:11That's extraordinary.
04:12And did you at that age, did you want to emulate your parents, do you think?
04:16I think it was too early for me to really tell.
04:19I think when I, the hiccup that happened to me was when I was four and a half.
04:23My mother got a job with a guy called Leslie Douglas, who was, who was doing shows for the American Air Forces.
04:32And he was in love with my mother.
04:34And she started to tour with him.
04:38And she sent me to my grandmother, who was, had abandoned her when she was seven.
04:47Why she sent me to live with this woman, I don't know, but I went to live with this woman.
04:51I left my friends at school behind.
04:53And you were living, this is by the sea?
04:55Yeah, and we went to live, I went to live with her in Margate.
04:59And it was just horrible.
05:01And I don't remember, and I kind of black it out.
05:04I tend to black it out.
05:05It was so horrible.
05:06You described it in your memoir a few years ago as the darkest part of my life.
05:09Yeah, I think dark is the right word because I don't remember a lot about it.
05:13She was nuts and abusive and cruel and surrounded by extremely pervy men all the time who interfered with me.
05:24At the end of that period, somebody reported my grandmother for abusive behavior.
05:30My mother and her lover came down and rescued me, and they brought my friend Graham, who had been my best friend.
05:37So I came back to Acton, and as far as I was concerned, that was where my childhood began.
05:43So this is a childhood of great uncertainty, of pain and darkness, as you say.
05:48But did music offer some kind of escape for you?
05:51Having seen your parents on the road and audiences cheering them, when did you start thinking,
05:57I want to make music myself?
05:59I think that happened when I was in my early, lucky 10, 11, 12.
06:05You've talked before about an aunt called Trilby, who had a piano.
06:10That's right.
06:10Who would allow you to play, but it was an out-of-tune piano, so it created strange resonant tones.
06:15That's right. Yeah, she was fabulous.
06:17One day I was playing the piano, just clunking away, and I went off into a dream, a fantasy.
06:22I could literally hear the most incredible music.
06:25It wasn't what I was playing.
06:26I was hearing something else.
06:28Channeling, I suppose.
06:29Anyway, I finished, and I went very quiet, and she was netting or something,
06:34and she said, that was very nice, Pete.
06:36And I said, I know.
06:37And I wondered how she knew.
06:40So she encouraged you, then?
06:42Yeah.
06:42And that was a place, a great haven of love and safety for me.
06:47Were you getting any musical encouragement from your father, then?
06:49No.
06:51Do you think he worried that if you followed in his profession, it would be too precarious?
06:56He knew that it was an uncertain life to be leading?
06:59No, I don't know why.
07:01I think it may be that my parents knew that I was damaged, because I do feel that I'm damaged.
07:10You know, I've done all of the things that people do that have fallen into addiction and
07:15bad behaviour, and, you know, all of the counselling and the AA and the steps and the, you know,
07:23three years in psychotherapy, and inevitably I feel like a diamond with a floor.
07:32You know, I feel in a sense that some of the suffering that I had when I was really small
07:36with my grandmother shaped me and gave me real edge.
07:41There's no question.
07:42You know, when I work, I am, what's the word, charged.
07:49And I feel that that came from the time with my grandmother, where I had to build up some
07:58level of resistance.
08:00Did your father, I think he died in the mid-80s, didn't he?
08:05Yes, yeah.
08:05So did he watch your career from afar, or was he encouraging when you got that huge global
08:11success?
08:12You know what's so interesting?
08:12It was my mum that was the most, the most encouraging.
08:17You know, I got to be 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and throughout that whole period I was playing
08:24the mouth organ, and I got very good at the chromatic harmonica, but my dad regarded that
08:30as an inferior instrument.
08:32And that's because he was a sax player?
08:33Yeah.
08:34And he was a very, very good clarinet player and bass clarinet player.
08:37He did classical concerts as well.
08:39He used to practice two hours every morning, so he could read anything you put in front of
08:44them, but he just thought that I had no musical talent.
08:50Your next choice for this cultural life, Pete Townsend, is seeing Bill Haley and the Comets
08:54in London in 1957.
08:57And, of course, Bill Haley's hit single, Rock Around the Clock, had been the first big
09:02international rock and roll hit in, I think, 1954.
09:06Put your bad rags on, join me, hon.
09:08We'll have a little fun when the clock strikes one.
09:10We're gonna rock around the clock tonight.
09:13We're gonna rock, rock, rock, no broad daylight.
09:15Gonna rock, gonna rock around the clock tonight.
09:19Had you seen Rock Around the Clock, the movie spinoff from the single?
09:22My dad took me to see it, and whenever that was, I saw it with my best friend, Graham Jimpy,
09:28his nickname was.
09:29Seeing Bill Haley in person, though, must have been a really life-changing event.
09:35You know, it was scary.
09:38My dad dropped us off.
09:41We got tickets at the very last minute, so we were right at the back of the Odeon, and
09:46the chairs that we were sitting on were going up and down like this because the people were
09:50jumping and jumping and jumping, and I remember the bass player had a proper double bass, and
09:56he would turn it on his side and ride on it like a horse.
09:59Did it encourage you to get your first guitar, seeing Bill Haley?
10:03Both of us.
10:03Both me and Jimpy.
10:06And Jimpy got the first guitar.
10:08His dad made him one, and Graham would stand in front of the mirror.
10:13He was a very good-looking boy, and standing in front of the mirror is a big part of rock
10:18and roll.
10:18You know, it's a huge part of it.
10:20You have to do a lot of standing in front of the mirror.
10:23And one day I was with him, and I picked up the guitar, and I played a tune on it, and
10:28Jimpy's dad said to my dad, Cliff, he's playing this thing I made, and he's making a tune.
10:35And my dad went, yeah, yeah, yeah.
10:37I mean, literally dismissed it.
10:39But that Christmas, he persuaded my awful grandmother to buy me my first guitar, and
10:46she found one on the wall of a Greek restaurant that she pulled down, and I had that for about
10:51two years.
10:53But I learned to play that, and eventually I got my own guitar, and I started to...
10:57So I would have been about 11, 12, when I first started to really dig in and practice.
11:03But your dad could clearly see you're enthralled to rock and roll.
11:05Do you think his indifference to your musical ability was because he saw rock and roll as
11:10a threat to his own life?
11:11He said so.
11:12He said so in so many words.
11:14And it was in that period that the shift happened.
11:17And the shift happened with my generation.
11:20I often say, with pride and with bombast, I drew the line with my generation.
11:30I drew the line.
11:31With that song.
11:32I was so conscious of it with my dad.
11:48There was this music.
11:50Which was his generation.
11:51Yeah, which was about rebuilding, about falling in love, about finding romance, about finding
11:58something in life which was better than war, I suppose.
12:02And on my side, it was, you know, we don't have that reason for being.
12:07We are kind of useless.
12:09We need to reinvent ourselves and have a new future.
12:13And that turned out to be the case.
12:17You know, rock and roll replaced the dance music of the previous era.
12:21You overthrew your father?
12:22Yeah.
12:23Your next choice of creative influence for this cultural life, Pete, is the artist and
12:28academic Roy Ascot, who taught you at the Ealing School of Art, where you were a student,
12:33I think 1961, 1962.
12:35Were you planning a career as a visual artist at that time, do you think?
12:41Yes.
12:42In that summer, just at the end of the school term at Ealing, Roger Daughtry came back.
12:51He'd been expelled.
12:52He came back in his rocker gear, took me aside and said, I've heard from your buddy, John Entwistle.
13:00I was in a band with John playing jazz.
13:02At school?
13:03At school.
13:05And I want you to join my band.
13:07And I went for an audition with him and he included me in his band.
13:09So I'd spent the summer playing at pubs with Roger and his band, which was called The Detours.
13:15The Detours.
13:16And we were good.
13:17We were really good.
13:18And we got lots of gigs at pubs.
13:20And we made a bit of pocket money.
13:23But for me, it was a game.
13:25It was a hobby.
13:26It was nothing to be serious about.
13:29I didn't see myself as being creative.
13:32I wasn't the lead guitar player.
13:34Roger was the lead guitar player.
13:36He wasn't a particularly good player, but he was the lead guitar player.
13:40I was the rhythm player.
13:41I was a gawky kid with a big nose that sat at the back and strummed.
13:45You know, so.
13:46And Roger was tough and cool.
13:47Yeah, yeah, he was the anchor.
13:48And we had a singer, a glamorous sort of Cliff Richard type singer who the girls liked.
13:53And so you went to Ealing Art College expecting not to be a musician, but to be an artist.
13:57Who was Roy Ascot and why was he so influential?
14:00He was the shock.
14:01Because I went to Ealing, I'd been to art classes right the way through the summer.
14:07And those classes were very conventional.
14:10They were drawing flowers and painting and trying to throw pots.
14:15There were still these chaps with tweed jackets and red bow ties, you know, who would sort
14:21of say, now the thing is, you've got to sharpen your pencil properly.
14:24But what followed with Roy Ascot was a much, much, much more orderly course of breaking down
14:31students' preconceptions, yes, but also of setting us up for a future in which communication
14:39was almost more important than artistic expression.
14:44So he was a pioneer of the understanding of digital art as well.
14:48Digital art, but also the way that digital art, when it came, and it was many years ahead,
14:54would change the function of art.
14:57So Roy Ascot was far more than a lecturer then.
15:00He was a kind of a...
15:01He was absolute visionary.
15:02He was like a philosopher for you then.
15:04Yes, a visionary and still is.
15:05He's still alive.
15:06He was only 10 years older than I was.
15:08He was only 26.
15:09As you say, you were already playing in the band The Detours, which became The Who,
15:13with Roger Daltrey, John Entwistle on bass, and then Keith Moon joined on drums.
15:18To what extent was your art school training or your education informing the identity of
15:25The Who and the sort of mission statement of The Who?
15:27To begin with, not at all.
15:28What actually happened is we were still the pub band.
15:31We were doing parties as well, Jewish weddings and things like that.
15:34We were making good money, but I kept it secret.
15:38And I pretended I was in a jazz band, but I wouldn't talk about it any further.
15:44I never let any of my friends come and see the band.
15:47I felt I was juggling, to be honest, and I wasn't sure which way I was going to go.
15:53I was really, really, really affected by this idea that one day we would have these things
16:03called computers, which would do for us what we couldn't do for ourselves.
16:08And, of course, this is 1961, 62, looking ahead and wondering, when will we get these things?
16:17And yet, ten years after you were in these lectures with Roy Ascot, 1971, you recorded
16:22The Who's Next album, on which you were using synthesizers as a compositional tool,
16:28which was really kind of ahead of the game in many ways.
16:30And we hear that most obviously on Won't Get Fooled Again.
16:33To what extent was Roy Ascot responsible for those experiments later on?
16:50Sort of directly, directly responsible.
16:54Your earlier songs Can't Explain, My Generation, The Kids Are Alright, Any Way, Anyhow, Anywhere.
17:00I get along the way out there Anywhere, Anyhow, Anywhere
17:06All of those songs expressing ideas of teenage rage and frustration,
17:13were they autobiographical lyrics, or were you writing about and for your audience?
17:18I think more for my audience than about my own.
17:22I think there was a bit of rage there, but I don't think very much.
17:27I think where I started to explore the inner darkness that I spoke of,
17:35that was instilled in me when I was an infant, was on stage,
17:38where I became somebody, I dare say, somebody that I'm not.
17:46I would prefer not to be that person.
17:48I don't know who that person is.
17:50The theatrical performer.
17:51Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how I do it. I don't know if I do it well.
17:55I don't know if I'm acting or whether it's real. It's just, I don't know who it is.
18:00Well, you're talking in particular about your stage persona,
18:03somebody who, in the public imagination, gets on stage,
18:07turns the guitar up very loud and at the end of the show smashes the guitar.
18:10And Roy Ascot at Ealing, I believe, had also introduced you to the artist Gustav Metzger,
18:15a proponent of what he described as auto-destructive art.
18:19As a man so well-known for smashing guitars on stage yourself,
18:22how influential was Metzger?
18:25Hugely.
18:26If I had a sense that what I was doing on the stage
18:30was driven by animal instincts, I don't think I would do it.
18:35I was very detached. I never enjoyed doing it.
18:42I never felt...
18:43Because, of course, as soon as I'd done it,
18:45I would have to buy another one or repair the one that I'd smashed.
18:48It was a very expensive stage act.
18:49Yeah, but it felt to me part of my own manifesto.
18:54When I was at art school in 1963, I wrote myself a manifesto,
18:58which was that whatever I did with the band would last six months.
19:03It was a punk manifesto.
19:05So Gustav Metzger was interesting because, of course, I read him wrong.
19:10I thought that what he meant was
19:12that artists should destroy the tools of bourgeois art,
19:17which in my case was my guitar.
19:19In fact, he was a climate change advocate.
19:24He believed that art was responsible, in part,
19:27for creating pollution and creating, you know, too much travel.
19:33And it definitely was an anti-bourgeois manifesto that he had.
19:36Did you regard The Who as an art project as much as a pop band?
19:41Yes.
19:41And what was difficult was that the other three members
19:45and Roger still today, they didn't and they don't.
19:49But for me, the beginning of my life as a musician and an artist
19:55was when I wrote the first song for The Who Can't Explain.
19:58And I'm driving home in my mum's little yellow van for her antique shop
20:02and I heard it on the radio.
20:03And I thought, my manifesto is not going to work.
20:17You know, I'm not going to get past this.
20:20I want this band to stop.
20:22I badly, badly don't want it to last for the rest of my life.
20:25This is not what I want to do.
20:27I don't want to be in a rock band.
20:2960 years later.
20:30Yeah.
20:32But hearing that record on the radio, you know,
20:37the creative in me just thought, wow, you know,
20:39people are listening to this.
20:41And you say you were writing about the audience
20:43and it wasn't about yourself.
20:44But that recurring theme of those songs, that frustration,
20:49is that something you recognised that you felt you then had to write about?
20:52There was an expectation.
20:53There's a story that I tell which signifies this so well.
20:59Can't Explain was on the radio.
21:01We had a regular gig at a mod club called The Goldhawk in Shepherd's Bush.
21:07A guy called Irish Jack, Jack Lyons, summoned me and said,
21:10can a group of us come back and talk to you after the show?
21:13And I said, so what's up?
21:14And they said, we just want to tell you that we really love this song.
21:18And I said, well, that's great.
21:19Thank you very much.
21:20Can't Explain.
21:20Yeah, can't explain.
21:22Well, we like it because it is how we feel.
21:26And I said, well, how do you feel?
21:27And he said, we feel we can't explain.
21:31And about a week before, I'd had a conversation
21:35with the head of the commercial art course saying,
21:40the most important thing for a commercial artist
21:43is having a client and having a brief.
21:46And I thought, there's my client, there's my brief.
21:50You were writing to a brief from then on then?
21:52Yeah, yeah.
21:53You were writing, giving voice, in effect,
21:55to people who couldn't explain their lives.
21:57Yeah, I mean, it sounds patronising, doesn't it?
21:59But that's what I suppose writers do.
22:02It felt like a commission.
22:03So from the late 60s, you became a songwriter really associated with storytelling,
22:08with those extended narratives in a song cycle.
22:12And particularly with Tommy, which is the story of the deaf, dumb and blind kid
22:16who becomes the pinball wizard, the messiah for a whole generation of people in the story.
22:22Did you feel like a frustrated novelist or a wannabe opera composer?
22:27The opera composer bit we can drop, definitely a wannabe novelist.
22:32The storytelling was already starting to grip me.
22:35So when I started to work on Tommy,
22:37I was, in a sense, trying to write in the Sufi tradition,
22:42which is that the story has an unfolding spiritual message,
22:48which is that wherever we go, whatever we do,
22:52we are going back, in a sense.
22:55We're not going forward.
22:56Of course, one of the most powerful renditions of Tommy,
23:00of those set of songs, was performed by The Who in 1969
23:03at the Woodstock Festival.
23:04And the whole set climaxing with See Me, Feel Me.
23:08And I think, you know, the sun is rising as you're performing.
23:14Touch me
23:16Heal me
23:20See me
23:24Feel me
23:29What are your memories of, you know,
23:31what is regarded as one of the most powerful moments in rock and roll?
23:36We'd been delayed.
23:39We were supposed to go on, I think, at nine o'clock at night,
23:41and we'd been delayed and delayed and delayed and delayed
23:44until when I got to watch a lot of fabulous bands as a result.
23:48But we went on three or four in the morning
23:52and did our two-hour set or an hour and a half set.
23:56And I noticed as we were starting, Tommy,
23:58that the sun was beginning to rise.
23:59And so we started to play Listening to You, I Get the Music,
24:03which is the prayer at the end of Tommy.
24:06And I kept playing it until the sun came up.
24:09That's why he goes on so long in that version.
24:30Yeah, but the main thing was
24:33not that the sun had to come up,
24:39but that the audience had to stand up.
24:42They were knackered.
24:44They'd all done too much dodgy acid.
24:47They were all tired.
24:48Some of them had their children with them.
24:51You know, they were in bed when we were playing.
24:53But it was the magic moment
24:55was when suddenly one of them kind of got up
24:57and then another one got up
24:58and then another one got up and another one.
25:00Then in the end, the whole audience was standing.
25:02It was kind of like a miracle.
25:05And if you feel as an artist you can work miracles,
25:10you are desperate to learn how it works.
25:14You know, how is that working?
25:18In 1973, you released the album Quadrophenia,
25:21another song cycle.
25:22And this one, sort of going back a decade earlier
25:25to your original subject, The Mods,
25:28and this was about a young guy
25:30who is suffering an identity crisis
25:33and mental illness as well.
25:36What was the initial inspiration for Quadrophenia?
25:39It was pretty basic stuff.
25:41You know, the band had turned into a prog rock outfit.
25:44We were doing big shows.
25:46We were playing stadiums a lot of the time.
25:48You were writing anthems in a band.
25:49Yes, anthems.
25:51And we lost ourselves.
25:54We got lost.
25:57I looked at the band and I thought, you know, who are they?
26:02Who am I?
26:03What are we doing here?
26:04You know, we're just going out.
26:05And I felt I had to reconnect the members of the band
26:10with their roots.
26:12And so it was a neighbourhood stunt, really.
26:15And the neighbourhood that I thought of
26:17was Shepherd's Bush, Hammersmith, Acton, where we grew up.
26:21Your stomping ground.
26:22Yeah, and morphed the four members of the band
26:26into one kid who looks at himself in them
26:31and my counsel was that we look at ourselves in him.
26:35That was a tricky one.
26:36So I don't think the other guys in the band
26:40identified themselves inside Jimmy at all.
26:44It's interesting, isn't it?
26:45Because I think the main protagonist of that song cycle
26:48is undergoing a kind of identity crisis.
26:51But that, what you're telling me,
26:52is the band had an identity crisis.
26:54Without question.
26:55Yeah, we did.
26:56What was interesting was
26:58I don't know that the band cared about the manifesto
27:04that was buried in the middle of it all.
27:07They just let me get on with it.
27:0958 years after you first toured America,
27:13you've just announced that you're heading out to America
27:16on a farewell tour.
27:17Yeah.
27:17So this is the end of The Who, then?
27:19Well, whether it's the end of The Who,
27:21it's certainly the end of touring in America.
27:23And will it be followed by a farewell UK and Europe tour?
27:26You know, that's another question.
27:28I asked Roger that straight away during the press launch,
27:34and he said, we'll have to wait and see.
27:36So it's down to Roger, then?
27:38Oh, yeah.
27:38Having been the almost sole songwriter for 60 years,
27:43you don't have a say in that.
27:45Look at what I have that he doesn't have.
27:48I have a one-man show that could run for a year.
27:53I think he's doing solo shows at the moment,
27:56playing mixtures of, and very happily doing that.
27:59So I think he will continue to sing and continue to work.
28:02But The Who is a clumsy machine for us
28:04because we're missing two members.
28:07You know, we're missing John Entwistle
28:08and we're missing Keith Moon,
28:10and we've been missing them for a long time.
28:12We're very, very dependent on each other.
28:14But we're getting old, so we have different needs.
28:18Looking back, what is the legacy of The Who,
28:21as far as you're concerned?
28:22What are you most proud of?
28:23I think it's the fact that in the chaos of the 60s,
28:28with the Beatles, with Bill Haley, with Elvis Presley,
28:31with all of those important bands, the Rolling Stones,
28:34that we were able to help create a form of music
28:36which seems to have lasted.
28:38And what drives you on creatively, Pete?
28:40It's just the need to be creative.
28:44So for me, the idea that I could today, for example,
28:47just retire, go sailing or something,
28:49and just stop writing music at all,
28:52it feels to me like a waste of time.
28:57You know, I might have five years left,
28:59I might have ten years left,
29:00I might have 15 years left, if I'm really lucky,
29:03of being able to work with music.
29:06What I'm actually doing is I'm telling myself
29:08that nothing is off the map.
29:10Nothing.
29:12Pete Townsend, thank you very much indeed
29:13for sharing your cultural life.
29:14Thanks, John. I've enjoyed it.
29:16I've enjoyed it.
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