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00:07Pete 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,
01:02he 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,
01:19it feels to me like a waste of time.
01:24I'm telling myself that nothing is off the map.
01:27Nothing.
01:28Nothing.
01:29Nothing.
01:31Nothing.
01:57Nothing.
01:58Pete Townshend, welcome to This Cultural Life.
02:01You 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.
02:23My 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 and I was born right at the end of the war in
02:48May,
02:49right 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.
03:29The Squadron Airs, they were called.
03:30They were a very famous and very popular dance band.
03:44From 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, passing out beer bottles
03:58to 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
04:09I'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, my mother
04:25got a job with a guy called Leslie Douglas, who was doing shows for the American Air Forces.
04:32And he was in love with my mother.
04:35And she started to tour with him and she sent me to my grandmother, who was, had abandoned her when
04:45she 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 and it was just horrible.
05:01And I don't remember, and I kind of black it out, I tend to black it out, it was so
05:05horrible.
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 behaviour.
05:29My mother and her lover came down and rescued me and they brought my friend Graham, who had been my
05:36best 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.
05:48Did music offer some kind of escape for you?
05:50Having 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.
06:09That's right.
06:10Who would allow you to play, but it was an out-of-tune piano, so it created strange resonant tones.
06:14That's right.
06:15Yeah, she was fabulous.
06:16One day I was playing the piano just clunking away and I went off into a dream, a fantasy.
06:21I 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 knitting or something and she said,
06:34that 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.
06:43And 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.
06:50Do 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 bad behaviour.
07:16And, you know, all of the counselling and the AA and the steps and the, you know, three years in
07:25psychotherapy.
07:27And 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.
07:40There's no question.
07:41You know, when I work, I am, what's the word, charged.
07:51And I feel that that came from the time with my grandmother where I had to build up some level
07:59of resistance.
08:00Did your father, I think he died in the mid-80s, didn't he?
08:05Yes, yeah.
08:05So did he, he watched your career from afar or was he encouraging when you got that huge global success?
08:12It was my mum that was the most, the most encouraging.
08:17You know, I got to be 7, 8, 9, 10, 11.
08:22And throughout that whole period, I was playing the mouth organ.
08:25And I got very good at the chromatic harmonica.
08:28But my dad regarded that as an inferior instrument.
08:32And that's because he was a sax player?
08:33Yeah.
08:33And 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.
08:42So he could read anything you put in front of him.
08:44But 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 in London in 1957.
08:57And, of course, Bill Haley's hit single, Rock Around the Clock, had been the first big international rock and roll
09:03hit in, I think, 1954.
09:05Put your right rags on, join me, hun.
09:08We'll have some fun when the clock strikes one.
09:10We're gonna rock around the clock tonight.
09:13We're gonna rock, rock, rock, no bright daylight.
09:15Gonna rock, gonna rock around the clock tonight.
09:19Had you seen Rock Around the Clock, the movie spin-off from the single?
09:22My dad took me to see it.
09:24And whenever that was, I saw it with my best friend, Graham Jimpy, his 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.
09:40We got tickets at the very last minute.
09:42So we were right at the back of the Odeon.
09:46And the chairs that we were sitting on were going up and down like this because the people were jumping
09:50and jumping and jumping.
09:52And I remember the bass player had a proper double bass and he would turn it on his side and
09:58ride on it like a horse.
09:59Did it encourage you to get your first guitar, seeing Bill Haley?
10:03Both of us, both me and Jimpy.
10:06And Jimpy got the first guitar.
10:08His dad made him one.
10:10And Graham would stand in front of the mirror and kind of, he was a very good-looking boy.
10:15And standing in front of the mirror is a big part of rock and 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.
10:22And one day I was with him and I picked up the guitar and I played a tune on it.
10:28And Jimpy'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 she found one on the
10:47wall of a Greek restaurant that she pulled down.
10:50And I had that for about two years.
10:53But I learned to play that and eventually I got my own guitar and I started.
10:56So I would have been about 11 when I, 12, when I first started to really dig in and practice.
11:02But 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 a threat to
11:10his 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 and 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 with that song.
11:45I 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 something in life which was better
12:01than 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.
12:14And 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 academic Roy Ascott, who taught
12:30you at the Ealing School of Art, where you were a student, I think 1961, 1962.
12:35Were you planning a career as a visual artist at that time, do you think?
12:41Yes.
12:41In 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.
13:15And we were good.
13:17We were really good.
13:18And we got lots of gigs at pubs and we made a bit of pocket money.
13:22But 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.
13:39I was the rhythm player.
13:41I was a gawky kid with a big nose that sat at the back and strummed.
13:45And 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 because I went to Ealing.
14:02I'd been at art classes right the way through the summer.
14:07And those classes were very conventional.
14:09They were drawing flowers and painting and trying to throw pots.
14:14There 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.
14:43So 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 with
15:14Roger 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, and Jewish weddings and things like that.
15:34We were making good money.
15:36But I kept it secret.
15:38And I pretended I was in a jazz band.
15:42But I wouldn't talk about it any further.
15:44I never let any of my friends come and see the band.
15:46And I 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?
16:16And 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, which
16:28was really kind of ahead of the game in many ways.
16:30And we hear that most obviously on Won't Get Fooled Again.
16:46To what extent was Roy Ascot responsible for those experiments?
16:50Sort of directly, directly responsible.
16:53Your earlier songs, I Can't Explain, My Generation, The Kids Are All Right, Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere.
17:07All of those songs expressing ideas of teenage rage and frustration, were they autobiographical
17:14lyrics or were you writing about and for your audience?
17:18I think more for my audience than about my own.
17:23I 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 that was instilled
17:35in me when I was an infant was on stage, where I became somebody, I dare say, somebody that
17:45I'm not.
17:45I would prefer not to be that person.
17:48I don't know who that person is.
17:50The theatrical performer.
17:51Yeah.
17:51I don't know.
17:52I don't know how I do it.
17:53I don't know if I do it well.
17:55I don't know if I'm acting or whether it's real.
17:58It's just, I don't know who it is.
18:00Well, you're talking in particular about your stage persona, somebody who, in the public
18:04imagination, gets on stage, turns the guitar up very loud and at the end of the show smashes
18:09the guitar.
18:10And Roy Ascot at Ealing, I believe, had also introduced you to the artist Gustav Metzger,
18:14a proponent of what he described as auto-destructive art.
18:19As a man so well known for smashing guitars on stage yourself, how influential was Metzger?
18:25Hugely.
18:26If I had a sense that what I was doing on the stage was driven by animal instincts, I
18:34don't think I would do it.
18:36I was very detached.
18:40I never enjoyed doing it.
18:42I never felt, because, of course, as soon as I'd done it, I would have to buy another
18:46one or repair the one that I'd smashed.
18:47It 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, which was that whatever I did
19:00with 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.
19:09I thought that what he meant was that artists should destroy the tools of bourgeois art, which
19:17in my case was my guitar.
19:18In fact, he was a climate change advocate.
19:23He believed that art was responsible, in part, for creating pollution and creating, you
19:31know, 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 and Roger still today, they didn't
19:48and they don't.
19:49But for me, the beginning of my life as a musician and an artist was when I wrote the first
19:56song
19:57for The Who Can't Explain.
19:58And I'm driving home in my mum's little yellow van for her antique shop, and I heard it on
20:03the radio.
20:13And I thought, my manifesto is not going to work.
20:17You know, I'm not going to get past this.
20:19I 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.
20:31And, and, but hearing that record on the radio, you know, the creative in me just thought,
20:38wow, you know, people are listening to this.
20:41But you say you, it was, you were writing about the audience and it wasn't about yourself,
20:44but that recurring theme of, of those songs, that frustration, is that something you recognised
20:50that 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, a mod club called the Goldhawk in Sheppard's Bush.
21:06A guy called Irish Jack, Jack Lyons, summoned me and said, can a group of us come back and
21:11talk to you after the show?
21:12And I said, so what's up?
21:14And they said, we just want you 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.
21:21Yeah, Can't Explain.
21:21Well, 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 with the head of the commercial art course saying,
21:40the most important thing for a commercial artist is 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, aren't you?
21:53You were writing, giving voice, in effect, to people who couldn't explain their lives.
21:57I 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, with those extended narratives in a song
22:11cycle.
22:11And particularly with Tommy, which is the story of the deaf, dumb and blind kid who becomes the pinball wizard,
22:18the 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.
22:34So when I started to work on Tommy, I was, in a sense, trying to write in the Sufi tradition,
22:42which is that the story has an unfolding spiritual message, which 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, of those set of songs,
23:01was performed by The Who in 1969 at the Woodstock Festival.
23:04And the whole set climaxing with See Me, Feel Me.
23:09And I think, you know, the sun is rising as you're performing.
23:15Touch me
23:19Heal me
23:22See me
23:27Feel me
23:29What are your memories of, you know, what is regarded as one of the most powerful moments in rock and
23:35roll?
23:37We'd been delayed.
23:38We 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 until when I got to watch a lot of fabulous
23:46bands as a result.
23:48But we went on three or four in the morning and did our two-hour set or an hour and
23:55a half set.
23:56And I noticed as we were starting, Tommy, that the sun was beginning to rise.
23:59And so we started to play Listening to You, I Get the Music, which is the prayer at the end
24:05of Tommy.
24:05And I kept playing it until the sun came up.
24:27That's why he goes on so long in that version.
24:30Yeah, but the main thing was not that the sun had to come up, but that the audience had to
24:40stand 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.
24:50You know, they were in bed when we were playing.
24:53But it was the magic moment was when suddenly one of them kind of got up and then another one
24:58got up and then another one got up and then another one got up and another one.
25:00And then 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, you are desperate to learn how it works.
25:14You know, how is that working?
25:18In 1973, you released the album Quadrophenia, another song cycle.
25:22And this one sort of going back a decade earlier to your original subject, the mods.
25:28And this was about a young guy who is suffering an identity crisis and 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.
25:56We, we, I 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 couldn't, and I felt I had to reconnect the members of the band with their roots.
26:12And so it was a neighbourhood stunt, really.
26:15And the neighbourhood that I thought of was, was Shepherds Bush, Hammersmith, Acton, where we grew up.
26:21Your stomping ground.
26:21Yeah, and, and morphed the four members of the band into one kid who looks at, looks at himself in
26:30them.
26:31And they look at, my counsel was that we look at ourselves in him.
26:35That was a tricky one.
26:37Um, I don't think the other guys in the band identified themselves inside Jimmy at all.
26:44It's interesting, isn't it?
26:45Because they say the main protagonist of that song cycle is undergoing a kind of identity crisis.
26:51But that, what you're telling me, is the band had an identity crisis.
26:55Without question.
26:55Yeah, we did.
26:56What was interesting was, I don't know that the band cared about the manifesto that was buried in the middle
27:05of it all.
27:07They just let me get on with it.
27:1058 years after you first toured America, you've just announced that you're heading out to America on 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, it'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.
27:36Well, so it's down to Roger, then?
27:38Oh, yeah.
27:38Having been the almost sole songwriter for 60 years, you don't have a say in that?
27:45Yeah, but look 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, playing 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 because we're missing two members.
28:07You know, we're missing John Entwistle and we're missing Keith Moon, and we've been missing them for a long time.
28:12We're very, very dependent on each other.
28:14But we're getting old.
28:15So we have different needs.
28:18Looking back, what is the legacy of The Who as 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 with the Beatles, with Bill Haley, with Elvis
28:30Presley,
28:31with all of those important bands, the Rolling Stones, that we were able to help create a form of music
28:36which seems to have lasted.
28:38And what drives you on creatively, Pete?
28:41Just the need to be creative.
28:43So for me, the idea that I could today, for example, just retire, go sailing or something, and just stop
28:50writing music at all,
28:52it feels to me like a waste of time.
28:56You know, I might have five years left, I might have ten years left, I might have 15 years left,
29:01if I'm really lucky,
29:03of being able to work with music.
29:06What I'm actually doing is I'm telling myself that nothing is off the map.
29:10Nothing.
29:11Pete Townsend, thank you very much indeed for sharing your cultural life.
29:14Thanks, John.
29:15I've enjoyed it.
29:16Pete Townsend, thank you very much.
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