Pete Townshend, the mastermind behind the songs My Generation and Substitute, is no longer a fan of The Who and is no longer slowing down.
Legendary The Who guitarist Pete Townshend, who wrote the 1960s rock anthem I Hope I Die Before I Get Old, has just turned 80 – but says he feels like a new man.
Or at least part of him does. “That song wasn’t a state of mind – it was a threat!” he laughs. “I don’t feel old – I just got a new knee.” And Townshend reveals that although he’s not planning to retire just yet, he admits that The Who’s days of going on the road are numbered.
One of the best and loudest bands in rock history, The Song Is Over, has announced its farewell US tour this summer, appropriately titled, The Song Is Over, after 58 years of being the first to tour America. “Whether it’s the end of The Who…”? Townsend pauses before saying, “It’s undoubtedly the end of our American tour. I inquired to Roger if his tour of Europe was over, and he responded, “No.” We’ll have to wait and see'”.
Townsend, a journalist for Radio 4’s My Cultural Life, discusses the dark years of his life that gave him his wild man of the rock persona, which included playing guitars on stage and destroying hotel rooms, but claims even at the age of 80 has an edge.
“I feel like a diamond with a flaw. He reveals that he is a dangerous f***er. I favored rock and roll as a philosophy. But when I started exploring my inner darkness on stage, my stage persona – smashing guitars and turning it all up – I was very detached and I didn’t enjoy doing it”.
He also acknowledges that Roger Daltry, his 81-year-old bandmate, and he now realize that their relationship has changed. The “need has changed,” he claims, noting that “Roger has previously said that we would continue touring until we drop dead.” “It was always me who said that, ‘ I reserve the right to stop, ‘ and I have stopped twice – once for 11 years when I worked with Faber and Faber as a book editor.
So I always assumed Roger was in charge of the cards, but I believe Roger is now in charge. Townsend wrote the rock group’s massive teenage anthems My Generation, Substitute, and I Can See For Miles despite Daltry founding the band in 1964 when the pair met at Ealing Art College.
He admits his co-founder thinks he’s pretentious when he says The Who was an art project for him as much as a pop band”. The other three members didn’t (feel that way), “says the father-of-three,” which was challenging. He would spend the majority of his time laughing if he and I were sitting together and discussing My Cultural Life at the time.
Townsend intended to pursue an artistic career, but Daltry persuaded him to join The Detours, which later became The Who. Even today, Roger still thinks it was his band. He had been expelled and came back and asked me to be in his band.
“And that’s true, and I’m grateful,” according to the statement made by the composer of the song “I Can’t Explain.” Townsend kept his pastime a secret while the band played weddings and pubs.
“I wasn’t serious about being in a band”, he admits. Roger was the lead guitarist, but he wasn’t a particularly talented player. I strummed and had a big nose while being gawky.
” But we had a good looking lead singer who the girls liked and we became quite successful. Townsend, a young, confused musician, even predicted its demise because he was so sure he didn’t want to play a band.
The Who are a band who are chopping away at their own legs is a manifesto I wrote myself. Then one day I’m driving home in my mum’s yellow van and heard my song, I Can’t Explain, come on the radio, and I thought, “My manifesto! I’m not interested in playing in a rock band. No, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing this. But wow – people are listening to this'”.
By the time Daltry was lead vocalist, Keith Moon and John Entwistle had already joined the band, and Townsend and Townsend had just released their 1969 rock opera album Tommy, which received a lot of critical and commercial praise. However, Keith Moon passed away in 1978 at the age of 31 from an accidental overdose of the alcohol medication Hemineverin.
Then in 2002, bass player John Entwistle’s dodgy ticker gave out after the 57-year-old took cocaine in a Las Vegas hotel room. Because we’ve been missing two members for a long time, Townsend calls The Who a “clumsy machine.” “Roger and I depend a lot on one another.” We’re getting old and we have different needs.
I would be honored if Roger wanted to perform MY music, if I could put it this way. We’re just accepting our current circumstances, not that there’s going to be an argument.
And he adds, “We’ve never agreed on very much, but that’s not to suggest there’s a war on, because there isn’t”. Townsend claims that the negative aspects of his personality were brought on by the age that have finally cooled the previous animosity between him and Daltry.
In 1999, he claimed the website contained images of child abuse, which he claimed was his autobiography. He was immediately given a formal warning. Born into a musical family right at the end of the war, Townsend first went out on the road with his musician parents aged just 13 months old.
He recalls that they were very well-known swing dance bands. Beer bottles being distributed among band members on the tour bus is one of my favorite memories.
I had done it so many times with my dad when The Who first started playing in the UK. I knew where I went. However, when his mother went on a tour and sent him to live with his grandmother in Margate, his happy childhood abruptly came to an end.
” Why my mother sent me to my grandmother who had abandoned her when she was seven, I don’t know, but I left my friends and school behind in Acton, “he says sadly.
I kind of remember everything because it was just awful and I didn’t remember a lot of it. She constantly fought with me, and she was cruel, abusive, and surrounded by incredibly wealthy men who constantly hampered me. It was a really shitty time and in the end somebody reported my grandmother for abusive behaviour.
He describes returning to his Acton, West London, home and saying, “My parents saved me; they saved me; they eventually got back together; and I eventually had two brothers. That is when my childhood began, as far as I remember.
Despite his father being a musician, Townsend says he didn’t encourage his son to join a band at school. He admits that “my father didn’t believe I had any musicality.” “My mother was very encouraging,” she said. When our band started, she lugged our kit around, helped us get gigs”.
The rock legend has been sober for 40 years, despite having battled depression and substance abuse his entire life. He ponders whether my parents were aware that I had been damaged because I’ve committed all kinds of wrongdoing and addiction.
And explains how his 1965 hit My Generation was about him pushing back against his dad. He explains, “I drew the line with My Generation.” After the war, Dad’s music was his generation’s love and romance. We didn’t have that reason for being – we needed to reinvent ourselves. Our generation was rock and roll. My dad’s big band generation was being overtaken by me.
The Who created some of the most powerful moments in rock and roll history especially when they performed at Woodstock in 1969 – and the hair-raising refrain of Tommy’s Feel Me See Me Touch Me played out across the half a million festival goers as the sun rose in the sky.
They went on to sell-out stadiums around the world, but Townsend felt that by the late 1970s, they’d begun to lose themselves. “The band had turned into a prog rock outfit. I felt we have to reconnect with our roots – and I wrote Quadrophenia about the Marquee and Shepherd’s Bush – where we’d grown up.”
Townsend’s bandmates were left out when they attempted to explain the story of a young mod Jimmy set in 1965 on the 1979 rock concept album. “The other guys didn’t identify themselves with Jimmy at all. The manifesto that was buried in the middle of it was irrelevant to them.
Although Townsend had complete control over his debut album, tensions between him and Daltry boiled over. “It led to the only incident in which Roger and I have actually had a physical fight”, he admits. I had been working on stage tapes all night, and when we got into a fight, he knocked me out and I had a bad behavior.
But when I finished it, I thought, “Wow, you know, they’ve let me do this.” “Like Tommy, Quadrophenia was adapted for film, and recently has been staged as a mod ballet. According to Townsend, Jimmy’s vulnerability demonstrated how common a spectrum teen boys appear to go through. Therefore, it has fresh relevance.
The 80-year-old has as much creative energy today as he did 60 years ago, but he says it’s time to do new things”. I’m proud that The Who were able to produce music that endured, and I’m not blatantly ashamed of my past, but I’m driven by the need to be creative. It seems like a waste of time for me to retire, sail, and stop writing.
Source: Mirror
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