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PT BBC 'Hard Talk' i/v (part 1)



PT on BBC News 24.  Interviewed by Tim Sebastian quite a well known BBC 
journalist so he’s quite combative (although nicely) and has done is 
reading.

RUN VT OF THE WHO ON TOP OF THE POPS (?) PERFORMING ‘WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN’

I: Pete Townshend, a very warm welcome to the programme.

P: Thanks

I: When you look at that how do you think it’s lasted?

P: Well ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ has lasted brilliantly, I think, it’s sort 
of - it’s straddled a whole bunch of eras and issues and it was written, 
really, about um a resistance, you know, that I had to be political - so it 
was about ‘I won’t get fooled again - I won’t get involved in political 
revolution, you know, or mini revolutions’ and er today it - it resonates as 
well, you know, it resonates because life goes on, wars go on, people die, 
you know - politicians and dictators are proven worthless and that er notion 
that - that one leader is as bad as the next eventually resonates on.

I: How do you feel about the Pete Townshend who wrote that as opposed to 
Pete Townshend now?

P: You know I - this - this particular era, this Lifehouse era, 1971, ‘72 - 
I was in a very good place creatively, I’m very proud of the work that I did 
at that time which I think is why I’ve kind of stuck by it for such a long 
time, you know, I’ve really ...

I: It’s a lifetime, half a life time.

P: It is ...

I: More than half a lifetime.

P: Yes but in pop it’s a short period of time, isn’t it really - you know, 
because I’ve grown up with it, you know, in the 60’s we - we never imagined 
that we’d last more than a couple of years so it’s interesting to be around 
at all.

I: How do you keep a project alive, at least in your own mind, for such a 
long time.  I mean you left it for long periods didn’t you?

P: Lifehouse, the project, on - from which ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ came was 
intended to be the follow-up to Tommy and er I wanted something not so much 
bigger and better but I wanted something that went straight to film and I 
felt that it was important it should be a film which included live 
performances because The Who were so fantastic life and the audience were 
pretty fantastic too.  The kind of feeling at Who concerts was very special 
I think.  But that specialness I believe came from the fact that we were 
playing Tommy live, you know, although people teased us for calling it a 
rock opera - what was very interesting - we didn’t demand that the audience 
didn’t applaud between numbers, but they didn’t.  These were rock audiences 
- rock n roll audiences who would politely observe silence between the 
numbers (Laughs) in Tommy as though they were at Covent Garden and at the 
end of the piece, you know, you get to ‘Listening to You I get the Music,’ 
‘See Me Feel Me’ those moments, really quite sublime moments at the end of 
the piece, musically speaking, and ...

I: Hard to top those.

P: .. and everybody would stand up and it was hard to top so Lifehouse was 
meant to top that.

I: In a sense though with Lifehouse you tried to set yourself an impossible 
task didn’t you?  You wanted more than rock, you wanted, as you say, to have 
a film, you wanted to - to have a play and they told you to dump the work, 
basically, dump the play - you were bitterly disappointed ...

P: I was bitterly disappointed that the project failed, yeh.  I - I - I 
wanted, you know, I wanted a lot but now I look back I don’t think - I think 
all that I lacked, really, was, you know, for along time I whinged that I 
didn’t have enough support, but in fact what I lacked was the skills that I 
now have er to develop the piece properly.

You know, I wasn’t a playwright, I wasn’t a scriptwriter, I knew how to 
write pop songs and I knew how to sell an idea - I was bloody good at 
convincing - you know I - I did sell the idea to Universal Pictures and they 
promised a couple of million dollars which was a huge sum of money at the 
time and would have easily have covered - easily have covered the film.  I 
didn’t really know what I was heading - heading into, it was too ambitious 
and today it’s not ambitious at all, I...

I: The time has come has it?

P: Well my time has come too, remember that you know in that 30 years that 
you speak of, 25 years the difference, you know, I’ve been an Editor at 
Faber, I’ve edited playwrights, um I’ve edited the works of playwrights, 
I’ve - particularly of Steven Berkoff, but I’ve worked with a number of 
other playwrights, I’ve - I’ve consulted with people that I’ve met through 
that work, you know, and I’ve also been involved in the production of plays 
with the Young Vic - I did Iron Man with David Thacker, I’ve done nearly ten 
different versions of Tommy - we’ve done a theatrical version of 
Quadrophenia, I’ve done my own play called Psychoderelict which toured in 
‘93, you know, I’ve got Toni awards and blah blah blah ...

I: But you said ...

P: .. I’ve done that ..

I: But you said in an interview recently that you were still dissatisfied as 
an artist - you said ‘the predicament I find myself in is that I’m 
uncomfortable as an artist living in the world today’.

P: I think - I think if you’re not uncomfortable as an artist, you’re 
probably not an artist.

I: You become too complacent?

P: I think you do, yeh.

I: The story of Lifehouse is the story of a man’s search for his missing 
daughter but it’s - it’s much more than that - what is it to you?

P: Well it’s really about the importance of congregation.

I: People meeting?

P: Yeh people meeting, people showing up.  It’s the importance of - of - 
it’s a challenge, if you like, to people involved in media today, in 
television, in the Internet, in satellite media, in theatre...

I: Because you foresaw the Internet didn’t you?

P: Yeh I did

I: The Grid as you put it.

P: I did - I thought it was inevitable.

I: But you thought it was harmful when you looked at it...

P: Not exactly ...

I: .. that it was controlled by Government.

P: No not exactly I thought it would be harmful if it became controlled by 
Government and the Internet, I think, unfortunately needs to be controlled 
by Government.  I mean I think the Russian Mafia are now - the - the 
Internet has now extended into Russia and the Russian Mafia are, you know, 
mavericks and cowboys and renegades and dangerous and I think, you know, 
they’re using the Internet for all kinds of of strange purposes particularly 
in the area of hard pornography.  And I think - I don’t want my ten year old 
son to switch on a, you know, and put some naughty word into a search engine 
and find that he’s exposed to the evils of the Russian Mafia.

I: And ...

P: .. and for me the true dumbing down that has happened in the last ten 
years has been to do with an inability for us, as artists and as people 
involved in media to deal with the specific audiences that are out there.  
Very interesting for me because I think, you see, being a pop artist in the 
60’s I learned to deal with a very specific audience, I’m unafraid of that, 
you know, I’ve been writing songs for an audience which, you know, we made 
the papers, and we seemed to be quite big shots but let’s face it, you know, 
if ‘Thriller’ by Michael Jackson sold 30 million albums which sounds like a 
hell of a lot in the year of the World Cup before last, the World’s 
population was only 3 or 4 billion, you know, - 30 million is a drop in the 
ocean, the pop industry is tiny - absolutely tiny - and insignificant 
globally.  So I’ve written for that market and it’s kind of  ...

I: You didn’t think that 30 years ago.

P: .. it’s kind of what we call narrowcast - Oh yeh I was very aware of it.  
I thought that I was an artist writing under commission for a very specific 
group of people, not only that for a very specific age group.

I: Music for you, Pete Townshend was in a way, a way out of a traumatic 
childhood wasn’t it?

P: (Pause) You know I ...

I: You didn’t enjoy being young I think you said.

P: I don’t know that I enjoyed being young, no, I - I ...

I: Your parents had a stormy relationship.

P: They had an exciting relationship and I think I had an exciting life I 
mean what happened to me is ...

I: You were caught up in the middle of it.

P: What I had as a child was a glamorous beginning, you know, up until the 
age of five I had a very glamorous life, my parents were working in a dance 
band and it was fantastic, you know, I’d be up there with the saxophones and 
the crinoline and the perfume and indeed the knife fights out in the 
ballrooms, it was very glamorous and the music was fantastic post war music. 
  But then ..

I: Pretty raw wasn’t it?

P: But then - yeh - but then I ended up having to go to school, my parents 
had a - a problem with their marriage and I lived with a grandmother for a 
couple of years, when I was still very small, before I was seven, before I 
was fully formed um and mentally and probably emotionally - and it was a 
horrible couple of years.  And as a result of that when my parents got back 
together and I went back home I was happy for a while.  But when I became an 
adolescent all of that ... stuff came to the surface.  And because I became 
- I went to art school and started to look at ways to - to use my inner 
psyche er and was helped to do that by the people that taught me, when I 
then got into rock n roll which had this edge, this potential for violence, 
this potential for brutal self exposition, I just grabbed at it.  I grabbed 
at it.  And - and what happened was is that a whole group of people around 
me had obviously been through very similar experiences.  I now realise that 
my experience as a post-war child was by no means unique, you know, by no 
means special - everybody had ...

I: It was unique in one way wasn’t it - it was unique in that it became 
central to what you were going to do in music to some of the themes that you 
were going to bring out after The Who had formed - and you didn’t realise 
that at the time ...

P: No

I: .. did you - it was only years later that those came to you.

P: Well I suppose when there’s a continuum  you can look back and see this 
boy in the middle of everything.

I: And Tommy is you isn’t it in a certain sense?

P: Yeh.  Yeh. Yeh - you know, I - I realise that, you know, where I was 
writing for a commission I was allowing myself to use - I was being given 
permission to use myself as the central character.

I: You really couldn’t get away from your childhood and from some of the 
traumatic experiences.

P: No.

I: In some sense.  The Who in a sense was formed out of a bunch of friends 
from Acton County Grammar School.

P: Absolutely .. yeh.

I: But you weren’t trend setters, you looked at the people out there and it 
was the Mod scene that was happening out there and you, in a sense, gave 
people what they wanted, you tried to look into their minds and see what 
they were thinking about ..

P: I ...

I: .. and gave them what was there - gave them more of it.

P: That’s right - you know it seems rather calculating now or cynical but in 
actual fact, again, this was something that came from art school for me and 
also serendipitously for The Who, we met a young PR guy called Peter Meaden 
who was one of the fashion trend-setters in the early 60’s in the Mod 
movement, he came up with some of the words that we used the word - the term 
‘Face’ for a, you know, a leading man - ‘a Ticket’ for one fo the - the 
minor figures and so on.

And .. but I - in my last year at art college, I did three hard years - I 
did three years of solid work and one year of pissing around.

I: (Laughs)

P: I did two years of foundation which is where I got my whacky ideas from 
and one year of graphics where I got this notion of looking at what the 
audience wants and giving it back to them.  And I was very very calculating, 
I used to look at what the audience was wearing and then rush off and buy it 
and then the next week I’d be on the stage dressed in a similar way and of 
course some of the credit which should have gone to certain fashion, 
trendsetting boys in the audience, I got because I was on the stage.

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