PT Radio 5 i/v (part 1)

["Fiona P" <fionapp@hotmail.com>]

PT i/v Radio 5 Live Tuesday 30th November 1999

Interviewer Ian Payne - a pre-recorded interview

I = Interviewer.

I: ... Time to hear now from Pete Townshend about his new project Lifehouse. 
  I say new but it’s actually been in the pipeline for around 30 years.  He 
started writing the follow-up to the Rock Opera, Tommy, back in 1971.  He 
finished chunks of it and wrote some of his finest songs as part of the 
process, but he never completed the thing to his satisfaction and so he 
shelved it.

It’s now unshelved and scheduled for Broadcast on Sunday on Radio 3.  Well I 
spoke to Pete Townshend earlier and asked him what the story for Lifehouse 
was.

P: Well Lifehouse is - today is a play which was developed for radio from a 
story which I wrote (laughs a little) in 1971 for The Who which was meant to 
be the follow-up to Tommy.

I: Right so it’s a play which will be broadcast on Radio 3 at the beginning 
of December.

P: That’s right, it’s - its final realisation, and it’s a bloody long time 
ago ...

I: mm I was going to say ...

P: .. I mean you’re talking 1971, 72 - it’s taken a long time to get to this 
place.  I’ve had it - I suppose I always thought it would probably be a film 
before it was anything else and - and then suddenly one day I realised that 
some of, I feel, and I’m not puffing Kate Rowland who was the director of 
the piece at all, I hope, but you know, I felt that a lot of the most 
innovative stuff that I was hearing that involved music was happening in 
radio and - and I started to listen a lot to radio and found that the pieces 
that jumped out at me were some of her pieces, particularly the series 
called ‘Spoonface Steinberg’ that she did with Lee Hall’s writing. And one 
piece called ‘I love you Jimmy Spud’ was just - I just thought stunning the 
way the music was used in that so I decided that I would see whether they 
were interested - that Lee Hall and Kate were interested in working with me 
and they - subsequently we got to this place where the BBC commissioned me 
to complete Lifehouse.

I: Can you tell us the plot or some of it?

P: Yeh the plot is - about ... a family living in sort of fairly rarefied 
times, not quite like today perhaps - in an extreme - extremely exaggerated 
view of the world today where - where there’s a terribly polluted world 
around them and - they are farmers, they live up in the North of Britain and 
their daughter runs away from home, she’s a teenager and she runs away from 
home and the story is really about the father searching, going down to 
London to find his daughter, and it turns out that what she’s doing is she’s 
going to attend a rather subversive music event which is a pirated event 
which is being run outside the main organised, Government-controlled, media.

I: mmm

P: In other words outside the auspices of (puts on ‘posh’ voice) the BBC 
kind of thing.  But this isn’t meant to be about the BBC, this is meant to 
be about the Internet, this is mean to be about the Grid, about world media, 
this is meant to be about - you know, and I’m not citing them as enemies in 
any sense, but they’re good examples: people like Ted Turner or Bill Gates 
or Rupert Murdoch, the people that control the media network that controls 
the world.

The idea was when I was - in the seventies when I was younger - I foresaw 
what - today - what - the way that we live and the way that satellites and 
cable and everything else would connect the world up and I was worried that 
we would forget how to have fun.

I: So when people meet up do they actually meet or are they on a computer?

P: In the story what happens is that you - that you - you simply follow the 
characters as the converge on this concert, you don’t hear the concert.

I: Is it a concert on the Internet - on the Grid?

P: Yeh

I: Right which is ...

P: .. but people have to show up to it too.

I: Ah

P: .. there have to be some people at the concert and some people on the 
Grid.

I: Right now you say it’s a sequel to Tommy - it’s got nothing to do with 
the story of Tommy ...

P: No

I: .. so how come it’s a sequel?

P: You know back then it was meant to be like Tommy, it was meant to be a 
story with music.

I: Right and you’re in it? You play the music in it?

P: I play a lot of the music, yeh, I - most of the music that’s in the play 
is - either new adaptation of the music that - you know, a lot of the stuff 
that came out of the story of Lifehouse is very famous ... because although 
the story, the Lifehouse story, flopped, the music that came out of it that 
I wrote for the play, I wrote about 20 songs, was bloody good.

I: (Laughs)

P: . .. Won’t Get Fooled again, no it was, it was some of the best writing I 
ever did - Won’t  Get Fooled Again, Behind Blue Eyes, song called Baba 
O’Reilly - a lot of really good pieces.  So they’ve - they’ve tended to last 
so I’ve gone back to use some of those pieces of music but what I’ve done is 
instead of using The Who versions, I’ve used the versions that I wrote at 
home so that it is more intimate and hopefully more poetic, really.  Less 
encumbered by what’s happened to The Who since.

I: Right so all those songs that are on there, they were originally written 
in the seventies.

P: And I’ve written new music for it as well which is a mixture of kind of - 
the kind of folky type stuff which I write today and the - I’m very kind of 
eclectic today - and some of the it’s orchestral chamber music.

I: And a lot of those songs presumably became hits in their own right didn’t 
they?

P: Couple of them yeh.  They were certainly big radio hits.

I: Yeh.  Why did it take 30 years to come about?

P: You know, I don’t think it’s really taken 30 years to come about.  I 
haven’t been, you know, waiting 30 years for this to happen.  I think if - 
if anything has changed it’s simply that time - events have caught up with 
the idea.  You know, when I first mooted the idea to - to Universal 
Pictures, they gave me the money to make a film but .. the whole story was 
based on the notion that computers, this is in 1971, that computers would 
link the - link the world with entertainment which would then become more 
than entertainment, it would become, you know, a kind of life narrative 
which would start to interfere with people’s spiritual development and would 
start to make everybody the same - this was my fear...

I: mmm

P: .. everybody would become the same.

I: Right

P: And er - and of course in 1971 if you look back there was no such thing 
as a computer - there were computers but they were as big as the Houses of 
Parliament, you know, and what they would do is they would go (computer 
voice) ‘Hello’ and it would take, you know - do you know what I’m saying?

I: I do, yes.

P: And what’s happened today is that - and also that people were kind of 
saying ‘a time when the world is interconnected by computers? Preposterous’.

I: mmm

P: ‘And anyway why would that be a bad thing?’

I: Which comes first the music or the plot?

P: Well for me, you know, I’ve never been very good at plot ...

I: (Laughs)

P: I’m not very good at plot, you know, I’m not - I’m not a playwright and 
I’m not pretending to be, I never have been, I’ve always needed other people 
to help me pin down the details.  I’m very good at gestures and ideas and - 
and...

I: Songs

P: Songs.

I: You’re quite good at them aren’t you? (slightly ironic tone)

P: Songs and um - so for me the notion was that big - some big idea, some 
narrative um backbone which um would inspire me to write songs.  I felt 
early on, you see, when I wrote - I wrote completely unconsciously the first 
maybe 10, 15, 20 songs that I wrote for The Who, came out of our little 
story, our little Shepherd’s Bush story and the story of the people around 
us and then suddenly I felt that that story was done, it was finished, you 
know, people were growing up, a couple of the blokes that used to come to 
the Goldhawk and see us play, you know, ended up as DJ’s on radio stations 
and some of them were lawyers and so on and I, you know, where does this 
story go now?  And I found it quite difficult to write about where I was 
because I was in this rock band and I couldn’t be - all my songs couldn’t be 
about how crazy Keith Moon was.

I: Do you have a favourite Who song?

P: I think ‘I Can See for Miles’ probably.

I: Why?

P: I think simply because it’s so well structured and ... and it also, you 
know, it’s real, it was a song about paranoia, about vision, about ...

I: That you were suffering?

P: .. psychic nature - the psychic nature of the human character, yeh, and 
yet it became a hit and it’s such a great record.

I: You were suffering from paranoia were you?

P: (Pause) Maybe Paranoia’s the wrong word.  It is a song about paranoia, 
but if I was suffering from anything at the time it was probably just 
jealousy.  I mean I remember Eric Burden saying to me ‘So how do you feel 
about everybody saying that ‘I Can See for Miles’ is about people taking LSD 
and you’ve never had it, have you?’ and I said ‘um ..um .. um’ and he said 
‘because I know what it’s about’ and I said ‘all right then Eric, tell me’ 
and he said ‘it’s about a bloke whose girlfriend is in another country, 
having sex with another man isn’t it?’ and I said ‘yes’.

I: (Laughs)

P: And he said ‘gotcha’.

I: And it was.

P: And it was yes (Laughs)

I: I’ve got a question here from a listener, Peter from Middlesex, who wants 
to know - he says: Almost all of your songs are written in the first person: 
I Can See for Miles, Hope I Die Before I Get Old, I Woke up in a Doorway - 
what does that say about you?

P: It says that, you know, I rely on my own artistic viewpoint - it says I’m 
an artist really.  You know, it says I’m not a playwright, it says that I’m 
not here to create characters for you to identify with.  If you identify 
with me and what I’m feeling then if you find anything of yourself in what I 
do ... that was true in the early days, it’s less true now.

BREAK FOR TRAFFIC!

Interviewer re-introduces the interview:

I: Back to Pete Townshend.  Well I asked him if he was enjoying life more 
now compared to his days with The Who.

P: Oh fff... God of course I am.

I: Yeh?

P: Yeh

I: Why?

P: Well I think life was hard then, you know, we had to work very very hard. 
  You know I - just to change the subject for a minute - talk - look at the 
Rolling Stones gigography for 1963, they did 326 shows and they made albums, 
and presumably a couple of them had babies, God knows when.

I: mmm

P: You know..

I: Still doing it ...

P: Those days - those days were very very difficult.  Allegedly doing it!

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