Excellent Guardian Article, Part I

[L. Bird]

Excellent Guardian Article
« Thread Started on Today at 22:54 »

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/omm/story/0,,1871386,00.html

Generation terrorists

It seemed like it was all over for the Who, one of rock's defining acts. But 
with their first studio album for 25 years, and a series of blistering live 
shows, Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey are back and as vital as ever. From 
Live8, the internet and Pete Doherty to the dramas and tragedies that 
they've survived and their own explosive relationship - the Sixties icons 
talk candidly to Simon Garfield about what drives them forward

Sunday September 17, 2006
The Observer


About three years ago, Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey had a conversation 
that went something like this.
Daltrey: 'Whatever you do, Pete, I'll support you!'

Townshend: 'Great, because I've got this idea that I want to do this musical 
in Las Vegas called The Boy Who Heard Music.'

Daltrey: 'Where?'

Townshend: 'Las Vegas.'

Daltrey: 'I'm not going there.'

Townshend: 'But you said you would support me in whatever I want to do.'

Daltrey: 'Except Las Vegas.'

Townshend: 'But it's only in Las Vegas that we'd get the 200 million dollars 
that I'd need to make my exploding Mirror Door moment.'

Daltrey: 'Yes, but whatever else you want to do, I will completely support 
you.'

A short while later, Townshend gave him some early chapters of his novella 
about three kids in a band.

Townshend: 'Well, could you read the story, because I want to write some 
songs about it?'

Daltrey (after reading it): 'It's the same old sh*t, isn't it? Come up with 
something new!'

Townshend: 'But this is it. This is me. I only have one story, one thesis. 
I'm a cracked record, and it's going to go round and round and round until I 
die.'

Such, at least, is Townshend's recollection of the conversation. He had 
endured these sorts of dispiriting exchanges with Daltrey before, and 
decided to press on regardless. One of the first songs he wrote was called 
'In the Ether', which, like many of his compositions, appears to be about 
spiritual awakening and the expiation of pain. Townshend considers it, 
without question, one of the best things he has ever done, proclaiming, 'I 
am writing better Stephen Sondheim songs than even Stephen Sondheim is 
writing!' Initially, Daltrey was less convinced. 'I played it to Roger,' 
Townshend recalls, 'and about a month passed. In the end, I got on the phone 
and said, "So, what did you think?"'

Daltrey: 'It's a bit music-theatre. Maybe if you didn't have piano but just 
had guitar ...'

Townshend: 'Yeah, and maybe if it was three guitars and was rock'n'roll and 
sounded like "Young Man Blues" it would be OK.' And then Townshend put the 
phone down. 'I was really, really hurt,' he says.

But three years later, and 25 years since the last one, we have a new studio 
album by the Who. Endless Wire contains 19 tracks, 10 of them comprising 
what Townshend calls a 'full-length mini-opera' entitled Wire & Glass. Its 
creator is 61. He looks his age as he walks into his recording studio in 
Richmond at the end of August with the latest mix of the CD in a bag over 
his shoulder, but he looks good with it, not excessively ravaged, grey in a 
dignified way. He puts the CD into the mixing desk, and Daltrey's voice 
fills the air: 'Are we breathing out/ Or breathing in/ Are we leaving life/ 
Or moving in/ Exploding out/ Imploding in/ Ingrained in good/ Or stained in 
sin.' It sounds like they've never been away.

'In the Ether' soon follows, as do several love songs, several songs of 
yearning, and several very angry songs.

The angriest is called 'A Man in a Purple Dress', an attack on the trappings 
of organised religion written after watching Mel Gibson's The Passion of the 
Christ. 'It is the idea that men need to dress up in order to represent God 
that appals me,' Townshend explains. 'If I wanted to be as insane as to 
attempt to represent God, I'd just go ahead and do it; I wouldn't dress up 
like a drag queen.'

The song 'Mirror Door' imagines a place where legendary musicians gather 
after their death to drink and discuss the value of their work. Elvis and 
Buddy Holly are mentioned, alongside Howling Wolf and Doris Day. It was only 
after the recording was finished that someone mentioned to Townshend that 
Doris Day was still alive. 'I was absolutely convinced she was dead,' he 
admits. 'But I went to the internet and there she was - a f**king happening 
website!'

When the album is over, Townshend offers me tea in an upstairs room 
overlooking pleasure boats and rowers on the Thames. It is time for 
something he does better than almost any rock star of any age - the analysis 
of his craft, the opening of a vein in the process of confession. It is hard 
to imagine that anyone has thought deeper about their role in popular music, 
or produced such honest appraisals of triumphs and failures. It is no 
surprise that Townshend's most enduring work - Tommy and Quadrophenia - 
arrived in the form of a concept. From his art-school education and finely 
crafted emergence as a mod, right through to his new mini-opera, the music 
has never quite been enough without a story, and the stories aim to be both 
universally appealing and intricately personal. Sometimes they hit and 
sometimes they don't, but precisely why this should be is something that 
Townshend is still struggling to comprehend. As Roger Daltrey told me a few 
days later: 'He always needs a bigger vision, but some of his narratives are 
just so difficult to understand. He's talking about the ethereal and the 
spiritual, and it's very difficult to write that stuff down.'

Townshend's personal story is equally complex, and frequently 
auto-destructive. When he used to smash guitars on stage it was only 
part-publicity stunt; he really was raging against something he couldn't 
explain. These days, after years of therapy and creative output, he has 
found a more eloquent expression for his joys and torments.

'The dream that is at the heart of the Who's work is a dream that I think 
Roger and I have realised,' he says. 'That dream is ... It's like the Stones 
at Twickenham. They're a pub band, but they're up there in front of many 
thousands of people, and what happens is quite extraordinary. Even though I 
understand they didn't play their best ever concert at Twickenham, a bunch 
of people I know who were there say, "It didn't matter. What matters is that 
we were there together." As artists, we can affect gatherings of people. 
People lose themselves, and in the moment of losing themselves they then 
find themselves. They find a commonality, an innocence, and a sense of being 
which, I suppose, is close to a meditative state. When they walk away from 
it, they look back and think something special happened.'

Townshend refers to his current band as Who2, not so much to separate it 
from the band that existed before drummer Keith Moon died in 1978 and 
bassist John Entwistle died in 2002, but more to reflect a state of mind. 
Townshend, and probably Daltrey as well, have come to recognise that rock 
bands have a certain natural life, and their survival beyond that depends on 
an acceptance that its most creative and famous days may be over, and should 
be celebrated. I mentioned that the Who I saw play a couple of years ago at 
the Forum and Royal Albert Hall - in which the mesmerising power of 
Daltrey's singing and Townshend's playing seemed unprecedented for a couple 
of guys approaching their sixties - reflected a remarkable rejuvenation of 
spirit, but he questioned my interpretation.

'It's not a rejuvenation at all, because we really don't have that in us. I 
think it is a rebranding, a recognition that the old Who brand is 
inviolable. It's just inviolable. There's almost nothing you can do with it. 
This was my problem in the Eighties - the brand was just so powerful. Who 
fans didn't like the last couple of albums that we made, It's Hard and Face 
Dances - and they weren't made lightly, they were struggled over - but they 
just didn't fit the model of the brand. So I sensed that what Roger and I 
should do was honour the brand, honour the history, honour the classicism. 
We should respect the fact of what we did, and accept our knighthood. And 
just live with it. And then the knighthood ties us to charity work. Anything 
that we do now has to be seen in context of that, but we can also draw a 
line and make a new start.'

The Who have just embarked on the second leg of a world tour. The live band 
has expanded to a six-piece - Townshend's brother Simon on second guitar, 
Pino Palladino on bass, John 'Rabbit' Bundrick on keyboards and Zak Starkey 
on drums - and nothing has pleased Townshend more than the reaction to 
recent shows from younger musicians. The Fratellis and Oasis enthused 
backstage, but approval from Paul Weller meant the most. 'If that cynical 
guy thinks it's OK ...' Townshend reasons. 'He was always very stern with 
me. You know, "Don't go back, don't ever go back, you're going back, I would 
never go back ..." I would just say, "Listen, I don't know if I could ever 
do what I did again." I sit and look at "My Generation" and "Won't Get 
Fooled Again" and I think, "How can I do that again?"'

You mean, you felt you can never better that?

'Yes, it was intuitive. And being intuitive is f**king difficult.'

I wondered how it was possible that the Who today looks less old than it did 
20 years ago. 'Yes, something has happened,' Townshend says. 'People don't 
mind if you're old, as long as you're content. What's unbearable is somebody 
who's old and won't let the past go.'

I had first met Townshend in 1985, not long after he had begun working at 
the publishers Faber & Faber. He helped me with a book I was writing about 
exploitation in the music industry. The Who had signed some disastrous early 
deals, and Townshend told me one reason for this: 'Every major contract that 
I've signed, I think, has been done in a dressing room, or I've signed it 
when I was drunk ... Can you imagine actually trying to sit down in the 
middle of a tour and explain a very complex bit of tax law to somebody as 
stoned as Keith and I used to be most of the time, or as thick as Roger used 
to make himself out to be?'

He says he went to work at Faber because he 'needed some dignity'. He liked 
the idea of regular employment without pressure to deliver solo albums to a 
shrugging audience, and he offered a creative service to writers and 
photographers who wanted to tell their stories. His job coincided with the 
longest fallow period of the Who, from 1982-89, a period in which Townshend 
told everyone the group was no longer relevant. 'There were two real reasons 
I stopped the band when I did,' he says. 'One was that I blamed the rock 
industry for the death of Keith, of Brian Jones, of Jimi, for the death of 
11 kids at Cincinnati at one of our shows. I felt that we hadn't looked 
after our own, and there was something wrong with our business.

'But I also felt we'd worn out the form. Punk had shaken everything, but 
what followed was computers and Linn drums and Heaven 17 and Scritti 
Politti. Interesting music, but quite manufactured and complex, and much 
less of the blood. I felt that my role in that world was over. And I would 
get these regular visits from Roger saying, "I want to do this, I want to do 
that," and I would say, "Listen, it's over. f*** off." Well, I wouldn't say 
f*** off, but "I'm not your man". Watching him pretending to be who he was 
.... it was all just pathetic. I had very little sympathy for him. I thought 
he should really go back and be a builder. A woman said to me the other day, 
"But he couldn't let it go." I said, "Well, why not?" "Because he was 
f**king gorgeous!" I said, "Is that really what it's all about?" and she 
said, "There aren't very many gorgeous men in the world."

'Looking back now,' he adds, 'it does seem very cold of me to have brought 
down such a heavy door. John Entwistle was very resentful as well. What 
happened with John was that he'd got used to living high, and his money 
supply was cut off. In the end, when Roger came to me and said, "Listen 
we've got to help John, let's try to train him to live less high," and we 
couldn't do that. And as we trained him to live less high, he died. He 
didn't want to live less high. He preferred to be dead, in a sense.'

He thinks of another reason he broke up the band. 'I didn't want to be in 
f**king pain all the time. I didn't want to be so disdainful or so 
intellectual or so arrogant. I didn't want to be doing interviews with 
people saying [moany voice] "What's it like being old, and you said you 
wanted to die before you got old." I remember thinking, "Are these people 
vegetables or something?" '

Did drugs have much to do with the break-up?

'No. I drifted into drugs immediately after Keith's death in 1978. By 1981, 
I was fairly full-blown. It's certainly not a period I regret - I had quite 
a wonderful time. The only thing I regret is that the dabbling with drugs 
meant that I stopped drinking. I was a very, very functional drinker. I used 
to love alcohol. I didn't love being drunk, but I loved drinking. Drifting 
into cocaine, because everyone else in the world was doing it except me, and 
then finding that all that really did was increase the amount that I drank - 
I think that did create what toppled me physically. My real descent into 
extreme narcotics like heroin was a bit like that Pete Doherty thing that 
he's elongated into a life story now. I was trying to stop drinking, 
thinking, "Well, if I stop drinking I can use this, and if I use this then I 
can use that, and that's prescribed, and that's not prescribed ..." and in 
the end you're thinking, "I can't deal with this - please help."'

What are you thinking when you see Pete Doherty self-destruct?

'He's such an intelligent man. I completely understand, I just understand.'

In the past few years, Townshend has been writing his autobiography, but it 
is a slow process. In effect he has been working on it since the 
mid-Sixties, dutifully keeping old receipts and correspondence and many 
photographs in the hope that they would one day become revealing. And so 
they are. Townshend mentions one photo in particular by his friend Colin 
Jones, an iconic image of the Who posed in front of a Union flag at the time 
of 'My Generation'. Townshend is in the front in a Union Jack blazer. 'With 
this fish-eye lens, it made my already quite prominent nose look massive. 
You can see if you look at it that I'm crying, because Chris Stamp [the 
band's co-manager] and Colin Jones were making me ugly rather than 
beautiful, and taking my worst feature, which I now regard as my best 
feature, and exaggerating it.'

The book, which Townshend is writing chronologically, has now reached 1970, 
and he has shown early drafts to Stephen Page, the chief executive of Faber, 
and Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone. It is called Pete Townshend: Who He. He 
says he is blessed with a good memory, but he found a peculiar gap. 'I went 
to my mum and said, "Weirdly enough, I can remember from 13 months up to 
four-and-a-half, but then from four-and-a half to six-and-a-half, I can't 
remember anything."'

His mother, now in her mid-eighties, said there was a reason for this. 
Townshend was born in May 1945, a few days after VE Day. His mother was keen 
to celebrate victory by singing with his father, a saxophonist in the RAF 
dance band the Squadronaires, and she would follow him around the world. 'So 
my early years were a mixture of unbelievable glamour and unbelievable shock 
at being dumped with my grandmother,' Townshend says. His grandmother lived 
in Westgate, on the Kent coast. 'She turned out to be clinically insane and 
very abusive, and sexually abusive, or possibly something going on around 
her that was sexually abusive - this loon grandmother who walked around 
naked under her fur coat and tried to shag bus conductors.'

His mother's recent revelations filled in the years Townshend had blanked 
out. 'As she was telling me, I fell in love with my mum again, because she 
came out of it looking terrible, but she had the courage [to tell me]. And 
though it was shocking, it was the making of me as an artist.'

For as long as he can remember, Townshend has been intrigued by the 
components that make rock music both so effective and so destructive, and he 
has made compelling connections.

'It's because of this denial that anything ever happened to us during the 
war. We're worse than the Germans, worse than the fascists. There's all this 
echoing damage going on. I began talking to people, and found that, almost 
universally, people who had been evacuated had been unbelievably 
traumatised. But they had been refused the option of any mention of the 
trauma. Because what had actually happened was victory, peace, 'you're 
lucky'. I believe that when rock'n'roll came along, it had to happen. It 
sounds pretentious, and I never set out do it, but Tommy was an allegory of 
the postwar British condition.'

In January 2003, Townshend became suddenly aware that his life had taken a 
dramatic new turn: he recognised himself in a newspaper report as the 
'famous rock star' the police were about to question as part of an 
investigation into child pornography.

'There were two things that went through my mind,' he says. 'One was that I 
don't deserve to be on the front of any tabloid newspaper. And two, this is 
gross hypocrisy that I'm obviously going to be sacrificed. So for a moment I 
thought there's just no point trying to continue. Luckily, Rachel [the 
musician Rachel Fuller, his partner since 1998] was next to me when I read 
the paper. I turned to her and said, "Fuck, this is the end," and she said 
"No, it isn't. Let's go and make a few phone calls ..."

'After a while I did actually realise that it wasn't going to have the sort 
of massive effect that I feared. But my first fear was that I was going to 
be framed. On the basis of the evidence and my immediate admission - I 
coughed up straightaway that I had used a credit card to access a website, 
as part of research - it would be then assumed, "Ah, we've got your number," 
and they would then feel inclined to frame me. They took 14 computers from 
my house, all of my CDs, all of my DVDs, and I was away from the house at 
the time so I couldn't [ask] myself, "Do I have a porn DVD under the bed?" 
In the four months that followed I just had to cross my fingers and hope. I 
was frightened. And when there was no evidence found, it was all over.'

Except, of course, it may never be over. Despite his admission of 
misjudgment, and the fact that he was never charged, such associations are 
hard to shake off.

'I see it a bit like surviving cancer,' he says. 'Like a life-changing 
positive experience. God, the arrogance of me! I looked at myself and I 
thought, "Fu**ing hell, Pete, what did you think was going to happen?" And 
the fact that I had deliberately kept all my charity work secret ...'

He remembers when he first came across an image in 1998. 'I was researching 
to give money to an orphanage in Russia. I put these words in: Russian ... 
orphanages ... and then I thought "boys", so I put boys in, and this 
horrible porno picture came up of a child being buggered. The conceit of me! 
I was thinking, "I'm going to be the one to stop this ..." When I told 
Johnny Cusack, the actor, this story in the autumn of 2003, he said, "I 
think I know the picture you're talking about. Pete, it's Photoshop, it's 
not even real." I said, "Well, the damage is done. I saw myself. I saw 
myself." It probably never happened to me, but I saw myself and I saw 
millions of kids like me.

'I suppose it's true to say that it could have had a much worse effect had 
Roger not been so profoundly and powerfully behind me. My lawyers and I 
decided that I shouldn't speak. So Roger spoke for me, and he was such a 
powerful voice. I remember Bill Nighy saying to me, "Fu**ing hell, everyone 
could use a friend like that." Because the fact is that Roger didn't know 
what was going to happen.'

I wondered how his relationship with Daltrey had changed over the years.

'You know, it's survived. My marriage to my wife has not survived, and my 
marriage to Roger has survived, and it might be that only one of them could. 
I think you can only do one thing. I remember saying to [my wife] Karen, "I 
was a pop star when you met me," as though that would expiate the problem. 
The problem for her wasn't me going away [on tour]. She often used to say to 
me, "Goodbye, don't come back, just send a cheque ..." She just wanted me to 
be who she believed I was when I was home, and to be less affected by the 
ravages of the industry I was in. When I started to bring the ravages of my 
work home with me, it became harder and harder. She would go to me, "But it 
was great playing, was it?" And I would go, "No, it was f**king miserable." 
"But you're selling records, aren't you?" And I'd say, "Yeah, but it's a 
load of s**t." And she'd say, "Well, why are you doing it then?" "Because I 
have to."'

Things have improved. He is still not divorced (complex property issues), 
but he is contemplating the matter again now that their third child is 16. 
He says that Rachel Fuller would like him to be divorced, and when I ask 
whether he plans to have children with her (she is considerably younger than 
him), he says they haven't talked about it. He adds: 'And as we don't have 
sex at all, it's not a problem.'

At the end of our interview, Townshend drives me to Richmond station in his 
small black Volkswagen Lupo. He also owns a Ferrari, but he gets a lot less 
hassle in the Lupo. On the way, he mentions the paucity of rehearsal time 
before the American tour, and the recent American anti-terrorism law that 
prohibits live webcasting. As he pulls up at the station he turns his face 
into the car, away from a pedestrian who has just begun to recognise him 
from his youth.