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PT Radio 3 i/v
PT on BBC Radio 3 - this is a more ‘lofy’ i/v the Interviewer had clearly
done a bit more research. Interesting because Pete mentions how people
communicate over the Internet - chat rooms etc. and says on his own site
there have already been flare ups between writers and even when you
apologise there’s still the remnant of the previous interchange just above
the newly typed message.
Also interesting because there are excerpts from the play itself - I’ve done
my best to transcribe these faithfully.
F
- - - - - -
Interviewer: (coming out of a piece about the Turner Prize - a modern art
prize). Well if the Turner Prize had a theme tune it could well be ‘Talkin’
‘bout My Generation’ The Who’s great anthem to youthful rebellion or pimply
petulance, depending on your point of view. Pete Townshend, who wrote it,
has returned to similar themes in his play with music: Lifehouse.
Originally conceived on the cusp of the 60’s and the 70’s, between Tommy and
Quadrophenia, it was planned as a multimedia spectacular but almost broke
the bank, not to mention the band, and has had to wait 30 years until now to
be finally realised for Radio. Good timing, as it happens, because this
apocalyptic journey through the industrial wasteland of Britain is set on
the last day of the Millennium - an occasion marked by a huge underground
concert, journey’s end for the characters but which we the audience never
get to hear.
Featuring David Threlfall and Geraldine James in an all-star cast, Lifehouse
is a picaresque tale of pirate DJ’s, underground raves, digital networking
and the power of music. Picaresque and remarkably prescient. I spoke
earlier to Pete Townshend about the preoccupations of his generation and how
they emerged then in his vision of the future.
EXCERPT FROM PLAY:
M: I thought I’d seen the last of you.
M: You never write, you never phone.
M: Because I don’t need you any more
M: Why not?
M: Because I’m - I’m a man for Christ’s sake.
M: Oh
M: What?
M: Nothing - just ‘Oh’. There used to be a war, that’s when we were born,
we liked the war, we liked what it left behind - a lot of holes where
buildings used to be where you can sneak around and hide and take shortcuts
to school. That’s where I lived in dark places like that.
M: Look I don’t need this, I’m in a big enough scrape.
M: It was scrapes that we were good at, the little man and the take care
bloke.
END OF EXCERPT.
I: Pete, what’s Lifehouse about?
P: Well the play for radio is about ... er the post-ware period from 1945 to
the present day. It’s about the time, about the importance of music to that
time, about the importance of media - entertainment, but also about the
significance of not just the art but also whether - I suppose the importance
of - of action. There’s a question - the play end with a question: If we
were born as close to 1945 as I was, you know, there was a huge bomb in
Japan which ended the war and left us with this strange climate in which we
live which was the freedom to roam bomb sites and strange kind of freedom.
That when we became 13 or 14 or 15 and we started to realise that we had
this new form of music called Pop and that we had this new freedom and new
rights, in a sense, to attack the establishment and take it over - CND was
formed, I think, when I was about 10 and I proudly wore the badge but I
didn’t know what it was about - you know, ‘Ban the Bomb’.
Today as we, as our generation, move into the new Millennium. The bomb is
still here, it’s proliferating and - and I wonder what it was that I should
have done that I haven’t done - both as an artist and as a - a man and, you
know, I suppose the question in the play is the story in the play is - this
concert, this big concert, this Lifehouse event that is happening at the end
of this play - is it real? Is it a dream? Or is it a bomb? Is it the end?
I: When was Lifehouse conceived?
P: 1971. You know, I’ve had a couple of stabs at it over the years. I
think in ‘76 I had a go at it, or ‘74 and then in ‘76 just before
Quadrophenia I had another look at it. In 1978 Jeremy Thomas a producer
came to me to write a new treatment for Nick Rogue the film director which I
did. I always intended it to be a film and I think that was my big mistake
and I think finally I realised, quite recently, about 2 or 3 years ago, that
the right place for it was radio and I think I got that idea listening to ‘I
Love you Jimmy Spud’ which was Lee Hall play in the Spoonface Steinberg
series, there were four plays of his. Lee Hall’s a relatively new,
relatively young playwright. And Kate Rowland was the director of those
plays and I was particularly struck by that one and the use of music and I
suddenly thought, you know, ‘If I could get Lee Hall and/or Kate Rowland
involved in Lifehouse, maybe that would make it take off’ and so I
approached them fairly open-handedly with ‘can we do anything together?’ and
- and when I showed Kate the Lifehouse script, the very first one, she - she
got it and so we - we worked on that?
I: And why radio?
P: I think radio because it’s closer to film, in fact, than theatre. Drama
on radio allows you to use your imagination, obviously. But also it allows
you to use your imagination in an epic way and an expansive way. And some
of the ideas in Lifehouse require some kind of an imaginative extrapolation,
a creative adaptation of the world we live in into an imaginary space - the
space of a musician, the space of a broadcast, the space of a young hacker -
these are the characters in the play who are living - not in some future
time but in a present day and observing around them a wasteland which is not
really a wasteland - we don’t live in a wasteland but you could say that we
live in an artistically bereft time. You know, we have to be very careful
about what we do never because particularly in the area that I’ve always
worked in which has been, you know, the naive world of pop art er and
popular culture, you know, pop music - this is stuff that we grow up with
and we carry with us, it only lasts as long as we do. So as we get older,
as we enter particularly as we go from one Millennium to another and we
carry this stuff across the threshold we think ‘Should I really take Won’t
Get Fooled Again with me?’ or ‘Should I really take Yesterday with me’ or
‘Should I really take Satisfaction with me’ or should I take something a
little bit newer.
Radio allows the music to speak for itself in this respect. Allows - in the
play as it stands you hear the music that I composed in the 70’s at the time
when I first had the idea and you can make a judgement - does it work today
or not?
EXTRACT
Pete singing ‘Behind Blue Eyes’
EXTRACT ENDS
I: It’s interesting what makes pop music. Pop music addresses particular
concerns at a particular time. What this play allows you to do is to employ
that as a means of talking about ideas which in fact are much bigger, much
wider, extend over a longer period of time. And that’s very - it’s a very
interesting problem for people working popular cultural forms seeking to
move away from, well in music’s case, the 3 minute, 4 minute song - to
address something which more ambitious formally.
P: Well this is the pop artist as guru isn’t it? This is the pop artist who
sort of says, you know ‘I provide you with the - with the musical collateral
of your passing moments’ you know, that’s a bit Buddhist isn’t it, you know
‘Don’t worry about the past, don’t worry about the future, just listen to
what I’ve got on offer for you today and if it fits, take it, and if it
doesn’t dump it’ you know, that’s very rock ‘n’ roll.
That sense that pop music is meant to be - not empty, not shallow, not light
- but very very pertinent to now. This knowledge that you have when you
make a pop record that, you know, ‘if we don’t get this out now, it won’t be
a hit next month. It won’t be a hit now, we have to wait until the seeds
burst, or this is a summer record or a winter record or a - we need a war on
for this record to work’.
Suddenly as a pop artist, if you imagine that kind of pop artist suddenly
saying ‘and isn’t this interesting - that this Buddhist moment, this way of
Zen, of pop Zen actually is in itself a metaphor for life and the way that
we should be living our life’ and that’s really what Lifehouse is doing -
trying to extend what I was trying to say in Tommy about the pop process,
about celebrity and going a little bit further with it and saying ‘actually
it’s even simpler than we think it is’.
I: The other thing about it is that it is a way of addressing people. I
know that your preoccupation back in the early 70’s when Lifehouse - you
were first thinking about it - was ways of addressing the problem of
alienation, I guess, and that’s something which still seems to be a
preoccupation today, if I’m right.
P: Yeh I think maybe for different reasons. When I was young I think the
kind of alienation that I worried about - or that I identified in my
audience was one of alienation - a sense of alienation from society that
drove them into gangs and cults. And today the kind of alienation that I
think we’re anxious about is the alienation, you know, the couch potato
syndrome. Is it easier to stay home than go out? Is it easier to fall in
love in fantasy world than fall in love in reality? You know, when there
are difficulties in relationships - do we really deal with them today or do
we run away? You know, the prevailing notion of modern sociologists is that
perhaps we run away, we are cutting ourselves off, we’re afraid and
frightened of the world and thus we say ‘well I’m not going out there, it
frightens me’ you know, ‘I’m anxious, I’m agoraphobic, I’m afraid of
vomiting or I’m afraid I’m going to be run over’ or for whatever reason
there’s lots - there’s lots of fear around these days.
EXTRACT
Combined sound of moving up and down a radio dial and hearing sounds and
voices:-
CHILD: ‘I’m the king of the castle ...’
MAN: Start collecting tokens from special packs and send away for your
glasses....
CLASSICAL MUSIC COMES IN QUIETLY
MAN: (in whisper) Whisper ... Wwwww whisper ... whisper these words...
RADIO INTERFERENCE
MAN: Do something amazing today - save a life...
RADIO INTERFERENCE
MAN: Whisper .... wwwwwwhisper.... whisper these words.....
MAN: All this shit they’re pumping you with, yeh you - slobbering on the
couch, you’re so full of junk, can’t even move, can’t even think, don’t
listen to that - listen to this then switch this machine off. Open the
windows, man, let in the air and the wind, man - it - it’s blowing over the
wires like a voice in the sky, blowing in from the sea, man. Hear it
breathing?
END OF EXCERPT
I: Does it alarm you though? I know one of your preoccupations with the
piece and clearly prophetic, you know, 30 years before the Internet, you’re
floating questions about the Grid and about the alienating effects of
technology.
P: You know, what I was worried about was not the Grid itself, I was worried
about the Grid being taken over the censorious and dictatorial Governments
in league with ... selfish media barons.
I: Like I said, prophetic (laughs)
P: (Laughs) Well you know, I think to some extent the reverse is true with
the Internet anyway. Certainly with, you know, what we have at the moment
is the fact that you know we’ve got a very very precariously imbalanced
scenario where there are huge powerful megabarons of media out there,
controlling huge chunks of the world’s entertainment industry either in
gangs or elite gangs or - megacompanies.
You know, where a company as big as Universal recently bought Polygram and
it’s now called ‘Unigram’. You know - I mean .. (with horror) Unigram well I
mean you know, for heaven’s sake. I mean The Who happen to be on ‘Unigram’
now I mean what a terrible name - ‘there is only one gramophone company:
Unigram’ it’s almost like an Aldous Huxley invention.
I: Yes
P: And it’s here. On the other hand, you have the Internet where your ten
year old child, in my case - my ten year old child, could quite easily
switch on and be subjected to the pornographic machinations of the Russian
Mafia and it’s a terrifyingly unpoliced medium. So my fears when I wrote
Lifehouse were - have not been realised and neither have I been vindicated
in the fears that I had, you know, I think what’s actually happened is a
different situation.
I: One of the things that concerns me about the Internet and I think it’s
very interesting as a phenomenon in the sense of the extent to which it
democratises and to which it’s actually, you know, deployed by people with
very clearly vested interests. Are you concerned that all our relations -
contact between each other - now you don’t need to be near someone, don’t
need to be in the same time zone as someone and what you lose is the kind of
physical context and it all becomes rather cerebral and rather text and not
about being a physical person in the same physical space as someone.
P: Yeh that does worry me. I remember having trouble with my manager, Bill
Curbishly, and it always used to flare up when I sent him a fax and I
realised what was happening is that we were communicating on a different
level because the fax I sent him was seen by his PA. It didn’t come in an
envelope, it wasn’t a private conversation, it was seen by his PA, she would
hand it to him, probably with a (a resigned slightly tight-lipped tone)
‘It’s from Pete’, you know, like that.
I: (Laughs)
P: ... and he would say ‘OK I’m going to reply’ and I could see him replying
and one day I said to Bill, I said ‘do you dictate your replies to me by
fax?’ and he said ‘yes’ and I could see him walking round the room replying,
not to me, directly, but via his secretary and to some extent for her
benefit - for the benefit of the world at large. As soon as I got on the
phone to him we - everything - all the problems of language would be
resolved and I think that, you know, chat rooms for example on my website
which opened about a couple - a month ago - we’ve already had flare-ups
because people in chat rooms, their conversations are in bald print and when
somebody apologises for having gone too far, you see the whole track of the
conversation. They may apologise ‘well I’m sorry I called you a .... ‘ but
the ... is still hovering a few lines up ahead and you can go back and look
at it again and again, you know, there’s that track, evidence that text
actually has but also the - the baldness of it, the hollowness of it. And
this is a terrible thing to have happened to - to text which is, you know,
the divine liquid of art, you know, in the modern world.
But this is a strange time and I think the Internet is only the beginning of
this World-wide Web which will eventually take us into a place which I think
I did predict in Lifehouse where, you know, you will be offered, you know,
through a plug in the wall, something which you will put into some orifice
in your body which will, you know, if it doesn’t just give you the
proverbial LA hand job, will give you some promise of some sort of cerebral,
spiritual, experience, compacted into, you know - you know this thing on
downloading on a computer, it’s called Stuffit, what it is is a thing that
compresses up data so a 5K file when you put it through Stuffit lands on
your computer desk top and it’s - rather than 5K it’s now 300K. My fear -
my vision in Lifehouse was that life would become like that. In other
words, there would be people saying to me (speaks like market trader)
‘Listen, you know, the rock star thing, the touring, the TVs through
windows, all that, the sex, the drugs, the rock ‘n’ roll. I can do that for
you and everything involved in that, I can do that for you in about a week.
And then you can go on and have a nice life, you can do your gardening and -
but if you wanted to, you could do your gardening in a week as well - we can
squeeze it all in for you’.
I: Except of course they’re wrong because they’re suggesting that your
consciousness of those experiences can be reduced to a script - to a stream
of digital information - where in fact what those things are about are about
physical people in physical places and that doesn’t seem to have been
factored in somehow and I think it may have something to do with this loss
in .. faith, in the notion of being physical.
And it’s something that really interested me particularly in your case and
anyone who’s worked in rock music, which is the most physical of media, and
I think it’s one of the reasons why English rock music has had such a
particular flavour to it is because it has allowed for some sort of
reclaiming of the physical which is so lost in so much English culture which
tends to be so cerebral and so buttoned down, you know, its inheritance from
the past.
What rock music does is release that and allows it to become open to inquiry
again.
P: Yeh. Really behind it all the only thing that’s important of course is
what happens with the audience isn’t it, because the artist can do what they
like. I mean you know Tracey Emin doesn’t actually have to be sober to do
the work that she does, her brilliance is that she is who she is and you
know, and I am extremely interested in her bed. You know I actually think
that - that the problem is not with her, it’s with the people that show up
at the gallery and expect to be treated like an audience in an old-fashioned
way, you know, I think that - that my audience has to show up for a part of
my work and I have to show up. So we have to set a date, we have to say ‘on
May 1st we will be there, you will be there, you can buy a ticket - come.’
When somebody says ‘oh Steven Spielberg is working on a new film’ or that
George Lucas is doing another version of the Star Wars trilogy or whatever,
you know, we know that - that this is something that comes in sideways like
a leaf into our life and it doesn’t really matter when it happens and it
doesn’t really matter when we access it. The central thing in Lifehouse,
you know, its physicality is a concert that everybody is going to, you know,
which we don’t actually hear in the play but it’s the promise of the concert
that matters.
I: One of your preoccupations as well is about being a man and about what
that means as a performer, that being a performer, working rock as a write,
coming up with a Lifehouse, there’s also an examination of that. That seems
to be something which is very much the case with The Who and slightly at
odds, in a way, with the image, but in fact what a lot of that was about was
thinking about what it is to be male.
P: Oh yeh definitely. I mean The Who’s audience were predominantly male and
you know, The Who were a strange band in that, you know, our songs were
about male frailty, male vulnerability, difficulty with you know, the
burgeoning feminism of the early 60’s - Germaine Greer is a professor at
Cambridge, she’s a powerful figure, and was a very very very sexy woman.
And faced with creatures like that, you know, I think the men that I grew up
with were - it’s wrong to say that they were misogynists - but they were
scared, they were frightened and - and so the irony was that the macho voice
of Roger Daltrey singing these songs that I wrote which were observations
of, as well as sharings of my own vulnerability, observations of this
universal frailty and inner collapse of all the men around me, the fact that
it was all done in such a macho way is kind of - it speaks doesn’t it, for
what I now realise is the double irony of English pop.
When Ray Davis wrote Waterloo Sunset, you know, it’s not just that he’s
saying ‘Listen this is where I grew up and this is not a very nice place,
it’s smoky and it’s grim but the sunset is our sunset’, it’s also that
there’s an ironic metaphor which is that there is beauty even in this and
although I’m being wry and smart and saying ‘yes this a pop song about an
awful muddy river and a polluted red sky at night, it’s also that this is
all I’ve got and I love it’.
So in a way the thing for The Who is that although we were - although Keith
Moon had this reputation for being smart and funny and fierce and a little
bit dangerous, you know, we all know that the circumstances of his life
reveal that he was a clown and depressed and disaffected and screwed up -
and eventually died as a result unfortunately. So it’s not just that The
who addressed the ambiguities that young men were feeling but the fact that
they were in themselves an ambiguity. So when people missed the double
irony I got very very upset and in the end I realised that it was a chance
you have to take.
I: A chance perhaps better to take working in a more extended form like a
Rock opera or a play for radio.
P: Yeh but you know, if you take it with a pop song and it works - Pulp are
a good example, Blur are a good example, they do it all the time and when
they pull it off it’s just fantastic.
INTERVIEW ENDS
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