PT Radio 4 i/v

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

PT on radio 4.  Shorter than Radio 3 - as well researched  - an arts 
programme called ‘Front Row’.

Interviewer: Hello, the man who once smashed guitars for a living has become 
a Radio 3 Playwright. The Who’s Pete Townshend is tonight’s Front Row 
interviewee .....

(Intros other guests)

First tonight, the Sci Fi writer William Gibson is often credited as the man 
who foresaw a fictional version of the Internet in his 1984 novel 
Neuromancer, it may surprise some then to discover that a similar vision of 
a global electronic communications network was central to a musical story 
mapped out by the rock star, Pete Townshend 14 years earlier.

In 1970, flush from the stage success of his rock opera Tommy, the tale of 
the deaf, dumb and blind pinball player, Townshend embarked on a new project 
called The Lifehouse which, like Tommy, he hoped would be performed by his 
band The Who.

Set on the last day of the Millennium, the story concerns a man’s search for 
his daughter who’s run away to take part in a one-off musical event, the 
Lifehouse - a sort of Woodstock festival meets the Millennium dome.

Plans for a stage musical and a film version of the project collapsed amidst 
critical sniping that Pete Townshend should stick to what he did best - 
writing two minute pop songs.  Although he went on to pen another rock opera 
with The Who, Quadrophenia, he couldn’t shake the idea of The Lifehouse.

This week, nearly 30 years on, Lifehouse is premiered on BBC Radio 3, taking 
the form of a 90 minute play set to music.

EXCERPT:

Music in (chords from Baby O’Reilly)

M: When I was a boy I designed the future.  It wasn’t like the picture in my 
comic - rockets and a city on the moon, no it wasn’t going to be like that.  
The future - was a great big empty place where everyone was watching ...

BOY: .. and everyone was listening to a man and he was telling them what to 
do and what to buy and what to think and even what to dream.  My Dad was 
always laughing, saying ‘you playing with your crayons’ and I’d say I was 
colouring in a picture of tomorrow.

Interviewer: The central theme of Lifehouse is of the need for human 
interaction and community - whatever the technological advances in 
communication.  When he came to the Front Row studio, I asked Pete Townshend 
whether the play was conceived in response to the escalating size of the 
audiences The Who were playing to in the late 60’s.

P: Rock and roll had been a pub and club thing that got big.  I felt the 
growth that was happening to The Who in - in the late 60’s and early 70’s 
indicated that rock ‘n’ roll was going to grow and become out of control and 
that the people that would suffer would be the artists not the audience.  So 
then the art would .. become disconnected with the audience and then the 
very essence of rock which was that rock which was that rock should reflect 
its audience - er would become broken.

I: So that - the experience of The Who, your own experience of performing on 
those vast arenas points to the central paradox that informs this play that 
actually we’re trying to reach, or you and through the - the narrative are 
trying to reach a state of communion, of congregation but it’s very 
difficult because we are do disparate.

P: I think that’s right - that’s right - and when I say that the Lifehouse 
is - a word that I use for music entertainment in the future, it’s my 
hopeful word, it’s my word for a hopeful future in which what we do is we 
still show up at The Albert Hall, we still show up and we hear new music and 
we share new musical experiences and we show up in the same place.  But 
perhaps some of the new technology which is around at the moment informs 
that kind of concert.

I: You’ve often been described as an artist full of contradictions and you 
burst on the scene singing about ‘My Generation’ and frustration and trying 
to articulate some kind of youthful rage - ‘I Can’t Explain’ - all of those 
two minute pop songs and yet at the same time, only a few years later, you 
were trying to build this project which then didn’t see fruition for another 
thirty years - is there a contradiction there?

P: The contradictions that you speak of, they weren’t my contradictions, 
they were contradictions that I observed in the audience.  What’s strange 
about pop music is that really pretty much British pop music has a function. 
  The function of the music that happened before, the pop music of my 
parent’s generation, was to soothe ...

I: To balm.

P:.. Yeh - after a terrible time.

I: mmm

P: .. to bring romance back into life.  Our music had a function, and it was 
not to shake people up or to scare people or to - or to frighten people.  It 
was simply to help us to move from adolescence to adulthood, that was all it 
was about.  It was to provide a self-contained therapy which had never been 
necessary for our parents, they’d never had to do what we had to do - we had 
to take care of ourselves from adolescence to adulthood which prior to our 
generation had been facilitated by the mechanics of society - by the 
military, by the academic, by the working class, the industrial - post 
industrial revolution machinery - we were free of all that.  We had to look 
after ourselves and our popular culture reflected that.  So when I wrote 
songs - and I - I mainly, as you know, dealt with the blokes (Laughs) um..

I: The Shepherd’s Bush geezers as you used to ...

P: Yes you know I - I understood what was going on with the blokes.  You 
know I was just thinking, you know, as I said that, you know - why didn’t I 
deal with the women?  Because they were too bloody complicated. I think I 
was thinking of people like Germaine Greer knocking around at the time, you 
know, it was too complicated - what women had to deal with was doubly 
complicated and - and I don’t know that they’ve achieved all of it, but that 
was all happening at the same time.

It was very very difficult to deal with, on the one hand, with the kind of 
women who were saying, you know ‘this is how we’re going to do things’ and 
the next minute screaming at Brian Jones and going ‘I want to shag him!’ you 
know.

I: So is that why so much of your art in the 60’s and you always called it 
Pop Art, you always called the music of The Who as a musical Pop Art...

P: I was an art student, I came from art school so I was - some of it was a 
bit impudent...

I: But is that why so much of it manifested itself as violence and rage and 
the smashing of the guitars?

P: You know so much of it didn’t manifest itself as that. Come on be fair.

I: It’s about the headlines isn’t it.

P: It didn’t - you know, it didn’t manifest itself in that way.  So much of 
our work was gentle and - and um spiritual and ... you know, and the post 
singles years of The Who from Tommy onwards, you know, I allowed my response 
to my audiences, and still probably my male audiences, but to my audience’s 
spiritual disaffection and difficulties to manifest.  And Lifehouse was 
meant to kind of pick up from there and go forward.  So it was ambitious - 
it was ambitious but .. um .. you know, the destruction that I grew up with, 
you know, the - the anger that I grew up with, the frustration that I grew 
up with that - that made it OK for me to smash guitars, was an artistic ... 
frustration.  You know I didn’t - I wasn’t angry particularly I was 
disturbed, I was afraid, I was anxious and I felt that I needed to do 
something - and what I did was, I think, what I felt I’d been taught to do 
or advised to do at art college...

I: mmm

P: .. which was to reflect what was happening in society in my work.

I: The climax of the Lifehouse and the communal experience of ‘The 
Lifehouse’ itself - this coming together of people - is predicated on the 
idea that you can feed elements of people’s personalities into some 
computerised system and music would then be generated to serve those 
individual people and it would tap into some kind of communal recognition.  
Do you still hope that that can happen because that was one of your dreams 
30 years ago.

P: I’m going to do it.  I don’t - I don’t know what - I’m going to do it - 
I’m going to do the concerts, I haven’t yet set dates but we’re doing them 
next year. I don’t quite know how they’re going to work out (Laughs) but of 
course today we can do that ...

I: With the Internet.

P: ... we can ... we can do it using the Internet to gather information, 
using very very powerful computers to produce music and then of course we 
send people tickets and they come to the concert and they hear their music.

I: So both in the Lifehouse and in the project that you still want to 
pursue, how would you generate that music from people?  How would you make - 
what are the co-ordinates do you feed in - birthdates? DNA?

P: Apparently feeding in DNA is rather too expensive, I think it costs about 
ten grand to analyse a hair and it’s, you know, it’s money well spent if 
you’re pursuing a murderer but not if you’re trying to, you know, (laughs) 
write somebody a pop song.

I’d use all of the information and - and details that I would get from 
somebody.

I: Just volunteered information.

P: Yeh we’re going to collect it through a website, we will get the 
information back, we will produce simple motifs, musical motifs, we’ll fly 
those back to the person at the other end, across the Internet, we’ll say 
‘what do you think?’ er and they’ll add some more information about 
themselves, they might say ‘I hate this’ in which case we say ‘well that’s 
you that is’ (laughs) ‘see that little brown puddle, that’s you that is’.  
What we’re trying to do is not create satisfied customers, we’re trying to 
reflect musically what people feel.  These will be quite short - the pieces 
will probably be no longer than 30 seconds long.  Long before the time comes 
for them to appear at the concert, by virtue of having an involvement in 
this process, they will be guaranteed a ticket at the show.

INTERVIEW ENDS

I: Pete Townshend, his play: Lifehouse is broadcast on Radio 3 ... etc...

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