PT i/v Radio 5 (part 2)

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

I: (Laughs)  When you look at the Stones now - you mentioned them - do you 
sometimes think that ‘maybe we could have gone on a bit longer, maybe we 
could still do a tour now’.

P: No because - because they had - they had what we didn’t have - Mick 
Jagger and Keith Richards had a writing partnership which meant that they 
could fight with each other, vibe with each other, co-operate with each 
other inspire each other, you know, I was on my own.  I was the sole writer 
for The Who. John Entwistle wrote a small proportion of The Who’s material.  
So when I ran out of steam I could only try to re-animate myself and what 
would happen is that the other guys in the band would wait with their 
fingers crossed: ‘Is Pete going to come up with it this time?’.  And 
eventually in 1982, I said ‘Listen I can’t do this any more’ and I really do 
believe that I couldn’t.  I think if I took the songs, for example, from my 
second solo album, which was released in the year that The Who broke up, the 
album was called Chinese Eyes and, you know, forget the fact that they’ve 
all got ‘I’ in the bloody lyrics, they’re all songs that are about me, 
they’re about, you know, what’s going on, you know, ‘I’m so far up my own 
mmm ...’ that um... do you know what I mean? And I don’t - I don’t think The 
Who would have been - those song would have been right for The Who.

I couldn’t write for The Who, I couldn’t work out what it was The Who should 
be singing about.  I didn’t see The Who as this revolutionary .... post 
working class, post-war kind of ... innovative rock machine - West London 
rock machine - that I did at the beginning, I just saw it as a - a band 
who’d lost connection with reality and with their - with their fans if we 
had any.

I: Do you think it’s inevitable that any band, eventually, has to fight?

P: Has to?

I: .. fight within each other?

P: With each other?

I: Yeh

P: No no no I don’t, you know, I don’t - we - no it’s not inevitable.

I: Do you all still get on?

P: We get on better now than we did ... then because we’re older and more 
grown up.

I: I mean you had the odd bust up didn’t you?

P: ... Very few really, actually, very few.  Really very few.  They were 
always very highly publicised because Roger and I never used to talk to each 
other face to face, we used to use the newspapers so everybody knew what was 
going on.

I: (Laughs) I want to know how much damage Keith Moon did do to hotel rooms.

P: You know I have to say it was a considerable amount.

I: Was it?

P: Yeh it really was a considerable amount.  And - and nobody really knows 
.. why he did it?

I: Where did he start?

P: (crosses question) .. because sometimes - sometimes he would do it ... 
purely because he’d forgotten to do it.  (Laughs) I remember once we were 
halfway to an airport and he sort of went ‘Oh my God go - get me back to the 
hotel’ and you know what’s coming and you kind of thing ‘oh my God he’s lost 
his passport, or maybe he’s left some terrible drug in the hotel room’ and 
we’d go back in and then he walks back in and ... and we missed the bloody 
plane because of this, he’d forgotten to throw his TV set out of the window.

I: (Laughs)

P: You know, and it was all a joke.  It was a joke: ‘I am Keith Moon, you 
will think this is funny’.  And of course we did think it was funny but then 
we got arrested and then, you know ...

I: It wasn’t funny.

P: It was never really funny.  It was never funny.  And it’s not funny now.  
And it’s not something that I’m proud of and if Keith was alive today I 
don’t quite know how he’d deal with it because Keith...

I: No.

P: .. whatever his insane and ego-istic and lunatic streak had a good heart 
and I think he would have great difficulty justifying it.  Now I get away 
with it because I say ‘you know, I went to art school’ and ... you know, I 
studied with Gustav Metzker (sp?) who defined autodestructive art, but you 
know, when I broke my first guitar thinking: ‘I am an artist breaking the 
tools of my trade’ which is what I was thinking when I broke my first 
guitar.

I: The metaphor.

P: You know .. Keith Moon went ‘ere - the girls are looking at Pete’ you 
know and broke up his drum kit (They both laugh).  And when I explained to 
him later, he said ‘autodestructive what?’

I: (Laughs)

P: But you know but he - he was kind of like some people - I mean Roger says 
that he was an artist in his destruction.  But you know, when you’re in a 
band, you don’t like hotels very much and that’s - this is an aside - I mean 
travelling salesmen don’t like hotels very much.  You know I’ve spoken to a 
few hotel managers that reckon that  - that rock bands are not the prime 
culprits in hotel smashing, it’s people in broadcasting.

I: Yeh?

P: Yeh.

I: I’d probably agree with them. I’d love to have met Keith Moon.  Say I’d 
never met him, if you were going to describe him to me?  What was he like?

P: He was - he was a bit frightening.  He was kind of larger than life, very 
very witty, living ... living on his wits all the time he was like a 
combination of Ian Hislop and Peter Cooke and ... and some drunk that you 
meet down in, you know, a pub at 2 o’clock in the morning in Soho.  He was 
very angry about something and nobody could quite work out why but a lot of 
the anger was turned into humour which was turned inside and that’s very 
British.  His humour was very British.

I: Could he sit quietly and watch Television for an hour?

P: No.  No he did sometimes I’m sure but ... Roger’s trying to make a film 
about Keith - not something I recommend.

I: (laughs)

P: .. but he’s doing it anyway.  And they’re working on a script at the 
moment and - and he keeps coming up with these incredibly moving things 
about Keith that one didn’t know even though I was in a band with him for 
all those years I didn’t know, for example, that when he and his wife Kim 
first split up, that he wrote to her every day.  I said to Roger ‘how?’ you 
know, ‘How could he possibly have written to her every day, you know, most 
of the time he couldn’t stand up’. And er she had the letters, you know, she 
had this great cache of letters that he’d carefully written every day to try 
and get her back.

And I think what’s important to get into perspective is - as moving though 
as that is, you know, while he was writing the letters, he was probably in 
bed with a prostitute, you know, so there was a kind of a confused soul 
there really. You know - I didn’t do that - I didn’t live that kind of life. 
  What happened to me was sometimes ... it just seemed like he was having 
such a great time you wanted to give it a try.

I: Yeh.

P: And somehow whenever I did it, I got arrested (laughs).

I: (laughs)

P: Or maybe it’s just about when there are two people doing it, you get 
arrested, and when there’s one you don’t, you know, because there’s, you 
know - I remember a lot of times you were preventing him getting arrested, 
saying to the hotel manager ‘listen, you know, we’ll pay, you know, we’ll 
pay  - he’s mad you know, he’s - or his dog just died’ or anything to get 
him off the hook.

I: Yeh I assume you’ve seen Spinal Tap have you?

P: Of course yeh.

I: They make a joke about drummers don’t they - but is there something about 
drummers?

P: Well there’s that fantastic line, too, in that film about angels - City 
of Angels - where the heroine is trying to work out why this man who is 
actually an angel is in love with here - why he could be so weird and she 
says, you know ‘have you had an operation?  Are you - have you got a chip in 
your brain?’ and then she says to him ‘Are you a drummer?’

I: (Laughs)

P: As though that would explain everything that this guy, you know, has no 
feelings.  I always think - I always say to girls that I meet - it’s 
remarkable how many chorus girls I know have fallen in love with drummers 
and I always say to them - what is - I said to one recently who worked with 
me ‘What is it about drummers? All these pretty girls going for drummers, 
you know, for f.... drummers?’ and she looked at me and she said ‘one thing, 
they’ve all got in common’ and I said ‘what?’ she said ‘stamina’. (laughs).

I: There is, the secret to it all!  Let’s bring it back to the Lifehouse and 
the fact that you actually predicted, I mean you were talking about it as 
called the grid then but you actually did predict the Internet and we see 
the same thing I mean you’ve got the same idea in the Lifehouse as in that 
film The Matrix, as well, the same idea that people are, I don’t know, 
asleep and they’re being controlled at the same time?

P: They’re living out their lives in a compressed - they’re living out 
lifetimes of experience in compressed form.  I mean we understand what 
compression is today, don’t we?  I mean if you download a file from the 
Internet we know that - from a five kilobyte file suddenly, bang, something 
happens on a computer desktop and it turns into 365 kilobytes.  Back in the 
seventies, I knew what compression was and I knew that also - I knew - I 
instinctively I had a feeling about time compression and experience 
compression as well, how you know, if we look at the way we dream and also 
the way that we experience art in a different way to that we experience life 
- how it would be possible for us to - if we suspended disbelief to 
sufficient level, we could enjoy the fruits of more than one lifetime in our 
lifetime.  And that was my notion that would that be a good thing or a bad 
thing?  I never tried to answer that question, I just thought it would be an 
interesting question.

I: Well you predicted the Internet and the future - 30 years ago - so 2030 - 
what’s going to be happening then?

P: Well I think... you know, I have to turn to a few other friends here, you 
know, we talk about it occasionally over the Internet.  Ray Kurtzwell (sp?) 
who’s the guy that invented sampling and I think really - I think it was at 
the behest of Stevie Wonder who said, you know, ‘I want to play an orchestra 
on my - an orchestra at my fingertips’.  But he was quite a bit more famous 
for having written - invented Talking Books and er Booking Talks, you know, 
the other way round and .. he says that, you know, in less than 25 years 
time computers are advancing so quickly that there will be a Cyborg, in 
other words a robot that thinks it is superior to the human being, walking 
down Oxford Street with its arms outstretched saying ‘I am the way and I am 
the light’ um and some of us will look at that Cyborg and think: ‘You know, 
he’s right’.

But really what interests me is not the spiritual stuff any more, you know, 
it’s not - it really isn’t.  I think that the spiritual stuff now I believe 
does come from what we do in our lives - not what is fed to us, not what 
happens outside, but how we respond to it and this may - this may be kind of 
an obvious conclusion to draw but what it leads me to is that what’s more 
interesting is how life will look in 20 or 30 years time and I think, for 
example, the kind of substances that we regard as normal today like wood, 
leather, paper, metal.  Those are the things that are going to change.  I 
think before we bother to - to go into rust-land, you know, um which is what 
most film directors seem to think is the future, is lots of rusty hulks of - 
I don’t know that they understand that there’s no air out there in space but 
nevertheless the spaceship all go rusty ...

I: Yes and they always explode with big bangs.

P: .. I think - I think future machines will be made of flesh is what I 
think, I think flesh is the future and being quite keen on flesh ...

I: (Laughs)

P: .. and it’s you know, well Lifehouse is about flesh, it’s about showing 
up, it’s about being there in your living organic body, not sitting like a 
couch potato watching a screen, not listening to music down a pipeline, not 
being stuck in front of a computer on your own.  There’s nothing wrong with 
those things but just occasionally get off your arse and show up.  And .. we 
all know that, nobody needs me to remind people of that.  But there’s a 
particular strata or society who, like me, are afraid that their children 
might end up like that.

I: mmm

P: You know, it’s never us is it? It’s always somebody else.  So I bring - I 
bring hope to myself when I look forward and I think, you know, actually one 
day there will, you know, there will be um - there will be a way that we can 
experience if you like - not - I’m not talking about sex, but the pleasure 
of the flesh, the pleasures of showing up, the pleasures of being there, 
without perhaps the stresses and strains that we experience today which is 
that, you know, we have to travel and every time we travel we know we 
pollute the planet so it would be nice if we could - transport ourselves 
somewhere and be somewhere else and be there but without the kind of er 
terrible inconvenience and profligacy that’s involved in that today.

INTERVIEW ENDS AND INTERVIEWER SAYS:

I: Pete Townshend.  I think we can aptly use the phrase: ‘top bloke’.  
Lifehouse is broadcast on Sunday night on BBC Radio 3.


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