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Pete's gonna do it !!!!
I got this article off the internet version of the Sunday London Times....
All we have to do is wait now....
Now here's a perfect subject we can all talk about and not have to worry
about it being a rumor anymore !!!!!!!
Later.....
George
Townshend writes a new
rock opera
by Nicholas Hellen
Media Correspondent
AS LEADER of the Who, Pete Townshend spoke for the
1960s generation who urged their elders to fade away.
Now, years after the hits dried up, he hopes to capture the
spirit of the new millennium with an ambitious rock opera.
The BBC has commissioned Townshend - who once
wrote: "Hope I die before I get old" - to create a musical
from unperformed fragments that he first devised at the
height of the Who's success.
His concept embraces computer technology, science
fiction and eastern mysticism in a visionary future cityscape.
The musical, provisionally called Lifehouse, will have its
debut on Radio 3 on December 6, and according to Tom
Critchley, an associate of Townshend, talks have begun
with Roger Daltrey and John Entwistle, the surviving
members of the Who, to stage it as a rock opera.
Details of the plot are to be discussed at a meeting
between Townshend and Kate Rowlands, a BBC
executive, this week. In an early version, he pictures
people living in virtual reality, manipulated by the owners of
the mass media.
His city dwellers spend their lives asleep, absorbing
experiences through tubes. They are rescued by rock'n'roll
after an historian stumbles across relics of 20th-century
music and concludes that it was a religion.
Townshend began work on Lifehouse in 1969, at the
height of his powers, intending it to be the greatest
multi-media rock creation ever. The success of the Who's
rock opera, Tommy, had raised his reputation from a
brilliant guitarist with a habit of smashing his instrument to
that of a serious composer.
In New York he was acclaimed by Leonard Bernstein,
and in Amsterdam the Dutch royal family booked seats.
The world's leading opera houses welcomed the band's
performance of Tommy, which told the story of a young
boy who, despite being deaf, dumb and blind, became the
world's greatest pinball-machine player, using only his
sense of smell for guidance.
For Townshend, Tommy's success was disorienting. While
other bands rushed to imitate it, he struggled to find a
follow-up. Influenced by the Indian mystic Meher Baba, he
devised Lifehouse, but it was met with indifference or
hostility by the other band members, Daltrey, Entwistle and
the late Keith Moon.
At one point, Federico Fellini expressed an interest in
directing a movie version, but his enthusiasm faded and
Townshend came close to collapse in a New York hotel
room, where he imagined that his fellow musicians had
turned into giant frogs. Some of the songs were released
on a record called Who's Next and Townshend went on to
create Quadrophenia.
The Who stopped recording in 1982 and Townshend
switched to publishing. In the early 1990s he collaborated
with Ted Hughes, the late poet laureate, to stage a musical
version of The Iron Man.
But he never stopped working on the Lifehouse project.
His chance to revive it came when Radio 3, searching for a
piece of music that could capture the excitement of the
21st century for a young audience, turned to him.
Will the musical talk to a new generation? Dave Marsh,
author of Before I Get Old, a book about the Who, is
unsure: "Lifehouse was inspired by the revolutionary milieu
of the 1960s and was the most interesting thing he ever
wrote. However, I don't think that anybody apart from
Pete has a clue what it is about."
The end for now......