Pete interview in Sunday Times

[Brian Cady <cadyb@home.com>]

Pete was interviewed in today's Sunday Times of London.  Here's the entire
article:

Pete Townshend wrote a rock opera about the net 30 years ago. Only now is it
gettings its premiere. On Radio 3. 
By MARK EDWARDS

Talking about his generation 

Nearly 30 years ago, at a press conference to announce Lifehouse, the Who’s
follow-up to the hugely successful rock opera Tommy, Pete Townshend sensed
things weren’t going well. "It was terrible," he recalls. "I suddenly realised
that all these smart journalists thought I was completely mad.  I was so
relieved that the guys from the band weren’t there.  They were very supportive
about Lifehouse, but they didn’t quite understand what I was going on about and
. . . I suppose it was a bit art school." 
Lifehouse was set in the future - the future we’re currently living in - in the
last days of this millennium. Townshend had written about a world in which
people stayed sealed up in their houses to protect themselves from pollution and
experienced the world through a vast communication network that he called The
Grid. At the end of the piece, Townshend envisaged a concert at which a band
played music that was somehow "programmed" to reflect the people in the
audience; as each individual’s music was layered on all the others, the sound
would evolve until it finally became "one note" - a note that would connect
spiritually with everyone. 
Let’s see now: rampant pollution, a computer network that connects everybody and
music that is programmed rather than composed in the traditional way. Townshend
appears to have got it all about right, if we allow him a certain exaggeration
for dramatic effect. But in 1971, the press and the public felt otherwise.
Nobody believed in the premise of the plot, and an attempt to stage a version of
the "one-note" concert at the Young Vic proved disastrous. 
"I did a lot of strutting around saying it was so simple, why didn’t they
understand," says Townshend now, "but it was like some young man walking into a
record company looking like David Bowie, with make-up and red streaked hair, and
saying, ‘This is the future’, and them saying: ‘Well, when we get to the future,
would you mind coming back?’ " 
Townshend was bitterly disappointed. Lifehouse represented a chance to pull
together the two disparate strands of his creative life: the audience-swaying
power of his rock band with the intellectual rigour of his years at art college.
"The bit I’ve always really liked about Lifehouse is the concert at the end,
which appeals to my Philip Glass pretensions, my experimental composer
pretensions, which have always been there: the ripply noises at the back of Baba
O’Riley or the funny noises behind Won’t Get Fooled Again. I love the Who
sounds, but I always wanted it to be a little bit arty, orchestral, cooler in a
way." 
Both Baba O’Riley and Won’t Get Fooled Again were originally written for
Lifehouse; several of the project’s songs resurfaced on the band’s next album,
Who’s Next. But they’ve never been heard in their original context . . . until
now. Because Lifehouse is back. With a vengeance. On Sunday, December 5, Radio 3
will broadcast the premiere.  The next day, Townshend’s Eel Pie Productions
releases two boxed sets: The Lifehouse Chronicles is a six-CD set, consisting of
the play plus four CDs of music; The Lifehouse Method is an art edition that
includes a seventh CD, a documentary on the making of - or rather, the failure
to make - the original play. Also on December 6, BBC Worldwide is releasing the
play in cassette form, and Simon and Schuster Pocket Books is publishing the
script. You can ease yourself gently into this burst of activity by watching
ITV’s Classic Albums on December 3, which will feature Who’s Next. 
Beyond that, Townshend still wants to actually stage the "one-note" concert.
"It’s almost as if, if you switched on all of the pop music, all the rock, all
the music there is, what you would actually hear is silence," he suggests. "It’s
silence music is striving for. I don’t know whether that sounds too arch, but I
understand what I’m saying. If this concert could happen in reality, what you’d
hear is something like the sea, something quite soft, gentle, fractal and
natural." 
Maybe the technology has caught up with Townshend enough to make it feasible.
Certainly there are already composers, Brian Eno among them, who have worked
with "generative" music software - programs into which you enter a certain
amount of data, and which then "compose" music based on that input. 
Another technological development Townshend foresaw in Lifehouse could also be
useful. "I think the internet is an incredibly valuable tool for reaching people
all over the world," he says. His idea would be to compile some basic facts on
these people, who would then become the audience for the concert and hear
"their" music played back to them. 
"Remember, it is an experiment, it might fail. I’ve been prepared to fail, but
the Who was always a band that had a strange will. I speak to Roger now and he
still thinks of the Who as a band that didn’t really fail - we got a few things
wrong, he’d say, but if we picked everything up from where we were before, we
could go on and everything would be great, Pete, you’ve just got to get your
head down and write some more songs." 
Townshend, however, sees the last years of the Who as a failure. "For me, what’s
interesting about the latter stages of the Who was not just that we failed, it
was that we failed and I was really trying hard." 
Townshend was already beginning to have problems with his role in the Who back
when he was writing Lifehouse. As the band grew bigger, and the concerts grew
bigger, he was already missing the sense of "congregation", as he puts it, that
he felt in the early gigs. He was sure the audience at the big concerts were
still feeling part of the event; but he wasn’t. He remembers the second of the
band’s two concerts at Charlton football ground as "horrible". 
"It rained a lot and Keith [Moon] brought Elizabeth Taylor.  He came in and
said, ‘Elizabeth’s in the other room, she wants to meet you,’ and I said to tell
her to f*** off. The whole day was a nightmare. I got home and my wife and kids
were asleep, and I thought: what is this about? But people who were in the
audience tell me the show was magic." 
This sense of isolation undoubtedly informed the plot of Lifehouse. The need to
reconnect with people, a theme of the play, was also very much on Townshend’s
mind. "In the early days of my writing, I was very conscious of a process which
was like a commission," he says, "writing for the audience, which was
predominantly male, and talking about male frailty. The irony was that the
vehicle I’d chosen was an incredibly macho, wild vehicle, and yet all of the
Who’s material was about male frailty, dissolution, misogyny, passivity in the
face of genuine female essence and sexual self-doubt." 
This feeling that the audience was his "commissioning editor" is one Townshend
wants to have again. He believes Lifehouse may get it back for him. The play
revolves around a kid from the post-war days - "Bombsite days," says Townshend.
He wants to see whether his audience - now in its forties and fifties - shares
the feelings he had as a kid.  "What I grew up with was this sense that there
was colour there somewhere, light, a bright new future," he says. "But there was
no f***ing evidence of it, it was all in one’s head.  I then got to be 12, 13,
14, and thought - oh, I get this, I have to paint it myself. 
"Lifehouse today is about my reality. It’s not to say the music isn’t important,
but I think if a group of people listen to the play, and the feedback I get is
that I am where they are, then I think what I’ll get is a really good commission
for my concert. Because I haven’t really had a clear commission since I wrote
Can’t Explain." 
Lifehouse is published by Pocket Books at £7.99. Order from the Sunday Times
Bookshop on 0870-165 8585

		-Brian in Atlanta