Pete Radio Times interview

[Brian Cady <cadyb@home.com>]

The following interview will be printed in the Nov. 30th edition of the BBC
magazine Radio Times.  Many thanks to Kim + Lester for sending it to me.  I
think you'll find some answers to some often-asked questions about Pete's
personal life here:

BBC Lifehouse - text of next week’s Radio Times - on sale streetdate: 30
November:

You would never believe that the mild-mannered 54-year-old man wearing bifocals
and zip-up cardy struggling slowly to articulate complex ideas in sixties
art-school speak, eyes closed as he chunters through the "ums and "ers", was
once the ultimate wild man of rock.  "My driver Dominic says he bought me five
bottles of Remy Martin a day for a year," he recalls, incredulous. I must have
spilt most of it, but I remember sometimes drinking three." The carousing nearly
tipped him prematurely into that long goodnight like so many of his friends nd
contemporaries - Keith Moon, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones.  "The wonderful thing
about being a rock star," he continues, "is you can pretty much do anything -
buy a painting at Bonham’s one day and be wheeled ot of a pub down the Balls
Pond Road into Casualty the next. No publicity is bad publicity. What is Noel
Gallagher going to do that will hurt him? That’s one of his predicaments, poor
fella."
If anyone is destined for "artistic" over-indulgence it is him, and years of
Indian mysticism and therapy allow him now to discuss his neuroses and problems
with remarkable frankness. He grew up in Acton, west London, the son of two
musicians. His father, Cliff, played sax in the Squadronaires dance band and his
mother, Betty, was a singer. "They both led glamorous lives, fell in love
briefly, married during the war, had me very quickly, and found themselves in
peacetime with their young lives ahead of them." Betty had several affairs and
left home for a while, and he was sent to live with his grandmother, who’d just
been deserted by her rich boyfriend. I suffered and had a bad time," he says as
he recalls her stealing, wandering naked round the streets wrapped in a fur
coat, and descending into extreme forms of eccentricity. It was emotional abuse,
and friends I grew up with suffered in exactly the same way. There were a lot of
hidden secrets and pain. But the upside is we were free to have ideas and look
into the future. I don’t feel bitter.  Those experiences trigger creativity."
Tommy, the brilliant rock opera he wrote in 1969, won five Tonys, a Grammy and
an Olivier, and has also been a film and a stage production. "It’s very specific
about alienation of the child. I was trying to show that although we hadn’t been
in the war we suffered its echo. In Lifehouse [his musical play set on the last
day of this millennium, on Radio 3 this week] there are references to an
emotionally unavailable father, the man behind the newspaper. My father was
emotionally unavailable to me because he loved his work so much and I suppose
that’s part of what drove me to be successful. I remember him returning home in
the middle of the night having drunk a bit too much on the band’s coach. He’d
think I was asleep and go, ‘I love you. I really love you,’ and I’d get this
waft of beer. Maybe alcohol and love were entwined for me. Some men can’t
express love unless they’ve had a few. You know those distorted values you get?
Tracey Emin’s Turner Prize exhibit My Bed [now on show at the Tate] is the
epitome of feminine desirability for me - an ashtray, foul breath and slightly
stained knickers.  Extremely exciting."
After two years his parents reconciled. "They fought all the time, but I didn’t
care. I was happy I had them. When I was 12 my mother had two more sons and
everything was hunky-dory." After his father died from cancer in 1986, she hit
the bottle and twice attempted suicide, decamping to Minorca in 1993 aged 70 to
live with a 29-year-old Spanish waiter and ex-policeman. They are still
together. "She’s very vigorous, grabbing at life. I’m trying to get her to
finish an autobiography. The problem with both her and my father was the same: I
couldn’t get enough of them."
He married early himself to Karen, a primary-school teacher he met at art school
in 1963, and they have three children: Emma, 29, Aminta, 27, and Joseph, 10. She
supported him through many traumas ("She may well be heroic, but she’d hate to
be described in that way"), banishing him frequently to the studio flat in the
garden of their Twickenharn home when he drank. They split for 18 months in
1982, got back together, but are now, sadly, separated again. "Neither of us
have new partners. For a long time I couldn’t deal with friends whose marriages
failed. If you renege on the biggest promise you ever make, what’s your word
worth? It’s very difficult to admit publicly that I’ve had marriage difficulties
to do with the fact that you change as you get older. My pride is such that I
find it hard to discuss. Our relationship comprised so many years I don’t even
feel out of it, which is strange. If one of us decides, ‘Hey, enough is enough
and we need to bounce off and start a new life,’ I suppose that would change
things."
The Who formed after he left art school. I came into my little pop group
carrying all this stuff about cybernetics, computers, auto-destruction. I don’t
care about being called pretentious, and when it came to Tommy I felt, ‘Bite the
bullet. This is a big idea. Allow  it to be pompous, ironic. Allow mischief to
be part of the process.’Well, that’s a pretentious statement. But I came out of
art school with a serious mind-set and ended up in this successful pop group.
The feeling I have that is most precious to me is that I felt I was commissioned
by the audience, not from a rich patron or concert promoter. We wrote our own
music and the effectiveness of my early work was that I was from the same world
as my audience. In  America, artists like Elvis Presley looked wild and free but
they weren’t. They were run by management organisations, with no sense of them
as artists.
In the middle years, the Who’s success led to the dislocation I felt within
myself and a distancing between me and the fans. Rock music was getting out of
hand and the concerts were too big. I’d see huge gatherings of people having a
great time, and I felt left out. Peter’s first principle of pop is you have to
reflect, and if you don’t feel part of the audience you become dislocated. Iwas
hip and our manager Kit Lambert [a bisexual drug addict who also died young,
falling down the stairs off his mother’s home in 1981] told me, ‘When you see a
convention, smash it. ‘I no longer need to do that. All my dissidence is in the
past.  Now I use my money to facilitate risk-taking. Of course, one then feels
that much of what one does is vanity, but as an artist you have a duty to honour
your gift."
Conventions weren’t all that were smashed. After every performance he broke his
Rickenbacker guitar, and naturally dignified it by saying it was
"auto-destruction". "I didn’t always enjoy performing, although I’m a natural,
and I didn’t like touring. I’d return to my little house in Twickenham, my kids
and my pretty young wife and burst into tears because I’d been away." That
evening he, John Entwistle and Roger Daltrey ["We’ve had our ups and downs, but
now we’re getting on quite well"] were flying to Chicago for a charity
performance to benefit an orphanage. "At the moment I wonder why the hell I’m
doing it, but then I enjoy the show. I have to armour myself, though. If I meet
a beautiful girl I must pretend she’s not there, I mustn’t fall in love, get
drunk, do this or do that. I’ll be in a hotel room, lonely. The book I’m reading
will not interest me. It’s a funny old world. What do I do?" He used to trash
hotel rooms.  "Yeah, I was angry. I don’t regret it. We paid the bill and at
least I rarely hit people." He was usually too smashed himself. "It’s difficult
to say if I was an alcoholic. I worked, took my children to school every day and
led a normal life.  The problem came when alcohol no longer killed the pain and
I had to deal with issues. Lo and behold I discovered they weren’t particularly
big. Some were to do with childhood. Another was about leaving the Who - which I
did in 1982.  I  was quite happy to call myself a drug addict because it sounded
glamorous, although I don’t think I was. I had a problem with alcohol but I
stopped easily, using hypnotherapy.  In 1993 1 thought, ‘I haven’t had a drink
for 11 years,’ so I started again and rapidly discovered it didn’t soothe or
quieten me in the way it did, so now I don’t drink at all." One of his major
problems, he says, is that he became addicted to a tranquilliser, prescribed
when he sought a cure for alcohol. I was also involved briefly with street
drugs. I was a rock artist, so I thought I could do it. Today I’m embarrassed
because I have a ten-year-old son at a good school and don’t want people to read
his dad was a drug addict, but nevertheless I am still a rock artist."
And perhaps bisexual, as he appeared to suggest in 1990, when he called his song
Rough Boys "an acknowledgement of the fact I’d had a gay life". It was nothing
of the sort really, he says. "A complex story. I feel a duty not to deny my
sexual duplicity or androgyny, although it’s difficult to be androgynous with a
bald head. I was also accused of being a transvestite, and as I’d just played
Widow Twanky in a pantomime with Joanna Lumley - I had fun spanking her bottom -
they printed pictures of me with a beard in a frock, with Joanna cut out of the
shot. I didn’t want to respond, but I think I should be honest and say, ‘I’m not
gay, but I’d quite like to be,’ because in show business, which I am afraid is
corrupt and always has been, there is no eccentricity, perversion or quirk that
can do you any harm. If there had been a shred of gayness in me I’d have acted
on it."
One day in the mid-seventies he discovered he was £1 million in debt after
spending too much on a country house at the same time as his publishing company
had an unexpectedly huge printing bill.  It was frightening and I dealt with it
by drinking too much. I was very drunk one New Year’s Eve and went into my Soho
office to find 40 employees, none of whom I’d ever met. They were accountants
who’d been brought in to ‘save’ me. I thought,’When this happens I’m supposed to
throw myself off one of the duller Thames bridges.’ Instead, I called my
manager, asked for a million pounds, and he said, ‘No problem.’I soon paid it
back. A lot of the time I was running around in a melodrama of my own making. I
used to fantasise, too, but that’s an important part of the creative process. He
started writing Lifehouse in 1971. It takes place on the eve of the new
millennium and the score includes several Who songs - Won’t Get Fooled Again,
Baba O’Riley - that were used on 1971’s Who’s Next LP (featured on Classic
Albums on Saturday ITV). "It’s an experimental project I hoped would be a
feature film. I care less than I did about that. I’m so pleased to have it on
radio because words evoke images, ideas and characters that are your own. I’m
passionate to make a concert [the centrepiece of the play] happen where you make
music for and of the audience that says something reflective and spiritual about
the way we are today." He tried it in 1971, at the Young Vic (which also staged
his musical version of Ted Hughes’s Iron Man), "but it quickly became clear we
didn’t have the time, the scope or the money. I’m, um, trying to speak about the
importance of congregation. I’d like to use the internet to gather specific
information about individuals, feed details into a computer and let a
synthesiser select notes from that pattern, like translating a person into
music. There’s a certain natural - as in Nature with a capital N - elegance. It
might be disharmonious and chaotic, like nature, but that leads to a sense of
harmony." Cacophony as art? He smiles, closes his eyes again, and says, I hope
listeners don’t perceive Lifehouse as part of the dumbing down of Radio 3."
He has been hounded by his line "I hope I die before I get old", but insists, "I
still mean that in the sense that it is a multifaceted statement and a truism:
what I long for, like every member of the human race, is to reach a point where
I get old and die." Recently he was talking to an African teacher at his son’s
school. "He remembers me, Desmond Tutu, Dickie Attenborough and others as being
very important when we helped the ANC. And 1 thought, ‘I’m OK.’ There were
hiccups and bad times, but work has been my catharsis." 

Programme Of The Week
Lifehouse
Sunday 7.30pm Radio 3
On a dark night during the darkest month, idly messing around with the tuner on
his radio, a susceptible listener might well imagine he had slipped back a
generation and was listening to the Who - and he’d be close to the truth.
Lifehouse, Pete Townshend’s "play with music" will be broadcast for the first
time, after nearly 30 years of incubation. The hero Ray (played by David
Threlfall) is a bit of a loser. Inspired by the back-to- nature hippiness of the
late sixties, he has exchanged city life for a remote part of Scotland,
intending to grow potatoes. But he’s not even good at doing that. His wife
(Geraldine James) is unsympathetic and deeply discontented; his daughter Many
(Kelly Macdonald) hated it so much that she ran away and is now missing,
presumed dead. Though conceived in 1971, the play has been revamped so that when
Ray sets off on his picaresque journey in search of Mary, it is the apocalyptic
last night of the century. He is accompanied by two people who inhabit his mind
and memory: his own self as an anxious small boy and the Caretaker - an
imaginary and often sinister Welsh friend he invented many years earlier. Mary
has been lured away by the Hacker, a pirate DJ whose broadcasts summon the lost
and lonely to himself and to the mysterious  Lifehouse. "I’m collecting the
music of your heart and soul," he proclaims, "because the night is coming. All
back to my place, one place, one music."

Hallucinatory, scarey, sometimes funny, occasionally bathetic and often bleak,
this original, eclectic and extraordinary work is bursting with imagery and wild
ideas. And it is one millennial event taking place at a very easily accessible
venue: your radio. 

7.30 Sunday Play: Lifehouse
By Pete Townshend, adapted for radio by Jeff Young. Townshend’s exploration of
humanity, begun in 1971, has finally come to fruition - a dream road movie set
in a world of info overload and techno-gluttony. It is the last day of the
millennium and a disillusioned Ray decides to leave his rural hideaway in search
of his missing daughter, Mary, leaving his wife, Sally, behind. Ray is drawn by
the voice of a pirate DJ, Hacker, to the Lifehouse and back to the music that
once gave his life meaning.

        Ray  Dwild Threlfall
    Hacker  Shaun Parks
        Sally  Geraldine James
  Caretaker   Charles Dale
        Mary  Kelly Macdonald
   Rayboy  Phillip Dowling
Director Kate Rowland

		-Brian in Atlanta