Re: Pete Radio Times interview

[p47paul@impop.bellatlantic.net]

Townshend states in this interview that he is in fact not gay. I am confused now.
What is up with that commercial with him saying that Jagger was the first man he
wanted to sleep with.  Anyway, I am glad he is not gay!  Not that there is anything
wrong with it! Ha

Brian Cady wrote:

> 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