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Re: Daily Telegraph interview with Pete 02.06.01



'I look my age - but I certainly don't feel it' A Lifetime Achievement
award is silly - there's still so much to do, Pete Townshend tells Neil
McCormick

TEN days ago, on a hot, sun-drenched May afternoon, many of the leading
lights of the British music business could be found assembled in a
gloomy, windowless, basement ballroom of a hotel in central London. The
occasion was the Ivor Novello Awards, an annual event in which the
achievements of British songwriters are celebrated over a three-course
lunch. Contemporary stars such as Craig David, Sonique, All Saints and
Neil Morrissey (on behalf of his plastic alter ego, Bob the Builder) had
all made copious expressions of gratitude for their recognition and the
ceremony was dragging on into its third hour when Pete Townshend was
summoned to the stage to accept a Lifetime Achievement award.

Despite enthusiastic applause, I think it is fair to say the rock legend
was not particularly overwhelmed. Casually attired in short-sleeved
shirt and jeans, Townshend announced to the designer-clad assembly: "I
did all this crap so I could have my own swimming-pool. And I'm not in
it!" He suggested that if they speeded proceedings up a bit, he might
still catch a few precious rays of sunshine. 

You could be forgiven for thinking the one-time angry young man had
turned out to be a rather grumpy old one. Townshend was joking, of
course, but there was a tangible edge to his remarks. As soon as the
last speech was made and the lights in the ballroom went up, Townshend
could be spotted pulling on his denim jacket, brushing off the
attentions of wellwishers as he made a beeline for the exit, with his
beautiful young girlfriend clinging to his arm.

"I am happy to get an old-lags' award," he told me the next day, though
adding that it was sales that really mattered because "Craig David and
Bob the Builder pay the party bill". The note of sarcasm adds to the
impression that Townshend is reluctant to accept the designated role of
respectable elder statesman. "The problem is they seem to have forgotten
they gave me a very similar award at the 'end' of my career 20 years
ago," he added, referring to a 1981 award for Outstanding Services to
British Music. "As for Lifetime Achievement - I'm far from dead."

At 56, Townshend is positively sprightly: lean, tanned and bristling
with energy. "I look my age," he admits, acknowledging a drastically
receding hairline, baggy eyes and sagging jowls, "but I certainly don't
feel it." 

For much of his adult life, Townshend has been dogged by over-literal
interpretations of his most famous line: a pithy, nihilistic epigram
written at the age of 20 for the Who's 1965 single My Generation. " 'I
hope I die before I get old' was obviously ironic," he says, unable to
disguise his irritation with the (admittedly rather shallow) critical
notion that simply by surviving into middle age he has betrayed his
youthful idealism. "Irony is vital to the pop process. There can be
double meanings, or multiple meanings when irony is at work. It is
reduced to a silly pop song if you analyse it literally."

Although he will sporadically claim to "not give a shit" about critical
perceptions of him, Townshend seems eager to establish that he is still
as creatively active as ever. The day after our encounter, he emailed me
a resume of his copious current projects, which include preparations for
solo shows in New York later this month, work in his home studio
compiling material for the third release in his Scoop series of oddities
and out-takes and developing a theatrical version of Quadrophenia with
award-winning playwright Joe Penhall.

The email itself was an indication of how Townshend has kept up with the
times. Always something of a technophile, Townshend has become an
enthusiastic silver surfer, keen to expand and exploit the artistic,
social and commercial possibilities of a virtual medium that - as he
likes to point out - he foretold back in 1971 with his Lifehouse
project.

He is deeply involved in running his own innovative and award-winning
website, www.petetownshend.com, for which he provides video clips,
segments of music and a fascinating online diary (which he uses as a
forum to engage in a passionate dialogue with fans and critics,
providing a remarkable insight into his mindset).

But for all Townshend's eagerness to remain a contemporary artist it is
his remarkable past that defines him. On Monday, Edel Records releases
Substitute - The Songs of the Who. Produced and compiled by the band's
live engineer, Bob Pridden, this is an album of specially recorded cover
versions of classic Townshend songs, featuring an all-star cast.

Second generation Mod Paul Weller contributes a blistering version of
the obscure B-side Circles, David Bowie breathes new life into Pictures
of Lily with colourful Ziggy Stardust stylings, Sheryl Crow lends a
feminine perspective to Behind Blue Eyes, Stereophonics deliver a
muscular rendition of Who Are You?' and Pearl Jam blast their way
through The Kids Are Alright.

And if many of the cuts emulate rather than improve upon the originals,
it only serves to emphasise the qualities of artistry, musical craft and
passionate performance that established the Who as perhaps the
definitive four-piece rock line-up.

Although he gave his blessing to the project, Townshend declines to be
drawn on it, his only comment being: "It either stands alone or it
doesn't." He is not so reticent when it comes to discussing the quality
of contemporary rock bands, however. "Travis and Stereophonics are
lovely," he says, somewhat archly, "but you put your hand in and what
you get is not very much."

It is Townshend's conviction that, by bringing an art-school perspective
to American rock and roll, the first wave of great British bands (whom
he cites as The Beatles, the Stones, the Who, the Kinks and the Animals)
almost completely exhausted the potential of the medium.

"Last year, I bought a whole stack of new albums, including Oasis, Pearl
Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Travis and Asian Dub Foundation, and there were
some really interesting, inspiring moments there, but the rest sounded
like filler. You could probably put one or two great CDs together out of
all those bands," he says, delivering his put-down with the amenable if
ever-so-slightly patronising air of a professor assessing the work of
promising students.

"That Beatles-parody style of Oasis is brilliant when it comes off, but
it would be very difficult to make a whole album's worth of it, because
the Beatles did it and they left an empty ice-cream carton! I think it
gets harder as we get further away from the source. We're now 50 years
away from Chuck Berry and Little Richard's original."

Townshend concedes that what younger artists bring to the pot is "new
 energy". "I hear a lot of songs that I think I should have written," he
admits. "But the fact is I shouldn't have written them. It's their
turn."

Townshend's reputation as one of rock's most visionary thinkers and
creative artists is not in doubt. But talking to this articulate,
passionate man one gets the impression of tapping into a raging internal
debate concerning how best he should employ his talents. "I have to face
the fact that I am 56 and a lot of my early writing was, if not for
teenagers, certainly about teenage adolescent rites of passage," he
says. "I suppose it's part of my nature, an issue the kids I grew up
with carried with them.

"Maybe because we were an immediately post-war generation, when we were
really young we were kind of disenfranchised. And I don't mean that in a
wailing, whinging way. We were genuinely disenfranchised because society
 hadn't yet decided what it was going to do with its young men."

He points out that he was 25 in 1970 when the Who released the classic
Who's Next album, on which he coined the phrase "teenage wasteland".

"Although I was well past my teenage troubles, our music was
specifically designed to lubricate the passage from adolescence to
adulthood. Without questions, as a writer, that's where I was most
successful. And, you know, I have never got close to that standard of
writing again." If this seems a telling admission, Townshend makes it
abundantly clear that he does not feel remotely redundant. 

"My creative energy is located elsewhere," he insists. "It's a bit like
being a painter who suddenly decides to change colour or change process.
I don't get out my electric guitar and start thrashing away at four in
the morning with a bottle of brandy in my hand. I don't allow myself to
be that angry any more. These days I'm more likely to get worked up and
write a ****ing string quartet or something!"

None the less, he admits that the sheer musical and emotional spirit of
last year's live Who revival has provided him with inspiration. "I have
my usual clutch of daft ideas," he says. "Probably the daftest is to try
to write some grand new project that might suit the Who. We shall see." 

In the meantime, there are plenty of other matters to occupy the
reluctant elder statesman's attention, as a visit to his website makes
plain. "There seem to be two young, pretty, topless women in my swimming
pool," he notes, in a recent posting to his online diary. "Am I really a
rock star or what?"