Posterazzi Pete Townshend in Mid-Jump Photo Print (8 x 10)

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Pete Townshend: Who Came First — 45th Anniversary Edition". American Songwriter. 18 April 2018 . Retrieved 16 August 2022. Atkins, John (1 February 2000), The Who on Record: A Critical History, 1963-1998, McFarland & Company, ISBN 9780786440979 , retrieved 18 June 2016 So there’s lots of stuff going on. We’re really looking at the way the pandemic has hit the country. And in the U.K., we’ve also had the effect of Brexit, the political upheavals, and all kinds of stuff. But the big news in the U.K. at the moment, and I’m sure you’re conscious of it in America even though you’re farther away, is what’s going to happen in Russia and Ukraine.

You know, I think I laughed when you asked that first question because I knew it was going to be the first thing you’d say. I am looking forward to it, but I don’t like touring. I have to be honest with people. I’m not going to bark at people I meet. I like what happens when we tour. I like the whole feeling of it. I’m somebody that if someone says, “Do you want to go to a party? There are going to be a lot of your friends there,” my first response will be to say, “No.” [ Laughs.] I’ve been working on that. I’ve been working with three different bands. I’ve been working with Wild Things, who are supporting the Who at the Royal Albert Hall in March at our Teenage Cancer Trust gig. I’ve been working with another artist called Reg Meuross, who is a folk artist in the U.K. He and I are working on a podcast about Woody Guthrie called Fire and Dust— a song cycle and a podcast.So by the time we got to Monterey in ‘67, Pete’s going, ‘Well, that’s my whole show! And it was always a great finale.” I have to confess here that our insurance company here in the U.K., our agent as it were, Robertson Taylor, is a kind of friend. [ Laughs] We’ve been working with him since the very beginning. I’ve got no sympathy with the insurance companies, but there you go.

You turn 80 in about three years. Do you still want to be onstage then, or do you view that as a time when you might step aside?A lot of the Who’s music is already fairly heavily decorated and dense harmonically anyway, so we’re not like the Stones or the Kinks. With an an album like Quadrophenia, for example, there was brass and there was violins. There were lots of synthesizers on it. On subsequent albums, I’ve always used a lot of synthesizers and keyboards. We kind of cruised through the 1980s, even though our recording career ended in 1982, but we cruised through that period with our music sounding really quite rich. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Because I don’t think, at the moment, I need to do that. I think I need to finish The Age of Anxiety… My original idea was the novel would come out, I’d put out an album, and then I’d do an art installation. What actually happened was I put the album out, and then the pandemic hit and there was no question of putting an album out. There’s been a big gap between the publication of the novel and the possibility of putting out an album of music. And so I need to find a new bridge, in a sense, and I’m still thinking that through, getting advice from various people. If you take a couple of hits from that era like “Athena,”“You Better You Bet,” and “Eminence Front,” they’re all very rich. They have a lot of orchestral harmonics in them already. For me, having the orchestra, what was amazing about it was that it actually gave me space. It’s never easy to spot Townshend’s contributions when listening to some of The Who’s classics. While he contributed an odd line or two to some of their best material, there was no real need for someone like Townshend to step up to the mic when they had someone like Roger Daltrey delivering some of his generation’s most muscular vocal lines. Then again, the only way to appreciate what Townshend gave to the band is to put his voice beside Daltrey’s on ‘The Song is Over’.

The Lifehouse demos included are: "Pure and Easy," edited from its original length of 8:35; " Let's See Action"; and (with minor overdubs added) "Time Is Passing." Of these, only "Let's See Action" had seen prior release, as a single by the Who in 1971. [7] The Who's versions of the remaining two Lifehouse songs were eventually released on Odds & Sods (1974) and its reissued version. [8] [9] All of Townshend's Lifehouse demos were eventually released on Lifehouse Chronicles in 2000. I’m pretty sure we’ve seen the end of Covid-19. I’m pretty sure that it’s behind us now. And the other thing, without getting into deep politics, this is something I’m sure you guys as journalists know far more than I do, but what we’re dealing with now is rising inflation. You go onto Bloomberg and you watch them, all they talk about is what’s happening with inflation, what the Fed are going to do, what they’re not going to do.And this is something he’s had close to his breast since 1993. He has to tell his own story; he has to have his own way. He sometimes crashes in sideways into my projects. [ Laughs] But if I don’t like it, I will say so in the press. I might have a moan about it if there’s something I don’t like, but I will never go to war in the way that some bands have.

I’d done the demo, by the way. The difference between my demo and his was really the difference in age, the difference in experience, the difference in craft. It’s a masterpiece. It’s the last thing he did, sadly, since he didn’t live long enough to do Faust. He’d learned all the lines, apparently.With respect for new music for the Who, one of the issues is that when we did … this is quite touchy stuff, so I don’t want to be unkind to anybody. But when I said to Roger, “I’m not going to go on tour with you until you get in bed with me and we make a new album,” we were given a million dollars by Universal/Polydor to make it. I’m happy that they paid us, but one of the stipulations is that when we travel, we’re not allowed to leave our hotel rooms. We have to travel in a very small bubble. And when we’re at the show, we’re not allowed to leave our dressing rooms. With the orchestra, it’s a similar effect. It’s almost like I could stand there for a good 50 percent of the show and play nothing at all. What’s interesting about that is that it gives me a chance to make sure what I do play, what I do do, where I look, how I behave on the stage, is more connected with the people around me, with the audience, and with, I suppose, to get prosaic about it, an inner sense. In other words, I don’t lose myself the way I did when I used to jump around, have a big adrenaline rush, and then come off the stage and someone would say, “Great show,” or someone would say, “Terrible show,” and I wouldn’t really know what I had done, to be honest, since I was like someone running a marathon. So the orchestra gives me space. We did get paid out for our U.K. tour, which was fabulous since we were able to pay some of the debt that we had to people around us and help some of the crew and help some friends and family, and just generally charity stuff that we would normally do as a part of what we do every time we go out on tour. We were able to cover some of that in a period that was otherwise totally dead.