![]() By the summer of '91, he had recorded a whole batch of new songs and had delivered an entire album to his record company. His Psychoderelict project, however, came about as a result of an accident, literally. This spring, Tommy received five coveted Tony awards including one for Townshend himself for Best Original Music Score. In the summer of '92, the production opened at the La Jolla Playhouse in California for a limited run and then transferred to Broadway where it became a box-office smash. Four years ago, he adds, he decided to "do a John Lennon." He and Karen opted to have another child and Pete became a full-time house spouse who just wanted to watch the wheels go 'round.Ĭreatively though, the real boost to Townshend's confidence has been the phenomenal success which the U.S. He insists that he's straight as a die now and that he even monitors his coffee intake. During the past two decades, he says, he's been hooked on about a half dozen different substances, but primarily alcohol and (briefly) heroin. ![]() Townshend is clearly a more contented person now that he's managed to kick his various addictions and patch up his relationship with Karen, his wife of twenty-five years. Here he is, a notoriously insecure artist who feels that he's been grievously mistreated by the media, preparing to reveal the contents of his new "album in the form of a radio play" in front of a hundred odd rock hacks, many of whom have been dancing on the grave of his solo career for over a decade, and he's casually chatting with some of them and cracking jokes, even at his own expense. The second thing you notice about being up close to Pete Townshend, however, is how relaxed, confident and even happy he appears. In the harsh stage lighting, his complexion is also eye-catchingly distraught, his forehead, in particular, speckled with blotches the colour of a raw steak and the texture of a fried one. That infamous beak is no longer the most striking architectural construct on the Townshend visage now that deep, dark pools have been sunk beneath his eyes and his cheeks have sorta collapsed down around his jawline. These days, he may be all cleaned up but the years of fearsome battle with booze, smack and pills have indelibly etched their legacy on his already craggy features. Up close, the first thing you notice about Townshend is how ravaged he looks. This one, Pete tells us, coining yet another musical sub-genre tag, is "an album in the form of a radio play." We've all got to use whatever we've been left with."Īll of which explains the background to why, today, I'm sitting in a theatre in London's plush Mayfair Hotel amid a raft of music journalists from throughout Europe who are all getting quietly monstered on Buck's Fizz while listening to Pete Townshend unveil his latest project, Psychoderelict. "The way I see it, David Bowie's got a shock of blond hair, Mick Jagger's got a flat tummy, Ray Davies is neurotic and I've got a brain. "There are a few people from the old guard left and everybody's watching," he smirks. But now that middle age has arrived (he turned 48 last May) that search has become even more intense.Īlone among the rest of that generation that didn't die before it got old, Pete Townshend believes that he's a man with a mission. Throughout his career, Townshend has been on a constant search for new and more "mature" contexts in which he can say what he has to say. The 1975 album, The Who By Numbers, for example, was a savage attack on his own celebrity and status as youth hero. Pete Townshend has never been comfortable with rock stardom and only sporadically comfortable with rock music. ![]() So if being pretentious is what I have to do, that's fine by me." That felt pretentious at the time but I still felt I had to do it. I had my moment of courageous pretentiousness jumping in with Tommy. "I've never had a problem with people calling me pretentious," he says. Townshend himself insists, however, that he wouldn't have it any other way. He set out to broaden the boundaries of rock but ended up bequeathing only new terms of musical abuse. Later, in 1968, he treated the world to the first ever "rock opera" in the shape of Tommy and, later still, his solo career became synonymous with the creation of "song-cycles" like 1989's The Iron Man.Īlong the way, of course, he's made some great, occasionally even sensational, music but too much of his work has been sunk by the ponderous weight of his high art affectations. As primary architect of The Who, he preferred to describe most of the band's LP releases as "concepts" rather than mere albums. Pete Townshend stinks of the stuff, and always has. I know so little about art that I don't even know what I like, but, as is the case with most people, I pride myself on being able to smell pretension a mile off. ![]()
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