The Who talk about PETE TOWNSHEND

KEITH: Pete. I don’t think that people would believe what Pete is really. Just what a gentleman Pete is, and he really is, I mean he is an absolute gentleman. And he’s charming. But I’m sure Pete’s gonna hate that y’know when he hears it. He has his moods you know, where he can be a right bitch, the same as all of us. And perhaps in Pete’s case they’re a bit more exaggerated. He’s larger than life. When he’s being charming he’s larger than life. Everything that Pete does is larger than life, which makes him what he is. Which makes him one of, I think it makes him one of the biggest talents that we’ve got in Rock’n’Roll today. An amazing man.

PETE: As soon as I got a guitar I played my first out of tune chord, I knew I was going to be the biggest thing on the Rock’n’Roll stage. Not that I am. I don’t mean that I’m the biggest thing on the Rock’n’Roll stage, I mean I knew then, you know, I knew then. And I think in a sense if you realise your ambitions the way we have done. Every single ambition that each one of us has ever had has actually come true. Then you think well why stop now, because I can just have another dream and maybe that will come true.

JOHN: I first met Pete when I was about twelve years old at school, and eventually I suppose we came to learn that we were both musicians. He played the banjo and I played the trumpet, and I formed like a Dixieland band in which there were three banjo players, so Pete decided that he was going to take up the guitar… I made my own bass guitar and formed a group with Pete and a couple of other fellows at school, actually called The Scorpions… Roger came up and said “I hear you play the bass guitar”. So I said yeah so he said “well d’you wanna join my group” y’know… we played a couple of gigs as the band was, and then the rhythm guitarist left and I got in Pete. Pete really didn’t want to join first but he saw that we had two Vox fifteen watt amplifiers so he figured oh this bands got a lot of equipment you know, I’ll join these.

PETE: I feel very guilty about making a lot of money, John doesn’t. We have different attitudes about our families and things like that. I mean we’re different blokes, but we still have that same thing in common that we had many years ago.

JOHN: Pete I think is mostly likely the person in the world I know that I’ve got the most in common with. He writes and I write and we both realise how difficult it is to write for a specific thing like The Who. I couldn’t possibly do it, I have no idea how he does it. Pete in the early part of the career I think thought at the back of his mind that the rest of the band weren’t really trying to actually do anything as far as writing was concerned. I know on the second album A Quick One While He’s Away I started writing and he seemed quite a bit relieved. I think Pete has mellowed a lot over the years. He’s still got an instant temper but I don’t think anybody in the band takes that much notice of it. They know that it’s gonna completely subside any minute.

PETE: It was only when Pete Meaden came along that we started to really realise the full depth of the mod movement. Me in particular I think, I was really sort of incredibly influenced by it, and in fact it became a very solid part of it you know.

PETE: I don’t like being on a stage unless I move, I’ve always liked dancing. So I suppose music to me, Rock’n’Roll to me, is music that I like the sound of, or alternatively that I like the sound of I like to dance to. You know I thought there was a great encouraging sign about a year ago when I noticed that a lot of people were starting to sort of choogle about in audiences again y’know. Seems to have gone back to square one again, but I mean you know, if the audience ain’t gonna dance then I’m gonna do their dancing for ‘em, they can watch me have a good time. And I don’t feel right unless I’m leaping about, and also I really like the fact that if I swing me arm like a windmill or do a scissor kick or something at a certain moment that it’s almost like a trade mark. It asserts me for what I am in a sense and I mean I know it’s a gimmicky thing to do but it doesn’t feel like a gimmick at the time because it happens to come across in an amazingly sort of charged moment. Perhaps even, believe it or not, at an unselfconscious moment, you know. Jumping out of a pure feeling of liberation, musical liberation rather than jumping because you think it’s the time to jump. Just suddenly finding yourself in mid air in a genuine leap of joy, or throwing a guitar up and smashing it because you really do feel like you could chop a tree trunk in half.

KEITH: Pete plays the most agressive chords and the most agressive guitar, with attack.

PETE: I get a fantastic amount of credit for controlling the direction of the group, you know, and stuff. And I mean a lot of this is true because of the fact that I do write. I can sit alone and write something, and if that happens to be all I write then obviously the band has to record it. But I don’t usually just write one thing. I don’t usually offer the band one direction to go in, and I don’t usually do sit down and write without consulting the band first. Because like I don’t want to waste an incredible amount of time writing material which is not going to be used anyway. And over and above everything else I mean, I want particularly, I want the man whose going to be up there saying the words I’ve written - i.e. Roger Daltrey - to mean what he’s singing. Ah, obviously to a great degree I’ve got a knack now after twenty years, of being able to write things which Roger can get behind. But occasionally I make mistakes, so obviously the very important thing about my relationship with Roger, over and above you know, personal relationships in the street or whatever, are concerned is that as a writer I should be able to write things that he can identify with. Ah, thus perhaps we come to one of the greatest secrets of The Who. Which is that Roger is a very ordinary bloke, right, so by writing things for this ordinary bloke I happen to be getting a lot nearer the man in the street. Getting a lot nearer to the kind of things that they want to say. And it’s only really recently that Roger and I’ve really sort of, that this has sort of dawned on Roger and I in this sense.

PETE: I Can’t Explain for example, the first song I ever really wrote, songs like that a lot of people I see, you know Who fans and Who biographers breaking it down into what it really means. I mean when I wrote it, it was about a guy who couldn’t explain his love for his girlfriend. Y’know, and that was really what it was all about. It later on became a song about a guy who couldn’t explain what he meant cos he was pilled out of his brain y’know. It just so happened that I had that kind of one track mind. Substitute for example, well I suppose in a way it was a very clever piece of writing but it wasn’t conscious. It was a word game if you like.

PETE: I’ve always, like, struggled. And I think The Who as a band, perhaps, less consciously maybe, have struggled to keep the real sort of strong roots with it’s audience. It gets more and more difficult, there’s no doubt about it. As the band gets involved in grandiose projects like Tommy films and you know, god knows what. I mean, it does tend to make one aloof from the public.

PETE: I think the most calculating piece of work I’ve ever done is Quadrophenia. And I think it shows, I think it’s very obvious what it was trying to do, and what it was trying to say. And in some senses it lacks a lot of ah, I’ll be first to admit it, it lacks a lot of the obvious discovery, the excitement of discovery that comes about from all directions, converging on say a song like Substitute. Which on the surface means nothing and is meant to mean nothing, but conveys an incredible sense of adolescent frustration just through, I suppose, its inability to say what it wants to say. As I get older I get more expert, I’m able to say what I want to say more easily, so I don’t convey frustration anymore. What I convey is gloss, cleverness.

ROGER: To me Pete’s always been very under-rated in the things that he’s good at and very overrated in the things that he’s bad at. He’s totally up in the air, he’s totally fantasising all the time and yet his fantasies are drawn from real life. But I think without the who Pete could never bridge the gap between the fantasy and the truth. Pete without the who would be half a Pete Townshend.