Roger Daltrey, Founder and Lead Singer of The Who

But in nineteen sixty nine, Pete Townsend labeled his album Tommy a rock Opera to remind her obvious she knew, but is to be what you Opera is not just a label that One clip from Tommy has plot, exposition and a line worthy of verity. She carries a scar on her cheek to remind her of his smile. The Who spent decades as one of the Big Four of the British invasion of American radio in the sixties. Big

Four as in Beatles, Stones Who, Zeppelin. Their arena shows earned them a reputation as the greatest live act in rock and roll. The brilliant Townsend wrote most of the songs and played lead guitar. Keith Moon and John entwhistle Worthy rhythm section. The band's front man is my guest today,

the legendary Roger Daltrey. Daltrey's talent speaks through nuanced vocal styles over many years and his raw energy, that looping swing of a microphone started with him electrified the vinyl, then eight tracks, then cassettes that anyone my age remembers. Roger Daltrey is the rock star prototype. Well we needed to be was a blokes band. The Beatles were writing songs for the girls. They had the Moose screaming the Stones that we're a guy and we're a girls band.

He wrote songs for fellas and I I could say this, maybe it's gonna sound like a joke, but it's not a joke. And that is you have no idea what you and your music has meant to me in my lifetime. It's it's if you can't even measure it. You are it for me in terms of the range and the beauty and no offense to other people, but you have the range could do it had the writer, I mean townsends of music, what a vehicle to to see Could you imagine what it felt like to be presented with

those songs for the first time. Here roses demo, see what you can do with this. We'll describe. We'll describe what that was like, meaning how was that process? Someone came to you with a tape and you start with him and listen to a tape where you bring them into the studio. I mean when I can't explain. We just played a rehearsal that was easy. It was kind

of a Kinker like song. You know, it's kind of all day and all of the night again, you know, you really got me and it was a tribute to the Kinks and it was a kind of easy song for me as well as anyway anyhow anywhere, which he we finished writing on the stage at the Marquee in London. He had he had the verses, but he didn't have the middle eight, which I helped him with. That's why

it's a copu co writing thing on that. And then we did my generation and substitute of They were really easy for me because we come from the Blues and James Brown and all that heavy stuff, so that was easy to get my teeth into and he just presented them, you know, and I just we just slammed away. We used to go into the studio and we used to have to make those records in probably two hours. Max. You know you made the whole album in four hours.

McCartney told me when I sat was in privately, he said to me, you know, we do two songs in the morning. We go have a cigarette and have a paint and go have a sandwich and come back and do two in the afternoon. Well a week they had a week, but that's how it was. And then it was only um uh. Once I got presented with Happy Jack, I had to think totally different about how I as

a singer. I was going to sing townsend songs and present them in any kind of way that I could hold my head up in the streets, because I mean Happy Jack. I mean, if you listen, Happy Jack wasn't old, but he was a man, very tramanic tone to him, very it's like unpassed song. I'm thinking, you know, this is embarrassing, but he but Peter had written it and it became a huge hit. I don't know why, but

it did. And then of course the next song he presents is I'm a Boy about a woman who wanted who was having quads and she wanted them all to be goals. And one of them turns up as a boy, but she treats it like a like a girl. So it's this little boy screaming to be heard. I'm a boy, but my mom won't submit it. And then I thought, well, the only way I'm going to get round this at all is to kind of climb into Pete's head and into his psyche. Was it a difficult thing to do?

It was tricky, especially those early songs, and I listened back to them now. When I listened to them at the time, I used to be kind of embarrassed about my voice. I was never happy with the sound of it. I've never done a good job on it. That a kind of paranoia about it, because it wasn't the kind of range I was used to singing in, wasn't the emotion I was used to singing about. So I always

felt that I failed. And it's only now and perhaps for the last ten years, that I listened back to them, and they have a haunted quality about them, which is exactly right, because he writes in a very unusual way, as you know, I mean, as you see peak very early on got very shrewd and realized that later on

it became much easier. Tommy became the vehicle that that really developed me as a singer because there was an ongoing process being slowly put together in the studio to develop this rock opera, which was going to be a single album, carried on into being this double album. And of course when you're in the studio that long working on a project, it just gives you more time to

artistic experiment. So so just with that point, there is that where you begin, like most commercially successful groups early on, you're recording an album in two days. Is Tommy the first time you get to luxuriate in the studio and spend months making a single album? Yeah, I mean it was ridiculously long time, but in those days and the label didn't care that way. In those days, the labels kind of did what they were told by the bands

and that was successful. Yeah, you know, they we were invented, inventing this industry that it became, and they were happy to let us get on with it. You know, they come in and have a listen. Obviously, I'm pretty sure they must have done. But this is obviously and Kit Lambert, our manager at the time, it was always convinced that the pop song could be much much more. And he always had this idea that if Mozart had written not for us, why can't we have a rock opera? And

how student was he? Because it told me it was the first rock opera. In my opinion, it's one of the best operas ever written. Certainly got the most lyrics, so the most copious yes, and it's probably had had as bigger audiences. That process of making Tommy and the studio got me to a certain level, but it was only after we then brought into rehearsals of doing it live on stage it just took off like a rocket.

In the studio, you've got the comfort of being able to hear everything you've seen and so you can concentrate on, you know, all the little details that you think are important. Once you get on stage, it's all about giving it the wallet that you need to give it to get it out, because you've got no Monetly says you have to be a belter. But why were you and the

other three so great on stage? Meaning I mean you're again I don't want to lay it on too thick here, but you're going to be the unfortunate repository of all my fandom here and that is you guys are smart and right in the studio and your balls out on stage. It's a combination. It's a really simple thing. When I put that group together, as each one of them joined me in my band, John, it mustle First, I knew that I had an ingredient that worked. Our bio rhythms

were similar. You know, everyone has a bio rhythm that is a certain thing. I knew that John and I had something that was special. Same when Pete joined people. Obviously an enormous talent, immediately obvious just by the guitar shapes he was playing. We've never seen anything like it. And his right hand movement, you know, because he'd been a banjo player, he had this kind of rhythm action

to was ductor die for you anyway. Then Keith Moon came along and all of a sudden, all these individual bio rhythms came together and made the algorithm that then became the Who. Because who is a unique rhythmic pattern, doesn't it. It's this like any other music out there. The next rock music it's on the one, you know, it's it's a slam rock and roll was music to screw too, and whose music was definitely music to fight too, and that's what it was about. So once that algorithm

that we had came together, it's like laying bricks. It's really weird. It's musical bricks. I just want to say that, you know what you mentioned about that music being for young men, there's music. When we knew there was a group of guys we had to go beat the ship out of across town that night, and that's when your music that came up. Your music was your Your music with him is we played in the locker room, so I was getting it ready for the big game. That's right.

Who got you on your feet? Yeah, there was. That's what we always tried to do. We always tried to play our music to you to move you. But I want to know you say it moved you to go out fighting, but but it moved me to tears as well, so of its beauty. And that's what I want to get to, which is you grew up very poor, Yeah, very little money, but post war England had a lot going on for it that that made it incredibly wealthy. We had incredible community. Uh you know, I was born

in a v one raiding in World War two. And so everything around us when we grew up been leveled by bombs and the war. To get through the war. All our aunties and uncles and our mothers and our dads are away fighting the war, but they were in the bomb shelters every night, and of course drown out the bombs. I used to sing, so seeing became a

really big part of the community. In those days. Every pub would have a piano and they would sing all these old, these old musical songs and things, and we'd all seen them too, And everywhere you went there would be people seeing on the streets. How old were you when you joined the Boy's Brigade? That would have been about eleven? Your boy, yeah, young boy? Yeah? What was singing to you? Like? Them were your stuff coaches about?

So from the beginning you enjoyed it. Yeah. I sang in a US choir when I was six or seven because I like dressing up. I knew I had a voice, and the skiffle of music came along. They were that earlier lead belly songs, Chain gang songs. Nnie Donegan, who was this guy in Britain who inspired me and people like Robert Plant to do what we did because he

was just so free with his voice. We could play that music because it's always three chords, so you've only got to learn three chords and you can play all those songs. And every street had a group, a skiffle group, which consisted of someone who's got a guitar from somewhere. I made my first guitar. For a bass, you'd have an old t chest, which was a two ft six square box open one end string through the middle of the top. With a broomstick, a good player could make

that sound like a double bass. And of course for rhythm, you could take something from mom's kitchen and the washboard and you had a band um. And that's where it all started. And the first time you played in front of an audience was when how old were There was a Churchill youth club on a on a Saturday night in Sheep's Bush and it's my mate said we gotta get up and sing a song. So I went up and I think I did hound Dog for five minutes

there with my hair soaped back. We couldn't afford any grease like the Elvis, but the soap work wonders and we all thought we could look like Elvis with the soap. I did my version of Elvis doing hound Dog and it was probably awful because that's right at the point when your voice is breaking. So but I didn't have any worries about it. And what I did notice immediately there was other people kind of looking up, and I thought,

this is quite a nice position to occupy. Some of them girls, most of them some of them girls, most of them giving you that look. There's something about a voice, isn't it. I don't know why. Boy. We had Mark Farner from Grand Funk Railroad on this show and he tells the story about he said, you know you're on stage, man. He talks like this. He says, you're on stage and the producer said, you know you're really small down there. The people are weigh in the back. Because you gotta

do something big, you gotta make it. Bigg got to give him a show. He goes, I want you to rip your shirt off in the middle of the show, and he looks at he goes what. He goes, I want you to because Foreigner was really fit, like you're very ripped kind of fit guy. He goes, I want you to rip your shirt off in the show, and Fier goes okay in the middleitary rip, the girls go insane. They come to work the next thing that the concert hall. There's a box of shirts in his dressing room. It's

like you're gonna rip your shirt off every night. And now actually exactly how it was. You can find something making it up as we went along, you know, uh, you know, and that that were wanders familiar with that Tommy outfit that I made, you know, all made out of shammy leather um. And but it was so wonderful to work in a skin, in another skin because it's so free. You know, it sweats with you, it breathes, and you don't get so hot because when you wear

ordinary clothes. It was it was wonderful to wear that. But when you when you have the four of you together for the first time, it's the detours, that's that's the who it was the detours with the four and then there was five of us we had. We were a kind of Cliff Richard and the shadows are like, you know, kind of doing the movements and everything very coolly. And then he was going on the fifth one, yes

he was. I mean we had a singer called Colin Dawson who thought it was Cliff Richard, but he wasn't, of course, and he decided to become a bacon salesman. But we by this time, I've seen a band called Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, which you should look up because they made some great records. And that was the first three piece band we've seen as a rock band where that had a lead come rhythm guitarist, a bass player, and a great drama and a least singer in black

letter trousers and a black patch over his eye. And it was Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. They even had a backdrop hand painted of a galleon that this is the bar looking crazy. But they did great songs. They did Shaking all Over, the original Shaking all Over, you know that song, and they need a shot of rhythm and blues, which the Beatles covered. That was Johnny Kidd

and the Pirates. And the guitarists of that band was a guy called Mickey Green, and he played in a way where not only was he doing the rhythm, he'd do the leads as well, so there was particular sound and Pete got it immediately. So by that time I was the lead guitarist when we had Peter's rhythm, but I was a sheep metal worker and sheet metalwork and guitar playing don't really go together because my hands were shredded. Most nights we get caught in the cuts and all

kinds of stuff. So I was very happy to give up the guitar. And all the time we've been doing these Cliff Richard songs. We used to play for g I's in some of the clubs in London, and they used to request things like Chuck Berry and you know, some John any Cash and weird stuff and I Royal Orbison. Now Colin couldn't sing that, but I could, so I used to do some of the singing. And uh so it became obvious that Pete should now become the lead rhythm guitarist and I would be very happy just to

become the singer. And that's when it changed their sheet metal career, media the lead vocalist of the Who. Yeah. But it also made us our first electric guitars. We couldn't afford to buy them in those days, but we could make them what I could make them, very rudimentary things, but they worked. So the four of you, did you get a record deal when you were the Detours. No, we were the Detour Us and for quite a long

while then we became the Who. And by then we were playing Chicago blues mostly, starting to feed in a bit of James Brown, a bit of Tamla Motown and uh, we've got a new manager, so now we've got to find an image. And he recognized that it was this group of fashion easters coming up called the MUDs, who were very sharp dressers. Uh, fashion changing very quickly, very tight suits, short haircuts, smart. And he said they need a band for them, and you can be that band.

And we kind of looked at him and said, yeah, what were it involved? He said, well, first of all, the barbers shop. And we went in to the barber's shop as the stones are like, and we came out there's a bunch of MUDs with short haircuts. Uh. Immediately took around the corner to buy some mud clothes. So there we were really wolves in sheep's clothing. And he said, you can't keep the name the Who. That's not mud enough, and we're gonna call you the higher Numbers. So we said,

what does that mean? Where does that come from? There said what the this week fashion Bowling shoes that you have to steal from the bowling alley because he's got numbers on the back, you know the side. Of course, the legend goes the bigger defeat, and all of a sudden, the MUDs really got behind us as our fan base. We were their band, and then they would come and request their kind of music that they and they were

changing their music regularly. It was. It went from kind of early reggae what was then called blue beat, Prince Buster and all people like that. But by now the blues for us have become a little bit tedious to twelve bar. But with the aid of Keith Moon and his very short attention span and double bassed dru feat, we could turn that into the feedback cycle and start inventing and be free form, which will then bring the

jazz influences that we we had round about. Yeah, when the high numbers go back to becoming the Who wegan, we're still the higher numbers. But then we get an another manager, which was Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, fabulous creative managers, and they said, well, we don't like to name the higher numbers, um, and we've heard you with the Who before that we think the who is in the right name, so they changed it back to the

Who that fans were very confused for a while. They were It's funny when you talk about the mad period and everything, you just start to see those images. You can even hear the lyrics in your head. You know, zoot suit by jacket with sivince five inches are quite dfinia and it makes you think, did Quae Drofinia come in his mind before Tommy but he put it on the shelf. I think Quadrapa came at the time he wrote it in seventy three. But musically you're right about

the lyrics Quadrophenia. It every generation that comes around picks up that album and goes somebody understands me. Yeah, it's really weird. And we were recently last year. We've never been South America before. We've never been you know, who are crazy? We're nuts? All those years obsuring never been out in the Brazil or do you know Argentina or Chill any of those places. Only went to Mexico. It's

to Mexico five years ago. What you guys down there, well, we just we just I don't know why we didn't get there, don't ask were mostly on the tour in the side of his peet that called the Scots, and he just didn't want to go there. He said, we have enough trouble fulfilling, you know, our crowd in the States, in the UK. So we never went down there. But anyway, we went down there last year. They knew every word of every song and they were singing louder, immensely, I

mean Mexico City. They it was extraordinary and they were all young people. They knew every word of every song. But they need this. I mean, it's good music. You know. People want it's good. They don't care how you know, yeah, as good as long as you can deliver it properly. And if we ever can't do that, then we'll stop. I don't ever want to go through the emotions. And I never who have never ever done a show where we've dialed it in and I can How is your

voice now? It's great. You had you had some trouble with your throat, Well, yeah, that was about that was about nine years ago. I had I've got it. I had a pre cancerous condition. But I found a doctor, Stevens, I tells. I put the Voice Institute in Massachusetts in Boston, and he sorted me out. My voice is fabulous now, it's it's a joy to sing and all the time I can give it the grit and the balls that

it needs. I'll do it now. When you when you do a show, let's pick up the difference between studio recording. What was your preparation before you went into the studio or you went on tour? Well, you have you have to be like an athlete. You owe it to your audience. You train your voice trained the voice that you can't train a voice, you train all life out of it.

Some of the trained voices. It's what ruins good voices. Obviously, if you had to sing eight shows a week on Broadway, you probably need to go to that area where you get the sound of the trained voice. Personally, I don't particularly like it, but my voices, I'm very careful about resting it. And these days I'm not allowed to do two shows back to back. I have to have a day in between. There's just out of respect for my voice. But then I can give it all the pedal that

I need to give it. Why it is pedal, it's about this is you know, this is singing from your ass um but that's how it happens down there. Well, that's how it has to be to get those songs into the vein of getting the who as it needs to be in my head anyway. And touch Woods my voice is is kind of looking after me at the moment, Damn Me Sweet music side a seminal moment in the counterculture. Dultry at Woodstock sings see Me Feel Me from Tommy.

There's earnestness and anger in Dualtry's voice. The band and the crowd took Tommy's rebellious message seriously. Another artist with a revolutionary sound is Tom York of Radiohead. York finds an almost giddy joy in hearing how his innovations spread into different music, sometimes very different. One of the best buzzes really is that thing where someone comes up you know, I'm really into what they're doing. It's really fascinating and

it's really totally new to me. But yet the occasions when fed off of you, yeah, and You're like, how could you? How could you feed off me? I don't see any of my stuff, yeah, but they see it and I'm like, wow, that's so cool. You know, people within hip hop who who are into Radiohead I'm like, I mean, obviously, I'm massively into hip hop, and we've we use hip hop as a reference point in the way we build tracks and stuff. But really, wow, that's bonkers.

The rest of my conversation with radioheads Tom York and here's the thing, dot'll work. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to hear is the thing? Shaking All Live at leads the greatest live rock album of all time according to the New York Times and the BBC. Only halfway through the show and already Daltrey's voice is ragged where you can hear him pushing, literally shaking through the song's last stanzas Roger Daltrey's intense physicality extends to his fists.

He told me he had a bit of a short fuse. But you know, I think that came from being bullied at school. I'm a little guy. I'm a very small guy, and the little ones always used to get bullied. As you know. It went on at school for quite a while. And she day I picked up a chair and when they were starting on me, and I just went in first with the chair and they left me alone. They

all backed off, and I thought, what this works. What it did to me, it kind of made my fight or flight mode, but it tripped it into I would always fight and if ever I felt that the threat was going to get out of hand, there's one thing a little guy I can do against a bigger guy and has to get the first punch or the first kick or whatever the region handshake, you know, and then

you might have a chance of surviving. But that's what it did for me, So I yeah, I kind of had a red mist and I I used to have to rule a band with a bit of an iron fisted the beginning because they were a lippy lot. Is it safe to say? Because you're a person who sings such you know, long live rock and these blistering anthems you the band would sing and then you blow some of the most beautiful notes and music history, singing sea and Sand and see Me Feel Me and all these

are the songs. Does Pete bring that out on you? His writing brings it out. It's it's in the lyrics, it's in the melody. You know, a lot of his demos when he writes them are very, very different than the finished product that I often give him, especially towards a lot of years of our career. I try and make each song have a starting point and take you on the journey through it. Rather a lot of songs kind of start and they get to a level and they stay there all the way through to the end.

I've always tried to make whose songs climb a ladder rather than being flatlining, you know what I mean. I mean brown Sugar comes out, they come out guns blazing, and a lot of those songs, the students, they start here, you know where as you say you want to kind of move around and said the song. I did the whole of telling me this summer with it with an orchestra uh and a rock band, and it's phenomenal. That's exciting. That's that. That's like a new claud Secle music when

you hear that. I've had these orchestrations done by a guy called David Campbell who's the father of Beck. But it's elevated Tommy to where I believe it should be now, so exciting to play. It's wonderful. Cameron Crowe, when I did a movie with them, got me the vinyl copy that I worshiped of the ls So with the gleaming

ball on top of that's just an orchestra. This is an orchestra, and I've got to tell you there's not one piece of this orchestration where the orchestras playing anything like a keyboard pad, you know, you know what I mean.

It's all melodic, interesting, percussive instrumentation. It's in recorded. I'm going to release possibly the Bethel Concert which is the Woodstock site, as you know, because it's the fifty years of Tommy in March, and of course next years fifty years of Woodstock, which is me made, us made, really made. So I'm yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna release it as a solo album. I just you know, as a performance.

Then I'm gonna ask if he'd like to overdub some guitar on it, and then it can be the who I want it out there for the record, because it's an incredible piece of work. It really is. People always talk about Moon and the legend of Moon and Moon being a very ill saying as politely as possible, being a very colorful character. You would have loved him, You would have adored everyone adorned Moon. You also would have hated him. You also would have exactly but Whistle, who

also died young. He was not that old and when when he died from a drug overdose as well, correct, uh, well, it was a heart attack. You know. John was unconditional with the way he lived. He wanted to live the

life of a rock and roll star. You know. The sad thing about John's death was the fact that the hard rock casino in Las Vegas, where he died in bed after a line of coke and whatever else she had taken that night, didn't put a glass case around him and open it as an exhibit, because John would have loved that. Then John, that to John, I've made it, but he was the first one. But he's the first one you recruited in the band. He was kind of a real maid of yours. And I remember seeing to

McCartney one time. He said to me, they were always telling them, you know, here's the best drummer in London that you should have, and you're gonna replace this guy. And he said, no, no, no, no, no, it's got to be these four people. It's these four. This is my band, these four. But we all felt like if if Ringo leaves and you get another guy in there, we ain't doing it. And how you felt. Definitely, twenty

Element is not going to be as good. No, And it took a long time to find the missing missing link that when Keith died, we put Kenny Jones in in the band was a fabulous drama Kenny Jones, but he was a drummer from Small Faces. But can you imagine putting Keith Moon in the Faces? It would have been you know, but equally it was a disastrous putting Kenny Jones in there. Who the algorithm didn't work anymore. It was like like having a square wheel on a car.

I love Kenny as a mate, and it was incredibly difficult to have to say I can't work with you, Kenny, it just doesn't work. How long did you work with them? We went on for about four years. How many albums did you record with them? We did? We did too. Um, we did face dances. And it's hard to Petee the same way. No. Well, initially he said he didn't, but my intuition told me that Pete knew Um I would

stock obviously for many many people. You know, there are people who are musical sophistic kids and they know even before Rolling Stones shows up and things like that, they find what is music and clubs and they're much more, you know, kind of savvy. For me, I was a bit younger. The as time I become aware of you is because of Woodstock wood Stuck is what introduces me to the who. I don't know where you're at in your career in terms of success are you? Helicoptering in

the Baffle described that experience. I was in Connecticut with my soon to be wife, Heather, and a mother and father, and we were watching the news and it had about this festival that we were due to play the following day with this was the Friday, And how the governor of New York declared the area a disaster zone because of all the mud and the rain and lack of food and lack of this, and the lack of medicine behavior and the kind of medicine that was the wrong

kind of medicine getting in, and how all the roads have been blocked and the state police had blocked everything off, and how everybody was having flying in a helicopter to even get to the site. Well, how are we going to get there? And that was father. He just said, well, well, well I'll drive you there in the Volkswagen and they had a Volkswagen Beetle, and so her we went to Woodstock.

We we jumped in the volks Wagon Beetle on the morning of the of the that Saturday morning, and we drove all the way to Bethel, and every time we came to any kind of roadblock which we drove through we got there. It was chaos. Yes, it was all those things, but it wasn't like they were presenting it on the news at all. Um, it wasn't as bad now. And we drove into the site in the obligatory hurt station wagon which every group used to have in those days. Um, So that was myth made up by the fake news

on the television. You went on what time, Well, we were due to go on at nine o'clock at night. You gear yourself up psychologically and you get your energy to be peeking at the time you hit the stage, so that you're ready to deliver to your audience everything that they deserve to be given. And we were already by nine o'clock, five o'clock in the morning or we go and there was hardly anything to eat. We had hard they anything to eat, hardly anything to drink that

wasn't laced with some something already an herb. Yeah. Um, and by the time we got on stage, so much of the equipment of broken down. It was. It was all a bit hit and miss, But for some reason or the other, it seemed to it seemed to capture a moment of the period, the struggle that that that age. You know, we we tend to forget now that that was the whole generation they were living with the Vietnam War, the horror of it, and you know, so many of

them being drafted. I remember Pete kicking Abbie Hoffman off the stage making his political speech. Just is not that we don't need any more politics? Did you get up here again? I'll kill you peace? Lava rock and roll now when you Because we had Peter Frampton on this show, and Frampton talked about, Um, they go out now and do this uh legacy album thing where they play the album and it's entirety from start to finish the way the album is performed. Are you guys doing Quadrophenia started?

We did it. We did it not too long ago, and we did in a two townsand thirteen. How did it go? Fantastic? Yeah, we did the whole the whole piece as it studies piece and it's it's a good place. We might revisit it sometime. I'll invite you along. Did you did you record that? Yes, there is a there's a DVD of it. Get it. It's really good. Have you perform? Where? Did you perform? Everywhere? Matter? Squigden? Why didn't you come? You did obviously on the film? Obviously?

I got four kids? Yeah, I got four kids five and under and I'm sixty. I got five months. You got a hundred kids? Took you get about a hundred kids on. That's what it brings me to my other question. I got two more questions for you. I got a thousand questions. You've been married for a long time, and you speak very lovingly about your wife in the book,

and uh, what's your secret? I found the right woman, and I found a woman who very early on, um, she understood the industry we were in, which, as you know, is very difficult to have any kind of relationship in long term unless you're have incredible goodwill and understanding and

truly love each other. She wanted to get married because we wanted to have children, and I said, well, I'll marry you, but you know, you know what band I'm in, and you know what I'm like, I'm never going to be that faithful husband that much like right, oh yeah, you have to yeah, and you have, but you have to do it up front. You can't do it after the occasion. And I did it up front and Heather accepted it. Um. You know, it wasn't as bad as

I could have been because of that. Um. And you know, here we are fifty one years later and we're true partners, true partners. She and your kids when their kids were school. Are you and she have three kids together? We got three kids when you when they were school? It would they go with you on the road? Did you always leave to They all came out and that was wonderful.

But it was really quite kind of funny when my kids first saw me on stage and kind of kind of thought, you know, and I couldn't hear them talking. They were kind of like six or seven years old, and my little girls and their friends were talking, and I could hear my daughter say, my dad's a rock star, and the other little girl said, yeah, but my dad takes the train to London every day, you know, which is so wonderful when you go Oh, this is this is real life. It isn't amazing. How you you you're

trying to tell that to people's kids. I've met famous, especially famous musicians, you know, acting as so ephemeral like who's good and who's great and what works and what doesn't work. As live music is much more pure, I agree with you. And there's there's also something about music. I don't know whether it's the same today, but it used to be so you could always remember exactly what

you were doing when you first heard that track. There's something about Buddy Holly singing that will the other day. Wow did that turn our heads? When you heard first heard Obvious singing? You know Heartbreak Hotel Whoa, you know, Little Richard singing, you know lou Seal. When I was gonna do lip sync battle on Jimmy Fallon, I didn't do it, but I was gonna do it, and they said, what do you want to do? I said, I want to do Barbara O'Reilly and they said, you can't do that.

I go way to go because you can't spin the mic. You're gonna smash the lights up in the TV studio. I couldn't. Who taught you how to do that. Where did you get that idea to take that mic and throw that mic? I didn't know. One told me. I just got yourself once they went into the free form in the early days, the late sixties. It just came out of boredom I was. I couldn't stand there and be like Robert Plant. I wasn't cool enough. I just needed to dance, but I didn't want to dance like

a an ordinary dancer. So I just started to play with it and it just got bigger and bigger. Energy and channel the energy, and then Pete started jumping and that legendary jump of here he's like a kangaroo. And uh, but the whole thing was kind of in with the music. It became like a ballet, didn't it. It was kind of extraordinary. And by when I think back and I look at some of those there's one piece of film that I've seen recently. Somebody showed me the Freddie Mercury

Tribute concert at Wembley Stadium. I had the rotten job of being the first act out on the stage. But take a look at it. It's on YouTube. You can you can watch it. What an entrance I'm reading that, Mike, It's wonderful to see the fear on Brian May's face. Things flying everywhere and it misses you every time. I've never hit anyone but myself with it. Fortunately aren't only one person um, but that that was deliberate and I was quite pleased with that. We we we could possibly

make an effort. I'm sure we would make an effort, although we think we tracked when Townsend was in New York to promote his book All a couple of years ago and we made a stabber trying to last sue him in here to do the show. How does he look back on all that worked at you guys? Did Is he proud? I think he is. He's got to be. We're having a great time on stage now for the first time in our career, the last well since two thousand and third, Team has been an absolute joy. Now

the band is very different. We've still got Zack Starkey, Pete Townsend and meet Uh. We've got the band I go out touring solo with. We've got Lauren Gold on keyboards. Frank Simes is our music director. Simon Townshend Peace brother of course, who's a fabulous rhythm player. We've got John a guy called John Button on bass and a guy called John Corey on keyboards. That's the lineup. We need to do Quadrophenia because it's there's so much music and

instrumentation in it. You know you need that. We've been getting reviews as good as anything we ever got in the seventies, which I'm so proud of to be this age and know that you're still delivering it in the right way. I'm gonna name three songs out of countless songs you sang, and you tell me was it easy or hard for you to sing this song? And I'm curious about something that's a really ripping kind of a lot of notes, so to sing see me filming a

piece of cake. Easy. It just came, yeah, yeah, absolutely easy as anything, easy, easy, easy. I went back to be the choir boy. Um Love Rain Army. That was really really easy, incredibly uh painful to hear Pete's remark when he first heard it, I don't like it. Well, he didn't like it. He didn't hear it the same

way I see it again. Like I was talking to earlier, how I would interpret his songs very differently sometimes and then he kind of wrote them and he he wrote it as this gentle love song, love Rain Army and I I thought, this is the last song on the album. Uh and you know, you know the songs you rip it in the end just needed to be primal. It was, you know, it needed to be out into space, you know.

Uh So I did that ending that I do. And he hates it, he can like it at all, And it was it was kind of that that hurt at the time, and it hurt because he said it quite a bit in the press at the time, so that was kind of weird. But equally, I still carried on

singing it that way. Didn't have any effect on your choice? No, no, no, what's the song you sang that you got the talked into or you even talked yourself into sing in a certain way, and you didn't like it And it turned out to be a great hit, Happy Jack Jake, But it was it was. It was a hit record. I couldn't could not believe it. I just could not believe this records hit record. I just never ever heard it.

And it's one of the few ones today I kind of when we start to revisit the hits, forget that one, and and and over the years, you did or did not do much songwriting with him, and he did he do, no, no, no, you know. I've written a few songs, but I'm no songwriter in the caliber of Pete Townshend. I co wrote anyway and how manywhere with him? But that was it. And I've written songs of my own, you know. But who you left it him well when you were I'm

like you, I'm such a big fan of his. I am such a fan of his, And the more I let him have his reign in his head, that the better the stuff. Because if you try and inter fear, you know, you probably screw it up. But I'll never think you guys went on tour in the U s and they put you in I think it was on the for of Newsweek, and I do believe. Sometimes I don't trust my memory anymore, but I do believe I'm precise in this one, which you had one of my

favorite lines of all time. You and they quoted you as saying, you said, nobody writes songs like Pete, and no one sings Pete songs like I do. That's the definition of the help me. When I was a kid, I thought to myself, I was like a little like I was young. I forget how old I was, and I thought any band that puts an album that was a song on it called a quick one while he's away, I thought, I gotta meet this band had had a song code a quick one while he's a wire, and

would play young people for me already levered twelve. Thus the name of the book is Thanks a Lot, Mr kibble White, with the name of your teacher who bounced you out of school. I made you the star that you are today thanks to let Mr. And I want to say, truly, you are, for my money, the greatest rock and will singer of all time. Thank you for doing this with us, absolute pleasure. I'll do it any time, and I'll tell Pete hete you got to it for you. Pete,

You've got to do it for me. Thank God. A track from Quadrafenia to Go Out On from three Daughtry captures the melancholy of Pete Townsend's lyric. His character a disillusioned who fan sits looking from meaning on a cold beach in Brighton. There's all of the lost promise of the nineteen sixties in that voice that was the incomparable Roger Daltrey. This is Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to here's the Thing