Pete Townshend

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Hello and welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which some of the world's leading Figures choose the most significant influences and experiences that have inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is Pete Townsend, songwriter and guitarist with The Who. The band first stormed the pop charts six months. years ago with teenage anthems including I Can't Explain, Substitute, and My Generation.

Broader songwriting ambitions led Pete Townsend to create the rock opera Tommy in 1969 and the concept album Quadrafinia four years later. Both projects were adapted as films. And now Quadrafinia has been staged as a ballet by Sadler's Wells. Throughout the 70s and 80s, the Who were regarded as the biggest and loudest live act in the world. Woodstock at LiveAid at Live Eight and the twenty twelve. Closing ceremony. Despite the deaths of drummer Keith. Whistle. Continue to perform and

Pete Townton, welcome to this cultural life. You were born in London in nineteen forty five into a very musical family. Your mother and father, Cliff and Betty, were both working musicians, and you've chosen both of them as your first creative influence. for this programme. Just give us a sense of what were they playing and and how big an impact they had on you. Well my dad was a professional musician, a clarinetist in little jazz groups. My mum was a young

Irish girl, I think you would call her, living with her grandmother, and I was born right at the end of the war in May, right when things were winding down. And my parents did their best to run a family, but it was difficult because my mother wanted to be a singer and my dad was really busy if you were in an Air Force orchestra you were in still in the Air Force.

And my mum was left behind and tried to build a career and then my parents started to take me on the road. Right. And that's when the good stuff started to happen. So this is a post war jazz band or swing band? And the squadronairs they were called. They were very famous and very proud of the Did you see your parents perform on stage or not? They would take you along to the to the shows.

Yeah, I travelled with them from the age of around thirteen months I started to travel with them on on the band bus. That's a glamorous life, I guess, through the Glamorous and and when I was a little older, from about thirteen months old I've got an extraordinarily clear memory of many big events like being on the band bus, passing out beer bottles to trumpets. Riding at the front, pretending to drive. When the WHO first started to tour in the UK, I knew my way to all of the gigs.

Because I'd done it so many times with my dad. That's extraordinary. And did you at that age did you want to emulate your parents, do you think? I think it was too early for me to to really tell. I think Um the hiccup that happened to me was is that my mother got a job with a guy called Leslie Douglas who was doing shows for the American Air Forces and he was in love with my mother. and she started to tour with him and she sent me to my grandmother, who had abandoned her when she was seven,

Uh why she sent me to live with this woman I don't know, but I went to live with this woman. I left my friends at school behind, I left the gang from Acton behind. And you're living but this is by the sea? I went to live with her in Margate. And it was just horrible. And I don't rem and I kind of black it out. I tend to black it out. It was so horrible. You described it in your memoir a few years ago as the darkest part of my life. Yeah. So she was She was not the same.

and abusive and cruel and surrounded by extremely pervy men all the time who interfered with me. I had no friends, I wasn't allowed to have friends. Anyway, it was a really shitty time. and In the end, somebody reported my grandmother for abusive behaviour. My mother and her lover, she had a new lover as well, they came down and rescued me and they brought my friend Graham, who was had been my best friend.

So I came back to Acton and at that point my father stepped in and said to my mother that she couldn't take me away. Right. And had to rebuild the relationship. And as far as I was concerned That was where my childhood began.

So this is a childhood of great uncertainty. Did music offer some kind of escape for you? Having seen your parents on the road and audiences cheering them, d when did you start thinking I want to make music myself? I think that happened when I was in my early lucky ten, eleven, twelve. You've talked before about an aunt called Trilby who had a piano. That's right. That's right.

Yeah, she was fabulous. She was fabulous not because she encouraged my meanderings, but she was just fabulous anyway. I one day I was playing the piano just clunking away and I went off into a a dream, a fantasy. I could literally hear the most incredible music. It wasn't what I was playing, I was hearing something else. Channeling, I suppose.

Anyway I finished and I went very quiet and and she was netting or something and she said, That was very nice, Pete and I said, I know. And I wondered how she knew. She encouraged you then. Were you getting any musical encouragement from your father then? Do you think he worried that if you followed in his profession it would be too precarious? He knew that it was a an uncertain uh

Life to be I I don't know why. I think It may be that my parents knew that I was damaged because I do feel that I'm damaged. you know, I've done all of the things that people do that have fallen into addiction and bad behaviour and, you know, all of the counselling and the the AA and the ps psychotherapy and And i in inevitably I feel like a a a diamond with a floor. You know, I feel in a sense that some of the suffering that I had when I was really small with my grandmother shaped me.

and gave me real edge. You know, I'm a dangerous fucker. There's no question. You know, when I work I am charged and I feel that that came from the time with my grandmother where I had to build up some level of resistance. You know, I was saved by my parents. You know, they did in the end save me'cause they got together for my benefit and eventually after a while I had two brothers. But it took a long time.

Rydyn ni'n siŵer wedi'n siŵer wedi'n siŵer wedi'n siŵer wedi'n siŵer wedi'n siŵer wedi'n siŵer wedi'n siŵer. He had a girlfriend too, of course. He was a very handsome fellow. And they remain together then? Yes, and seemed to be quite happy to Did your father um he I think he died in the mid eighties, did you? Yeah. So did he he w watched your career from afar or was he encouraging when you got that?

You know what's so interesting? It was my mum that was the most encouraging. swung behind us and started to help us deliver gear, got us auditions for gig and used some of her old romantic connections. She contacted Leslie Douglas and Leslie Douglas, who's the man I think who's most in love with her, got us a job at the American Air Force canteen kind of place in Kensington.

and we were paid about probably the equivalent in today's money of about a thousand quid. Wow. It was huge. We bought gear, we bought guitars, we bought a van. In my case we drank, you know, we we were wealthy because of that. And and then it also gave us a contact with an American audience. One, two, three o'clock, four o'clock, right. Five six

Your next choice for this cultural life, Pete Townsend, is seeing Bill Haley in the comets in London in nineteen fifty. Of course Bill Haley's hit single Rock Around the Clock had been the first big international rock and roll hit in I think 1954. So do you remember hearing that song on the radio? Yeah, yeah. You know, funnily enough for a lot of people like me who had dads that liked the Goon show, that was where we ha fur heard the first attempts at rock and roll.

Very well. Pay a ransom of a thousand golden splendors or hand. Ye gulp. Give me till the end of Ray Ellington's number. Not a moment longer. 'Cause Ray Ellington who was the M D He was a big fan of black rock music and he used to play rock songs on the goons. And had you seen Rock Around the Clock, the movie spin-off. I saw that on the Isle of Man. My dad took me to see it with my f best friend Graham, Jimpy his nickname was.

Seeing Bill Haley in person though must have been a really life changing event. You know, it was scary. My dad dropped us off. We got tickets at the very last minute, so we were right at the back of the Odeon. Where was that? this this was at the top of Edgeware Road. It's gone now. The building was falling down when we were in it.

We and the chairs that we were sitting on were going up and down like this because the people were jumping and jumping and jumping. And I remember the the bass player had a proper double bass and he would turn it on his side and ride on it like a horse and And it had this thumping swinging and I remember when I my dad took us to see the film, which would have been the summer before, I remember saying to him, Do you like this, Dad? And he he said

Sort of quite politely, he said, Well it swings. It swings. That's all he would say. Did it encourage you to get your first guitar seeing Bill Haley? Rydyn ni'n gyntaf. Rydyn ni'n gyntaf. Rydyn ni'n gyntaf. Rydyn ni'n gyntaf. Rydyn ni'n gyntaf.

Graham would stand in front of the mirror. And standing in front of the mirror is a big part of rock and roll. You know, it's a huge part of it. You have to do a lot of standing in front of the mirror. And one day I was with him and I picked up the guitar and I played a tune on it and Jimpy's dad said to my dad, Cliff, he he's playing this thing I made and he's making a tune, and my dad went, Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean literally dismissed it. But that Christmas

he persuaded my awful grandmother to buy me my first guitar and she found one on the wall of a Greek restaurant which she pulled down and I had that for about two years and eventually I got my own guitar. But Your dad could clearly see you're enthralled to rock and roll. Do you think his indifference to your musical ability was because he saw rock and roll as a threat to his own life?

He said so. He said so in so many words, you know, with three lads and these big amplifiers that we had we could make an equivalent noise of of a twenty piece dance band. and we could fill the halls. So it was inevitable that we were gonna put them out of work. And it was in that period that the shift happened. And the shift happened with my generation, I often say with pride and with with bombast, I drew the line with my generation. With that song.

Yeah. Because I was so conscious of it with my dad, there was this music Which was his generation. Yeah, which was about rebuilding, about falling in love, about finding romance, about finding something in life. which was better than war, I suppose. And on my side it was, you know, we don't have that reason for being. We are kind of useless. We need to reinvent ourselves and have a new future.

And that turned out to be the case. You know, rock and roll replaced the dance music of the previous era in every You overthrew your father.

Your next choice of creative influence for this cultural life, Pete. Is the artist and academic Roy Ascot who taught you at the Ealing School of Art uh where you were a student, I think nineteen sixty one, nineteen sixty two. Were you planning a career as a visual artist at that time?

Yes. And I thought that th the band that I was in at the time was the band so I started it in September of nineteen sixty one, I was sixteen, and in that summer just at the end of the school term at Ealing, Roger Daltrey came back, he'd been expelled, he came back in his rocker gear, took me aside, and said I've heard from

your buddy John Empwistle. I was in a band with John playing jazz. At school. At school. And I want you to join my band. And I went for an audition with him and he included me in his band. So I'd spent the summer playing at pubs with Roger and his band which was called the D Tours. Yeah. And we were good. We were really good and we got lots of gigs at Pub. and we made a bit of pocket money. But for me it was a game. It was a hobby. It was nothing to be serious about. I didn't

see myself as have been creative. I wasn't the lead guitar player. Roger was the lead guitar player. He wasn't a particularly good player but he was the lead guitar player. I was the rhythm player, I was a gawky kid with a big nose that sat at the back and strummed, you know, so Yeah. Yo's the anchor. And we had a singer, a glamorous sort of Cliff Richard type singer who the girls liked.

And so you went to Ealing Art College expecting not to be a musician but to be a an artist. Who was Roy Ascott and why was he so influential? He was the shock because I'd been uh art classes and those classes were very conventional. But what followed with Roy Ascot was a much, much, much more orderly course. of breaking down students' preconceptions, yes, but also of setting us up for a future in which communication was almost more important than artistic expression.

So he was a pioneer of the understanding of uh of digital art as well. Digital art but also the way that digital art when it came and it was many years ahead would change the function of art Roy Ascott was far more than a lecturer then. It was absolute vision rate. It was like a philosopher. Yes, a visionary and still is. He's still alive. He was only ten years older than I was. He was only twenty six.

As you say you were already playing in the band The Detours, which became the Who with Roger Daltrey, John Em Whistle on bass, and then Keith Moon joined on drum. To what extent was your art school education informing the identity of the Who and the sort of mission statement of the Who? To begin with, not at all. What actually happened is we were still the pub band. You know, we were doing parties as well and Jewish weddings and things like that. We were making good money.

But I kept it secret. And I pretended I was in a jazz band. I never let any of my friends come and see the band. Yeah. I was earning more money than the lecturer in charge of the course, so no, not particularly. I I just felt I felt I was juggling, to be honest, and and I wasn't sure which way I was gonna go. I was really, really, really affected by this idea that s one day we would have these things called computers.

which would do for us what we couldn't do for ourselves. And of course this is nineteen sixty one, sixty two and of course it took t to nineteen eighty five before I had my own personal computer. And yet uh ten years after you were in these lectures with Roy Ascott, nineteen seventy one.

you recorded the Who's Next album, on which you were using synthesizers as a compositional tool, which was really kind of ahead of the game in many ways. And we hear that most obviously on Won't Get Fooled Again. To what extent was Roy Ascot responsible for those experiments? Of directly responsible. Because he opened your mind to the possibility of or your mind in particular. Yeah. The synthesizer felt to me. of a way that I could in a sense

In fact I think at the time I said I will be the computer. I will feel what I see in my audience members. I was one of the proponents of rock and roll. as a what would you call it, a philosophy. Your earliest songs can't explain any way anywhere. my generation, the kids are alright. All of those songs express I can go in.

Were they autobiographical lyrics or were you writing about and for your audience? I think more for my audience than about my own. There was a bit of rage there, but I don't think very much. I think where where I started to ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r mewn gwirionedd yn ymwneud â'r hyn sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n

Yeah, I don't know I don't know how I do it, I don't know if I do it well, I don't know if I'm acting or whether it's real. It's just I don't know who it is. Well, you're talking in particular about your stage persona, somebody who, in the public imagination, gets on stage, turns the guitar up very loud and at the end of the show smashes the guitar. And from what I understand, Roy Ascott, who's one of your key creative influences.

had also introduced you to the artist Gustav Metzger, who had come to Britain in the thirties as a refugee from Nazi Germany, and he established himself as an artist, a proponent of what he described as auto destructive art. Um as a man so well known for smashing guitars on stage yourself, how influential was Metzger? Hugely. If I had a sense that what I was doing on the stage was driven by animal instincts, I don't think I would do it. I was very detached.

I never enjoyed doing it. I never felt because o of course as soon as I'd done it I would have to buy another one or repair the one that I'd smashed. It was a Very expensive stage act. It felt to me part of my own manifesto. When I was at art school in nineteen sixty three I moved from the ground course into graphic design. I wrote myself a manifesto.

which was that whatever I did with the band would last six months. It was a punk manifesto. It was My first public statement to Fabulous Music was which was a teen magazine was the Who or a band that are chopping away at their own legs. An auto destructing man. So Gustav Matzka was interesting'cause of course I read him wrong. I thought that what he meant was that artists should destroy the tools of bourgeois art.

which in my case was my guitar. Uh in fact he was a c a climate change advocate. He believed that art was responsible in part for creating pollution and creating too much travel and it was definitely was an anti bourgeois manifesto that he had. Did you regard the Who as an art project as much as a pop? difficult was it that the other three members

And Roger still today they didn't and they don't. If Roger and I were sitting together and w I was doing an interview about this cultural life, he would spend most of his time laughing. Did he see it as a pretentious view of the band that you were to do? that was that was a theme that I had to live with and still have to live with to this day about my own work. You know, I think if you're lucky enough to be a rock star you're supposed to put up and shut up.

So Roger Daltrey sees it as a rock and roll band. He puts up and shuts up. He also sees it as his band. To this day, you know, he started it and I feel in a sense that yes, of course that's true, I accept that. And I'm very grateful for him giving me this job because it's a great job to have.

ac mae'n iawn i'n iawn i'n iawn i'n iawn i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd And I was driving home in my mum's little yellow van for her antique shop and I heard it on the radio and I thought My manifesto is not gonna work.

You know, I'm not gonna get past this. I want this ban to stop. I badly, badly don't want it to last for the rest of my life. This is not what I want to do. I don't want to be Sixty years later. Yeah, and hearing that record on the radio. you know the creative in me just thought wow but I'm listening to this.

There's a story which signifies this so well. Can't explain was on the radio. We had a regular gig uh a mod club called the Gold Hawk in Shepherd's Bush. A guy called Irish Jack, Jack Lyons, has been a constant fan of the Who, is still alive, still still proselytizing to this day.

summoned me and said, Can a group of us come back and talk to you after the show? And I said, So what's up? And they said, We just want you to tell you that we really love this song. And I said, Well that's great, thank you very much. Can't explain. Yeah, can't explain. We like it because it is w how we feel and I said, Well how do you feel? And he said, We feel we can't explain.

And about a week before I'd had a conversation with the head of the Commercial art course saying The most important thing for a commercial artist is having a client and having a brief. And I thought, there's my client. That's my brief. You were writing to a brief from then on the other. Thank you. You were right, giving voice in effect to people who couldn't explain their lives. I mean that sounds patronizing, doesn't it? But that's what I suppose cr writers do.

Your next choice for this cultural life, Pete, is a collection of short stories called Labyrinths by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. When did you first read this collection of the first? I read it on tour in nineteen sixty seven, our first tour of America with when we were supporting an artist called Herman's Hermit. who he was a number one star.

Peter N. I carried this book with me and I read it slowly but surely all the way through the tour and it was towards the end of that tour that I started to think about writing something. That was rather more esoteric, I suppose, is the word than the kind of songs that I'd been thinking about before. It was on that tour, for example, that I first wrote the song It's a Girl, Mrs. Walker, it's a girl about Which I suppose was about reincarnation.

And although Borgers didn't refer to reincarnation, all of his stories were refutations of time. He didn't write it right like a quantum physicist, he wrote like a writer. But he wrote a lot about time being something which is abstract. So a lot of the stories are nonlinear. That's right, yeah. But he actually talks about time as well. He describes time. He tells stories about time. And I had a quick look back at it before I came today just to remind myself I was surprised.

how bloody difficult a lot of it was. But I really loved it and I really was inspired by it. And I carried it I've still got the book. And so those ideas then started to directly influence your songwriting. I started to feel that he was a storyteller with a unique mandate. I needed, in a sense, something outside the music world. I needed something that was

that was difficult and I think his writing is difficult. I think if I recommend this book to people to read and they buy it, they're gonna hate me because it's bloody difficult to read. So nineteen sixty seven you read this book whilst travelling across America. And this is a time when your songwriting is changing with the Absolutely the Who Sell Out album. اشتركوا في القناة

Definitely working on opera. Without question. I'd r I'd r in Around that period I'd written the mini opera, which was on the the second Hual. The one called a quick Yeah, a quick one. Which is I realised later was about my days with my grandma. It's about childhood. So from the late sixties you became a songwriter really associated with storytelling, with those extended narratives in a song cycle. Particularly with Tommy.

Which is the story of the deaf, dumb and blind kid who becomes the pinball wizard, the the messiah for a whole generation of people in the story. Yeah. Yeah. Charlie was already starting to What had happened to me also on that tour was that I'd heard about this Indian teacher called Mehababa. I think you already figured it out.

Y yeah, guru figure. So when I started to work on Tommy I was in a sense Trying to write in the Sufi tradition, which is that the story has an unfolding spiritual message, which is that wherever we go, where whatever we do, we are going back in a sense. We're not going forward. And again that time is something Thanks. With Tommy I was grappling with elements that I'd been inspired by with Bourgers, which is trying to write into the story.

Which meant that the background the issue of Tommy's great career, if you like, was an immovable, in a way, a kind of an atmosphere rather than an event.

And I think I came close to achieving it. I think I went a bit sideways a couple of places. I think I g I went sideways when it became about pinball because originally it was about a rock star. It was just about a rock star. And And of course one of the most powerful Sorry to interrupt but also a uh yes, communal gathering but also the fact that you can't trust

Well I was gonna say the reason I mentioned communal gathering is of course one of the most powerful renditions of Tommy of those was performed by the Who in 1969 at the Woodstock Festival and the whole set climax You know the sun is rising.

What are your memories of what is regarded as one of the most sort of powerful moments in rock and roll? We'd been delayed. We were supposed to go on I think at nine o'clock at night and we'd delayed and delayed and delayed but uh we went on Or four in the morning, and did our two hour set or hour and a half set. And I noticed as we were starting, Tommy, that the sun was beginning to rise, and so we started to play listening to you.

Given that you'd written about those the power of the communal gathering. And you were seeing half a million people there in front of you. I mean is that a fond memory you have of that festival? I don't have good memories of of Woodstock I'm afraid, but that's for a whole load of reasons. I think the The main thing was is it ended up being very, very badly organised but i obviously the film of it was a great success and it actually helped bring Tommy back, it helped bring the Who back and it

helped make the careers of a lot of fabulous bands who wouldn't otherwise have been noticed. So it was a great event.

In nineteen seventy three you released the album. Another one. This one sort of going back a decade earlier to your original subject, the the mods, and this was about a young guy suffering an identity crisis and mental illness as well. What was the initial inspiration for Quadrafinia?

It's pretty basic stuff, you know the band had turned into a prog rock outfit. Lifehouse had turned into Who's Next with Barbara O'Reilly and Won't Get Fought Again and Behind Blue Eyes, these big big songs which had actually effected our transition from a arena band to a stadium band. We were playing stadiums a lot of the time. You were writing anthems. Yeah.

And we lost ourselves. I looked at the band and I thought, you know, who are they? Well, who am I? What are we doing here? You know, what we're just going out and I I felt I had to reconnect the members of the band with their roots and so it was a neighbourhood stunt really and the neighbourhood that I thought of was was Shepherd's Bush, Hammersmith, Acton, where we grew up. Your stomping ground. Yeah.

morphed the four members of the band into one kid who looks at himself in them and my counsel was that we look at ourselves in him. That was a tricky one. I don't think the other guys in the band identified themselves in the I don't know that the band cared about the manifesto that was buried in the middle of it all. They just let me get on with it. It was the first album that the Who had allowed me to produce. technologically and musically, I touched everything, I did everything.

It it led to the only incident in which Roger and I have actually had a physical fight, which was that I'd been working all night on stage tapes and was late for a rehearsal and we had an argument and I behaved badly and he knocked me out. But when I finished it I thought, Wow, you know, they've let me do this. They trusted me. It was your vision in your album in a way. It got great critical reviews I think when it was released. It was then adapted as a film in nineteen seventy nine. And now

You're involved in a new iteration of quadruphenia as a mod ballet. Why ballet? You know what's interesting in the first workshop where we had a room we're playing the orchestral backing tracks with the dancers dancing group of boys. was that suddenly I realized that the universality of dance the timelessness of it, of of the poetry of dance, is such that you can apply it to almost anything. And in this particular case it became about Jimmy being vulnerable Jimmy being the protagonist.

Yeah, just being vulnerable. That's all. It just expressed the universality of what I'm saying. fifteen boys seem to go through. There's been quite a bit of stuff about that in the current uh wave of entertainment. So it has new relevance in a way. It goes back and it's come full, sir. one of the most exciting explorations of m of my music that I've ever seen.

That this is a piece which is reaching back to the your early days in the mod movement at a time when the Who were managed by Kit Lambert, who was the son of Constant Lambert, the composer, and a founder director of the Royal Ballet. He was indeed and he d Kit had a box and I used to go and sit in it in at Covent. I'm watching Yeah, watching ballet. And listening to opera as well. The interesting thing is really when you actually create that art.

is that everything in in an individual's career has that cycle of of you know, from when you evolve from the egg of of adolescence into wherever you end up and I'm eighty next birthday. For me, if I can just close on this with respect to chordophenia. I decided about two years ago that as I approached the age of eighty I was going to swerve. I'm going to avoid this arcing. I'm going to avoid this cycling and try to avoid

the fact that because one has done something good in the past that you have to keep revisiting. I'm not saying I'm disowning my past, but I'm actually moving into other areas. Um, I'm moving into creating art, into producing theatre, into producing ballet, into writing very serious classical opera. I'm grasping all of the attributes that I know that I have and in a sense

I think it was uh in when I did the Daily Mail interview recently, I must have said at some point I'm above the who. I think that was the headline. I don't think that's what I meant. I think what I meant was it's time for me to look at maybe the next five to ten years of my life and try to do something different.

Fifty eight years after you first toured America, you've just announced that you're heading out to America on a farewell tour. So this is the end of the Who then. Well whether it's the end of the who, it's certainly the end of touring in America. And w will the will it be followed by a farewell UK and Europe to do that? You know, that's another question. I d I I asked Roger that and he said, We'll have to wait and see. Well so it's down to Roger then.

Oh yeah. The Who is a clumsy machine for us because we we're missing two members. You know, we're missing John Emptwistle and we're missing Keith Moon and we've been missing them for a long time. We're very, very dependent on each other. But we're getting old. Yes. And so we have different needs. So if Roger Daltrey says to you we carry on touring as the Who until one of us keels over on stage, you're quite happy to go along with it.

He has said that often in the past, but I think the needle has shifted. It was always me that said, you know, I reserve the right to stop and I have stopped, of course, twice in the Who's career.

once for eleven years I didn't work with the Who from when I went to work for Fabre and Fabre as a book editor. So I think, you know, I've always felt that I was holding the cards. I think Roger holds the cards now because I think If he wanted to perform my music, if I can put it as bluntly as this, I would be honoured.

So I don't think it's about there being an argument between us, it's just about the fact that we're accepting our current situation. And we've never agreed really on very much. But it's this not to suggest that there's a war on because there isn't. I hope I die before I get old is one of your most famous lines. Do you feel old now? No, no. I've just got a new knee. So so Agent's a state of mind in that song then. No, it's nothing about a state of mind really, it's a threat, isn't it?

It's one of the songs that made you a global star. It made the Who one of the biggest, certainly the loudest band in the world for many years. Looking back, what is the legacy of the Who as far as you're concerned? What are you most proud of? I think it's the fact that in the chaos of the sixties all of these fantastic creative people that we were able to help create a form of music which seems to have lasted.

And all of those hundreds of songs that you have written over the last few decades, is there one that you would like to be remembered by? Love rain on me. Which is from Quadrofin. Why that one? I don't know. I just like it.

And what drives you on creatively, Pete? just the need to be creative. So for me, the idea that I could today, for example, just retire, go sailing or something and s just stop writing music at all, it feels to me like a a waste of time. You know, I might have five years left, I might have ten years left, I might have fifteen years left if I'm really lucky.

of being able to work with music and work with art and w with this swerve that I'm taking, what I'm actually doing is I'm telling myself that nothing is off the map. Nothing. I I may actually do some dancing when I get my other knee done. Pete Townsend, thank you very much indeed for sharing your cultural life. Thanks, John. Thank you for having me.

And if you enjoyed my conversation with Pete Townsend, just a reminder that Paul McCartney, Sting, Niall Rogers, and Nick Cave are just some of the many songwriters who we've had on the show. series. You can hear them and every other guest if you just search for this cultural life. Wherever you get your podcasts internationally. And please do subscribe to the series so you don't miss an episode. From me, John Wilson, and series producer Edwina Pittman. From BBC Radio 4 and the History Podcast.

Well not so funny people in all I'm Joe. And this is half-life. She finished her job, she dropped dead. My father finished his job. He was dead within a week. I mean, that's all quite a weird kind of story, you know. And so we call it like the curse of this memoir. An eight-part podcast about how the past lives on inside us. I wonder what how you feel after all of this. Even when we try to ignore it. Will detonate sooner or later. Listen to Half-Life on BBC Sounds.