Electronic musician Vangelis was nominated for a Golden Globe and a BAFTA for his score, after the Who guitarist’s experience of making the Tommy movie in 1975 turned him against the idea of attaching himself to another film.
He said: “I worked on the music with Ken Russell for his adaptation of ‘Tommy’. And when I finished, after sort of six months of working with him, I took him aside and I said I would never ever ever work on a movie ever again, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, and I don’t even really like the film!
“But I love Ken Russell, he’s fantastic. Anyway, afterwards Terry Rawlings gave me a script to look at, and I said, ‘No, I’m not doing any more movies.’
“And he said, ‘You must read this, mate, you must read this, it’s fantastic it’s by a guy called Ridley Scott.’
“And I said, ‘I’m not doing any more films!’, and I read the script, and I thought ‘this is rubbish’, and I said to him ‘it’s rubbish, and I’m not doing any more films for you’, and it was… ‘Blade Runner.’ ”
Townshend also tells about his relationship with Roger Daltrey: “When you look back at where we started, I wouldn’t say we despised each other but we had very little in common. Now, we have very little in common but we really care about each other deeply.”
Founder and frontman Roger Daltrey tells Sky News: “We didn’t ever really split up. It was a necessary departure for a few years, because we had problems to solve, musical problems in the band. But we got over it, Pete [Townshend] and I, it runs deep together. It’s been said we split up – we didn’t.
“Of course the line-up has changed over the years, with the deaths of drummer Keith Moon in 1978 and bass guitarist John Entwistle in 2002.
Back in the early Sixties, “Some guys were predicting the coming of computers”, remembers Townshend. “They predicted that computers would radically change the way that artists operated, including musicians, and that they would also change language and communications.”
“So, I wrote several essays for Melody Maker talking about the necessity for musicians to listen to what it was that the audience was really hoping for, and what the connections really were between audiences and performers,” he explains. “In other words, the normal idea of performance was that the performers are like gurus. I twisted it on its head, and made the audience the gurus. A lot of that sifted down into the Life House thesis.”
