Townshend, a longtime ballet fan, told NME that he came up with the idea for the production after hearing early demo recordings of an orchestral score for Quadrophenia that his wife, Rachel Fuller, conceived in 2015.
“What inspires me is trying to do something that has a slightly more ambitious thread,” he told NME. “It’s not me being pompous. It’s just something that seemed to fit more into the dis-conjunction that I felt when I left art school and ended up in the band. It felt like there was unfinished business for me, which was the art.”
A long-term ballet fan, Townshend envisioned the project after hearing early demos of his wife Rachel Fuller’s orchestral score of the album, which was first performed at the Royal Albert Hall in 2015 and recorded by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. “I heard her score and I remember saying to her, ‘I can just see dancers dancing’,” he said. “It had tones of Prokofiev about it.”
“There was a poetic sensibility to what I was seeing,” Townshend said of early workshops. “I was just shocked and surprised. I thought, ‘Hey, there’s new shadow here, there are new shades, there’s new optimism’. I was never happy with the film. I felt the film was lazy. It was not based on my story and it didn’t include much of my music. So I thought here was an opportunity to do something that honours the music, but also possibly takes it into a new era, a new place.”
“I’ve been a fan of ballet. Kit Lambert, was The Who’s manager, who was the son of Constant Lambert, who was one of the founders of the Royal Opera House. He had a box in the Royal Opera House and I used to pop in there quite a lot or go with him. I used to go with Lord Goodman as well, the Labour peer – we’d hang out together and watch ballet. I won’t say I was a disciple of it, but I loved good ballet certainly. It was part of my education process. Kit Lambert was really keen that I tackled the issue of snobbery and inverse snobbery in rock, that I just battled it head on.
“I’m working on an opera at the moment, I’ve been working on one for a long time, The Age Of Anxiety, and I’m very fearless now about calling it an opera. It’s a fucking opera. Sorry. My friend Rufus Wainwright writes operas, I can write operas.”
“The young boy falling in love with a girl across the way and having a hero who lets him down? I’m sure there’s a Greek myth that inspired it for Shakespeare. Romeo And Juliet has a bit about it and even [three-act opera] Peter Grimes by Benjamin Britten has a bit of it. Those epic stories of young men struggling to find their way in an uncomfortable world.
“My obsession of the day is young women having a struggle to find their way in the modern world because of social media, its effects on them. I think young men tend to spend more time with pornography and video games than working out whether or not they look OK. I’m not looking for parallels for how ‘Quadrophenia’ should work in the modern day, I’m working to try to use it as a mythic tale which triggers something in the audience.”
