He told Record Collector magazine: “I think it’s time for Roger and I to go to lunch and have a chat about what happens next."
"Because Sandringham shouldn’t feel like the end of anything but it feels like the end of an era.!
“You know, we lost Bob Pridden, our long time sound man, a couple of years ago and our fabulous road manager/ production manager Roy Lamb is retiring.!
“Roger and I are still banging on with new people around us.!
“It’s a question of, really, what is feasible, what would be lucrative, what would be fun?!
“So, I wrote to Roger and said, come on, let’s have a chat and see what’s there.”
Pete feels “very lucky” to still be performing after so many decades.
He added: “You know, I’ve never really enjoyed touring at all, but this last couple of bashes – the UK tour, the shows in Europe and the American tour – I admit I started to get a real feeling of fulfilment.
“I feel very lucky to be doing this at my age, to still be able to perform.”
As well as his career with The Who, the ‘My Generation’ rocker has a number of other ventures on the go.
He said: “I’ve got a lot going on. I’m writing at the moment, working on a new project in a new way."
Tn a new interview to the 'Independent' Pete Townshend talks to the about his seventies .
He’s at home in the English countryside, wearing a black beanie and some serious-looking headphones. His white goatee is neatly cropped, and he has the air less of a veteran rock star than of a particularly curmudgeonly academic. “I don’t know about Rishi Sunak,” he continues. “I don’t know about the Tory party, per se. They say, when you get older, you drift from being on the left to on the right. I suppose there was a gentle drift with me. I’m 78, and between 60 and 70 I think I was starting to drift slowly to the right, but... f***!” That expletive is followed by a reckless outburst of anger: “I would line them all up and shoot them.”
(Excerpt from the Kevin E G Perry interview on the Independent released 7 Oct.2023 - read the full article HERE)
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.”
More thrilling are the live recordings from the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco later that year, which capture The Who in full flight as they tour in support of Who’s Next. Wildman drummer Keith Moon had to have injections in his ankles midway through the show, something that has been attributed to his hard-partying diet of barbiturates with brandy.
Townshend explains that Moon was in fact dealing with the after-effects of an incident on the way to the Isle of Wight Festival. “He’d broken both his ankles,” says Townshend. “The helicopter crashed as we were coming in to land. It started to spin, and the pilot told us to jump out. We jumped out in order, and Keith was last to jump out as the helicopter was rising up. He did the whole gig with two broken ankles, and he was still getting morphine injections in his ankles before shows for about a year after that.”
Moon still sounds phenomenal. “Yeah, he was an extraordinary man,” he agrees. “When it came to drugs, he could swallow four horse tranquillisers. I think it was elephant tranquillisers that finally got him.”
In 2002, he published an essay on his website titled “A Different Bomb”, in which he described how he had stumbled across images of child abuse online and his attempts to raise the alarm. The following year he was arrested and subsequently spent five years on a sex offenders’ register after admitting he had used his credit card to access a website that claimed to host child sexual abuse images. He maintains he was only ever doing research with the best of intentions.
“You know, I made a mistake, but I think I did the right thing,” he says. “I was challenged by Keir Starmer, who was then in charge of public prosecutions, to either go to court to make my case clear or to accept a caution. I was terrified of going to court. I thought I would be used as a poster boy, so I refused. I took the caution. So legally, there’s an argument that I was guilty of what I was accused of, which was downloading child pornography, which I never did. In fact, I was campaigning and researching and trying to get to a place where I could be useful to point the finger at where it was coming from.”
