The Who’s Pete Townshend: ‘Girls are fickle, they move from one band to another’

The Who guitarist on the dark side of rock ‘n’ roll, his musical telling of Siddhartha, and Roger Daltrey’s views on Brexit

Whether because of my accent, or the fact that we’re sitting in a boat, Pete Townshend has begun our interview reminiscing about The Who’s argy-bargy old days playing to dockworkers in Scottish ports.
“In Greenock, the old shipbuilding district, they’d start concerts at 7.30 and you would play to an empty hall. Then when the pubs closed at 11, they would all cross the road and come in, raging drunk and throwing bottles. And Roger [Daltrey] was a bit of a scrapper. He jumped down, took on seven guys and knocked them all out, because they were so f—ing drunk. And that gave order to the gig.”
The fighting talk of rock’n’roll youth is relevant to our meeting today. We’re below decks on the Grand Cru, Townshend’s studio housed in a converted 24-metre Dutch barge moored in St Katharine Docks marina by London’s Tower Bridge. Perched next to the songwriter, 79, is his wife of eight years, the composer and musician Rachel Fuller, 51.
The couple, who live in Ashdown House – a National Trust-owned, 17th-century country mansion with 100 Oxfordshire acres – have collaborated on a new musical telling of Siddhartha, Herman Hesse’s 1922 novel of self-discovery. Titled The Seeker, it comes as a beautifully illustrated graphic novel; an accompanying score, written by Fuller, featuring narration from the late Christopher Plummer; songs, some Fuller originals, some of them Townshend deep cuts, sung by artists including Sir Elton John and Emeli Sandé; and a one-off, all-star concert in London this week.
Fuller’s original idea was for “just” a double album, to be released in 2020. “Then the pandemic hit and absolutely f—ed everything sideways,” she says. “Then [former Universal Records CEO] David Joseph and I, coming out of the pandemic, were like: ‘How could we get the readers who resonated with the novel to find the music?’”
They came up with the idea of a physical book. “Then, hopefully, we can reach readers of the novel and people who found Siddhartha, whether it be 50, 60, years ago.”
Townshend says he read Siddhartha during “the hippie days of LSD and waking up in the morning thinking there must be more to life than rock’n’roll. Which is tantamount to idiocy anyway.” When he got to Siddhartha, he realised “that what [Hesse] was saying was that the spiritual path doesn’t exist. And there is no such thing as a teacher who can show us the way. Which kind of went against where I was at the time – it was 1967, I was 22. The Who were already really big.”
At one point in Fuller’s epic, 47-part score, Plummer intones: “Siddhartha settled into city life… The years passed by, and with them came great wealth. A house and servants soon set him apart. Slowly, the world crept into his soul, and sickness and anxiety took hold… And Siddhartha could not see that he had changed.”
That, I suggest to Townshend and Fuller, is also the rock star condition. We’re talking several weeks after the death of One Direction member Liam Payne, who fell from a balcony while under the influence of drugs and alcohol.
“I think that’s [the effect of] wealth as well, and privilege and notoriety,” says Fuller. “You see it with footballers.”
“No, it’s not that world,” counters Townshend. “The Who were never wealthy. I’m wealthy now, but [back then] our managers stole all our money. The hedonism was driven by the fact that we were very young, we became famous very quickly, and that our audience was mainly boys.
“The thing about One Direction,” he continues, “was that they were a huge hit suddenly, and their audience was 90 per cent girls. And girls are very flippant. They’re fickle. They move from one band to another quite quickly, and one artist to another.” Townshend’s statement feels neither fair nor true – One Direction fans have remained staunch even in the decade since the boy band’s split.
But Townshend maintains he saw this fickleness first-hand, when he toured with his saxophonist dad in RAF dance band The Squadronaires. “I watched artists like Frankie Vaughan get dropped. He was the nation’s heartthrob. Then [1959 one-hit wonder] Craig Douglas came along at the same concert. I noticed the audience were doing this…” – Townshend affects a bored yawn – “when Frankie Vaughan was on, and then screaming at Craig Douglas. He was a different person to throw their knickers at.”
It’s the reason why Townshend told his Who bandmates at the start: “We’re not going to be like The Beatles or The Rolling Stones or The Kinks. We’re not going to work for screaming girls. We’re going to work for the boys.”
I wonder whether, when he hears of stars dying far too young after a life of drugs and alcohol, he is reminded of The Who drummer Keith Moon, who died in 1978, aged 32.
Townshend agrees that Moon embodies the worst of rock’n’roll hedonism. “And the best of it. Because none of it meant that much to him. The spiritual side of it is interesting, because despite all of his [bad behaviour], there was always humour at the bottom of it. A desire to make people laugh.”
Some younger artists, though, have learnt the lessons of their forebears. From Lewis Capaldi to The Last Dinner Party, they feel empowered to cancel tours in the service of better mental health. That wasn’t an option for The Who’s generation. Does Townshend think the new generation should toughen up?
He sighs. “No, I don’t think they do.” In fact, he can relate. “At the height of my career, I was feeling that I couldn’t deliver what The Who needed. I tried it with [the rock operas] Tommy, Quadrophenia, Lifehouse… There was this demand… to come up with something that would feed this beast.”
“And people around me were saying: ‘So much of what you write is so beautiful, but it’s just not suitable to The Who.’ So I was nagged into doing a solo deal. It was at the same time that The Who got a massive deal with Warner Bros. And I got a deal with Atlantic – seven albums in five years. I was supposed to write the music, demo it, record it and support it on the road.”
It was an unsustainable amount of work. His solution? As he said two years ago: “In 1982, I decided that I’d muddled everything up and had taken on too much, and I announced that I was leaving The Who.” Now, he tells me: “I remember my [then] wife Karen saying to me: ‘I’m going to write a book one day, called The Show Must Not Go On. I think she started it. When I worked at Faber,” he says of his time, in the mid-’80s, as acquisitions editor at the publisher, where he worked with authors as diverse as Steven Berkoff, Brian Eno and Prince Charles, “I tried to commission it from her. But it’s an interesting concept, this idea that the show must go on – it comes from the circus, really.”
Now The Who have lost half their line-up but, as Townshend points out, at least it’s the singer and songwriter who are still standing. Townshend insists that Daltrey is not a colleague but “very much a friend”, despite their divergent political views. The frontman was loudly pro-Brexit. “[That was] very problematic for me. I think he was wrong. But we are a nation divided down the middle. He’s not a fascist Right-winger, he’s a very decent man. But it felt to me that with respect to the arts, and particularly to music, the free flow of life from all of the history of Europe…was going to be denied to our young people.”
So he and his partner-in-rock agree to disagree. “Because we’re both old men, and we’ve been through tumultuous times. We’re at a point now when we both wake up in the morning, and one of the first things that we’ll think is that we’re lucky to be alive – and to still have an audience. A few years ago, we went into Wembley Stadium. And we nearly sold it out!” he laughs.
Townshend tells me he recently had lunch with Daltrey, “to talk about the possibility of doing anything else. We’re both a little bit ambivalent, but I’m pretty sure that we will. We have accepted an offer from Live Nation to do something in America.”
“I’m going to play tambourine!” chips in Fuller with a smile.
“Roger says he wants it to be ‘raw’,” says Townshend with a slight frown. “The problem with that is: if I go back to the style that I had back in the ‘60s, he won’t be able to hear a f—ing thing.”
The Seeker album and book are released on Nov 7. The Seeker in concert is tonight at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London. Tickets: theseekermusic.com