Who I Am: A Memoir

by Peter Townshend

  I played an acoustic set as a solo artist for Amnesty International’s benefit show, The Secret Policeman’s Ball. I didn’t drink any more than during any other performance, but sitting on a chair ‘unplugged’ wasn’t the way I usually worked, and without the adrenaline rush of jumping around I fell into a light stupor during the show, rather than afterwards. There was always someone around drunker than I was, or doing more drugs, so I always managed to feel I wasn’t so bad. Actor, satirist and comedian Peter Cook was trying not to drink that night, hoping to save his liver, and suggested I give his method a try – he smoked huge joints instead. Graham Chapman from Monty Python was there with his young boyfriend; they were both smiling, remembering Keith fondly.

  The next month I helped organise a Rock Against Racism benefit concert in which I performed. I was becoming an artist of conscience, which was important to me. Meanwhile Harvey Goldsmith arranged for The Who to perform at Wembley Stadium with AC/DC in support, but it wasn’t as intense as it should have been. The Greater London Council limited the sound level, and forbade us to use our lasers. We worked hard, playing to a huge audience of nearly 80,000 people, and fans sent letters praising the show, but it didn’t feel right.

  I was back into songwriting, often sitting alone in the middle of the night in the open-plan living room of our home with a bottle of Rémy, cassette machine and guitar. I was confused about being back in The Who again. I had made a promise to Karen that I’d settle down, and I was clearly not going to be able to keep it.

  One evening, by some miracle, we were in bed at the same time. Before she dozed off I asked her a question. ‘Do you still love me?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Not even a little?’

  ‘Maybe a little,’ she replied. ‘Now please go to sleep, or go down and work. I’ve got to be up early.’

  Meher Baba’s secretary Adi Irani made a visit to London around this time. I tried to get his advice.

  ‘My wife doesn’t love me any more,’ I said. ‘What should I do?’

  ‘She doesn’t love you at all?’ He wobbled his head as he spoke.

  ‘She said she loved me a little.’

  ‘Ah!’ Adi clapped his hands and smiled. ‘A little! That’s good. Love is universal. Limitless. So even a little is enough.’

  I wrote a song called ‘A Little Is Enough’, and recorded it using the same system as I’d used on ‘Let My Love Open the Door’. Although I’d always thought my love songs were terrible, I think this is one of the best songs I’ve ever written.

  The Who crashed back for a short tour of the States. I loved playing with the new Who. I was able to stretch out a lot more, play more single-note solos and my playing quickly got better. I was drinking on stage, but as long as I kept moving I’d stay in good shape.

  In New York I found myself in the peculiar position of being the only member of The Who travelling alone. Kenney had his wife with him, as did Roger, and John was holding court every night with the new group of acolytes he’d built up on his recent solo tours. At my parties at the Navarro there were lots of beautiful girls. I was often rejected, but not always, and even if I was rejected I didn’t give a fuck. It was wonderful, I can’t pretend otherwise.

  Of course I wasn’t separated from Karen, and we had never even broached the subject, but I was convinced that my marriage was over. Or maybe I was just trying to convince myself that her not loving me made it all right to behave like every other decadent rock star.

  I began seeing myself as a party man, an honorary senior Punk-playboy-cum-elder-statesman. Chris Chappel, who worked for Bill Curbishley, escorted me to see U2, The Clash and Bruce Springsteen. Chris was a young, hip dude, a massive Clash fan, and his enthusiasm was infectious. I thought The Clash were spectacular. They were charming to me when we met, and Joe Strummer clearly had a heart of gold. His work for political causes, especially anti-racist ones, was inspiring.

  Chris began to act as advisor to me in all things young and cool. I took to wearing baggy suits and brothel-creepers, piling my thinning hair on top of my head like a rocker. Always a pretty good dancer, I stopped idiot-dancing and danced like Mick Jones and Paul Simenon from The Clash. At 34 I was still just about young enough to pull it off.

  After a riotous show at New Bingley Hall, Stafford, where the crowd went crazy and I danced like a fool, I found Rabbit at the hotel bar talking to Sue Vickers, the wife of Mike Vickers, an old friend from the Manfred Mann band. Rabbit lived in West Hampstead, close to the Vickers family, and they sometimes met up and socialised together.

  ‘You were amazing!’ She kissed me on both cheeks.

  ‘Amazing,’ another voice chimed in.

  On a stool next to Sue sat a young girl. She had a pretty, slightly upturned nose. Her blonde hair was long, almost to her waist, and it swung behind her as she spoke. ‘I’m her daughter,’ she explained. I took a few steps back, blinded; there were rays emanating from around her head.

  ‘Have you got kids?’ The girl from outer space was addressing me.

  ‘Yes,’ I mumbled. ‘Two daughters.’

  ‘Do they like horses?’

  Bloody hell, I thought. She’s a mind-reader.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘They ride, they really want horses, and they nag me a lot about it, but I’ve never felt brave enough to let them have their own.’

  ‘You must buy them their own horses.’

  The girl smoked, blowing swirls of blue cloud around her face. She spoke for fifteen minutes about how fantastic horses were, how they had made her life worth living when she was a teenager.

  I suddenly felt I might fall over. ‘Pete,’ I breathed to my friend Peter Hogan, a Meher Baba follower who managed the Magic Bus bookshop. ‘Get me back up to my room.’

  He grabbed me, and I said my goodbyes.

  ‘I’m on my way to bed too,’ said the girl. ‘I’ll give you a hand.’

  Up the stairs we went, one arm around my good buddy, the other around the fabulous girl. At the top I made a lot of joyful noise and a mother trying to get her baby to sleep emerged from her room to shush me. I apologised profusely, telling her I knew what it was like.

  The next morning I woke up to see a passport on my bedside table. It belonged to someone called Jacqueline Vickers. I looked at the photo but her face seemed like a stranger’s. I called Sue Vickers’s room and of course I found the girl. I started to apologise, I didn’t know what for, but she interrupted me.

  ‘I’ll come and get my passport.’

  When she got to my room she explained.

  ‘You wanted to fuck me,’ she said. Bloody hell, who wouldn’t!

  ‘Why the passport?’ I asked. ‘Surely I didn’t ask to see it?’

  ‘No, you berk.’ She picked it up and flicked through the pages. ‘It’s my ID for being in a bar.’

  ‘So I wanted to—’

  ‘I told you you’d have to rape me, and you fell asleep.’

  I started recording my solo album on 19 November 1979 with Chris Thomas, whom I’d met at Paul McCartney’s Hammersmith Odeon concert, for which he’d produced the recording. Rabbit was present for every track, and his work was phenomenal. I used several drummers. Kenney Jones was an obvious pick. James Asher had worked with me at Oceanic. Simon Phillips came in on a few tracks too; I’d loved his work with Gordon Giltrap.

  Chris had chosen Wessex recording studios where he’d recorded Never Mind the Bollocks, on the other side of London. 21 November was Rabbit’s birthday, and after the session we went to Mike and Sue Vickers’s family home for a drink. Their daughter Jackie was there with her boyfriend, musician Reg Meuross, and her younger sister Cathy. Mike and Sue were incredibly kind to me. Mike was my contemporary, and we spoke about the difficulty of maintaining a marriage in our business. He revealed that he and Sue had been having problems.

  I felt more at home in their house than for years. Mike, a big-band aficionado, could discuss the kind of music Dad played. Rabbit seemed more at ease than I’
d seen him recently. Suddenly I had an idea. ‘Why don’t you all come to New York? Our first show is on 30 November, but we can go earlier and hang out. I’ll get tickets on Concorde!’

  Mike and Sue, I suggested, could get some quality time together. We could see shows, go to art galleries and go shopping on my credit cards.

  When this fabulous idea didn’t go down as well as I’d expected, I got Jackie alone in the kitchen. ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘Reg won’t come,’ she explained. ‘He can’t.’

  ‘Oh.’ I was disappointed. ‘What about your sister?’

  ‘She’s at school, you dope.’

  ‘What about you?’

  She said yes.

  The solo album recording moved to AIR studios in Oxford Street, and the tracks started to sound better and better as more was added. Chris Thomas helped find a new voice on tricky songs like ‘Jools and Jim’, ‘Empty Glass’ and ‘Little Is Enough’ and to build really solid backing vocals in thick layers on pure pop songs like ‘Let My Love Open the Door’. Wherever my demos had good elements, Chris used them, like Glyn Johns before him.

  Chris had just completed the first Pretenders album with Chrissie Hynde. Chrissie had an extraordinary and unusual voice with a huge dynamic range, and Chris worked with her intensely, doing quite a lot of ‘comping’ – recording a number of vocal tracks, and then choosing, isolating and combining the best parts. By the time he worked with me he knew precisely how to get a virgin singer like me to find a real voice. There is no false modesty here: this was my first really serious solo album, and I had to learn to sing hard rock, high notes, low notes, and express passion and sexiness.

  One night all the band members had dinner at the Hilton with Kenney and his wife, Jan. The mood in the room was extremely high. Winning the point over Roger, I had insisted Kenney be made an equal partner in The Who. He would get a 25 per cent share in the new Who record deal Bill Curbishley had brokered with Mo Ostin of Warner Brothers. The deal was for $10 million for four new albums and a ‘Best of’, hopefully to be delivered within seven years or less.

  Doug Morris, head of ATCO records, came to see me in London with a deal for three solo albums over five years, also for very good money.

  ‘Can you deal with both these contracts, Pete?’ Doug was asking the obvious question. The fabulous money aside, I was committed to seven albums over seven years. To do that I needed to write more songs per year than I’d ever managed before.

  ‘Yeah,’ I told Doug carelessly. ‘I can deal with it. I’m on a roll.’

  My best friend Barney and his girlfriend Jan got thrown out of their flat in Richmond, so I allowed them to move into the top floor of my old office near my Twickenham home. Barney soon wanted to buy the entire house. I made Barney an offer I knew he couldn’t refuse: if he accompanied me on the next batch of Who tours of the States I would let him have the house for nothing.

  ‘What would I be doing?’ he asked.

  ‘I want you to be my friend, and tell me when I’m out of order.’

  ‘I am your friend, and you’re always out of order. I tell you, and you never listen.’

  ‘I will listen,’ I promised.

  ‘Fucking liar.’

  ‘I’m not a liar.’

  ‘See,’ said Barney triumphantly. ‘You never listen.’

  I was preparing to travel to New York with Barney, Mike and Sue, and Jackie. I also gave Rabbit a ticket to thank him for his amazing work on Empty Glass. Karen and the kids had simply faded into the background of my consciousness. It was the only way I could handle what I was doing. When I arrived at Heathrow Airport, slightly hung over, only Sue, Jackie and Rabbit were there waiting for me.

  Sue handed me an envelope: ‘Dear Pete, Thanks for the offer of a trip to New York, but I don’t think things are going to work out for Sue and me. Please look after my family. Love, Mike.’

  As Concorde took off, Jackie gripped my hand. When we were in the air she asked me to tell her some jokes to keep her distracted. I was in the middle of the one about the hippopotami in the swamp (my father’s favourite) when she looked back to the rows of seats behind us. She suddenly gripped my arm.

  ‘Oh my God!’ She put her hand to her mouth, as though about to retch. ‘Mum and Rabbit are snogging!’

  I couldn’t tell this story if not for the fact that from that day forward Sue and Rabbit remained together as a couple until Sue’s death in 2007. Mike arranged to leave home when Sue returned. Unfortunately, Jackie’s sister Cathy always associated my appearance with the collapse of her parents’ marriage.

  From the second night in New York, Sue and Rabbit started sharing a room. Jackie, all alone, came to stay with me. We felt thrown together; maybe we had cooked it all up. It didn’t matter. I felt that God himself had sent me a very real angel to help me, to make me feel whole.

  Jackie, who raised my pulse rate every time I set eyes on her, soon started telling me she was falling in love with me. I started telling her I loved her too. I suggested that she and her mother stay with the tour, and they both jumped at the chance. It was paradise; I had never been so happy. I woke up to this dazzling young woman who launched me into the light of each new day with a stupid grin on my face.

  The third date of the tour was at the Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati on 3 December 1979, where we played our usual show. On stage with the band I was often quite delirious with enjoyment, which was completely new for me. I had never enjoyed performing as much as I did on this tour.

  I was drinking a lot, that’s true, even on stage, and smoking, that too is true, and of course I danced. Maybe I did dance like a fool. Who gives a shit? I was inspired. I often made disastrous musical mistakes on stage, but I was stretching the boundaries and taking huge chances with extemporisations. Kenney struggled to keep up sometimes, but always gave me a solid rock bed. Rabbit was always right with me, often taking the lead. John did what he always did. Unflappable, he was always totally in tune with whatever I did. I often played astonishingly outlandish passages, and sometimes when I ad-libbed on stage I cooked up lyrics that I wrote down later and used for new songs.

  All this freewheeling was understandably tough for Roger, making it tricky for him to fit in with our musical digressions. I kept taking over the lead microphone and kicking off new songs. My adrenaline on stage was running so high most nights I couldn’t control myself.

  After the show at the Riverfront we assembled in the band’s dressing room. Bill had terrible news.

  ‘Something terrible happened out there tonight,’ he said. ‘Eleven kids have died. I don’t know the exact details.’

  ‘When did this happen?’ someone asked. ‘During the show? In the crowd?’

  ‘No.’ Bill tried to calm us. ‘It was at the entrances, on the plaza outside.’

  ‘Before the show?’ I got to my feet.

  ‘We decided not to tell you.’ he said. ‘The crowd couldn’t be allowed to leave the building while security was still dealing with the trouble outside.’

  Back at the hotel we all gathered in a meeting room and watched the television. Some of us were weeping at the images of bodies laid out, reminiscent of a mass shooting. We didn’t say much. We had a few drinks, but I was already numb.

  It turned out that eleven fans were killed (and many more injured) in the rush for seating. The concert was sold out, and when the crowds waiting outside in the cold heard us performing the soundcheck they assumed the concert had started and stampeded. Those at the front were trampled to death by those pushing from behind, who hadn’t realised that the doors were still closed.

  I was reminded of the incident in New York when Bill Graham had decided not to tell us there was a fire. I re-ran the show in my head over and over again. Had I said anything stupid on stage? It was possible. How did the lines ‘It’s only teenage wasteland’ and ‘They’re all wasted’ at the end of ‘Baba O’Riley’ fit with the rows of bodies outside? Why couldn’t we have been trusted to know what had happen
ed?

  The answer was obvious. And I’m sure that if I had been in Bill’s shoes I wouldn’t have told the band either. Poor Bill, having to watch that show with fingers crossed that we didn’t make things worse. Our shows were becoming incendiary and unpredictable, and he often described my stage persona during this period as ‘malevolent’.

  I mishandled the press, trying to be ironic in an interview with Greil Marcus of Rolling Stone: I railed at the rock industry for being so stupid it couldn’t keep its audiences alive. We made another mistake when we decided to continue our tour. We should have stayed in Cincinnati for at least a few days to show our respect, which we genuinely felt, for those who had died and their families. Instead, we automatically followed the dictum that the show must go on, and flew to Buffalo to perform the very next day.

  The first chance I had I chartered a jet to Myrtle Beach, hoping to find some solace from Meher Baba’s ever-present spirit. Barney and my friend Geoff Gilbert went to the centre, but I couldn’t bring myself to go. Instead Jackie and I walked along the beach until dawn. We slept all day. Meher Baba was with us, much as I sometimes tried to keep him out.

  Mo Ostin, chief of Warner Brothers Records, and his wife Evelyn came to AIR studios in Oxford Street to hear the first playback of my solo album on 7 January 1980. They loved it; Mo would carry the word back to Doug Morris and Ahmet Ertegun that they had a hit album. Chris Chappel, my young minder and fashion advisor, and I hung out a bit. I was finding it very hard to be home. A couple of nights when I was working in Oxford Street I stayed at a hotel nearby, where Jackie joined me. She was waiting for me to make a decision about our relationship.

  Chris knew of a vacant flat above a shoe shop in the King’s Road that I thought might be useful as a bolthole, so I arranged to rent it. I set myself up a record player and settled in. The master bedroom faced the main road and it was noisy, so I slept in one of two tiny bedrooms at the back of the flat.