Who I Am: A Memoir

by Peter Townshend

  Frank Pike passed me various novels of Jean Genet to try to revive. They were extremely controversial, all recently republished by Grove Press in the States. Genet was still alive (he died in 1986), and my job was to try to meet him in Paris and see what he wanted to do with his backlist. I never managed to track him down, but did arrange for his entire list of plays, essays and novels to be republished.

  Once installed at Faber, I contacted Brian Eno about publishing his famously fastidious creative notebooks. I let Eric Burdon live in the cottage at Cleeve to write his autobiography I Used to Be an Animal – But I’m All Right Now. I wasn’t at all sure he was really all right – me either – but we both worked hard on the book.

  I began moulding myself into the editorial team at Faber. P.D. James, William Golding, Ted Hughes, Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, Valerie Eliot and many other Faber authors treated me with suspicion but conditional respect, willing to give me a chance. It was exhilarating. I went to Queen Square twice a week, and on most other days held related meetings at Oceanic where I had based my new offices.

  I met T.S. Eliot’s widow Valerie at Faber. She took me very seriously and made it plain that the vagaries of rock ’n’ roll would pale against those of the wild men of the early Faber days. Ezra Pound had been Eliot’s editor, after all. I didn’t doubt there had been more fireworks in Eliot’s life than sitting on the seafront in Margate where I myself had walked endlessly with my crazy grandmother.

  Valerie Eliot was earning money for Faber through Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats. In March she and Matthew asked me to accompany her to the opening night of Andrew’s new piece, Starlight Express. She told Matthew Evans she was nervous about going, but felt she really should. Like me I think she felt a duty through her role at Faber.

  I was appalled by the show. Neither of us quite knew how to take it. Cats had been a triumph, I thought, a masterful balance between family entertainment and literary brilliance. In Starlight the music and lyrics seemed deliberately corny. At the party afterwards I told a few people what I thought, not realising that one of them, Richard Stilgoe, had written most of the lyrics. He was so shocked that I knew immediately what a faux pas I had committed.

  Every opening is just that, a beginning, often awkward; revisions could change a show completely in subsequent weeks. Years later I saw the same show in revised form in Las Vegas and found it enchanting. I had forgotten I was an entertainer, forgotten what entertainment was for.

  Some of the most successful books I commissioned for Faber were rooted in my contacts from Eel Pie Books and the music business. Charles Shaar Murray was working on Crosstown Traffic, about Jimi Hendrix; Brian Eno brought in the artist Russell Mills for More Dark than Shark; Matthew Evans, after a brainstorm with me, suggested Jon Savage for a book about The Kinks. By June my own book of short stories, Horse’s Neck, was ready for delivery. McCrum had worked through the manuscript, reducing nearly 300 pages by over half.

  ‘Pete,’ he began cautiously. ‘You realise that readers are going to think all these stories are about you?’

  ‘They might, I suppose. And some of the settings are drawn from my world. I’ve only had one life, after all. But what I’ve written is fiction.’

  ‘I think it would help readers greatly if they were relieved of the burden of trying to second-guess whether the leading character in each story is really you disguised – or someone else, close to you.’

  ‘What do you suggest?’

  ‘Make every story about yourself, and if they have a central character, call him Pete. If any of the stories don’t have a central character, make them first-person.’

  I took Robert’s advice, although the final story closes with a dream sequence in which a rider mounts a horse from behind. I wondered about the implications of putting it into the first person. Later, when the book was released to reviewers, critic Bryan Appleyard stopped me outside the lift at Faber.

  ‘You do know,’ he announced, ‘that readers are going to think you actually had anal sex with a horse.’

  Working at Faber I felt right at the heart of London life. I was grateful to be alive, remembering how close I had come to dying from a careless overdose. My efforts to raise sympathy and understanding for the plight of addicts, and hope for rehabilitation within the National Health Service, brought me in July 1984 to a meeting at the Commons with the Secretary of State for Social Services, Norman Fowler. He agreed to put the junior health minister, John Patten, in touch with Meg Patterson. I believed I was being taken seriously by politicians partly because I had taken a serious role in the Establishment at last through my work at Faber.

  My life was also enriched by time spent getting to know some of the more pre-eminent authors on Faber’s list. On holiday in our new house in Cornwall, Matthew Evans and his wife Lizzie came to stay, and we met William and Anne Golding at their house in Truro. Bill, as his friends called him, was a fiery, hearty man, generous-spirited and adored by his family. He’d published his classic Lord of the Flies around the time that my dad’s first record went on sale. I was surprised at how well Bill played the piano. He had taught music, as well as classical languages. We got on very well, and one day I took him sailing in my little Falmouth Bass boat; he hadn’t been on the water for many years after an almost fatal capsize with his family on his small sailing yacht, but he was obviously a natural seaman.

  Back in London, in September, my daily life was further enhanced by helping friends and strangers get into rehab, and raising funds for music cooperatives and charities. Karen and I became co-chairmen of the trust for the battered women’s refuge when David Astor stepped down.

  I spent October winding down some of The Who’s business interests. Roger Searle, Mick Double and Alan Smith of ML Executives, formed by our road crew after the Tommy movie windfall, wanted to take over the company, and we needed to establish a fair value. It was extremely difficult. It turned out that not only did we have to find a way to give this company and all its assets to our road crew, we also had to sack them and pay them a severance. The final closure was a sobering moment. The Who had the finest crew in the world. As solo artists we had discovered that no longer could we have an idea in the morning and see it executed by the afternoon.

  I had persuaded Karen I could no longer live at The Anchorage. I embarked on a publicity tour of Britain doing readings from Horse’s Neck. Prize-winning novelist and playwright Caryl Phillips was on the same junket, and we hung out a little, going clubbing after readings and having breakfast together. We went to a nightclub and I took a small drink, which happened very rarely; I knew it was dangerous, but it helped with my anxiety. In Sheffield three young Mods sat in the front row wearing their parkas, holding a guitar with a Union Jack painted on it and grinned while I read my tales of decadence. In Dublin I was joined by Irish writer Anne Devlin, and one yobbo in the audience opened his question for me by wondering if her reading was far superior to mine because she was Irish and I wasn’t.

  I took over The Who’s charity Double-O to help in its mission and with fundraising. Within a month I was visiting drug rehab units and sharing my story.

  Melvyn Bragg commissioned a South Bank Show about me, which Nigel Wattis directed. Shooting began in May, while I was recording music tracks at the boathouse for a new solo album. Suddenly I realised that my life hadn’t changed as much as I thought. Nigel wanted to capture on film a piece of everything I was doing at the time. I was to be presented as a kind of Renaissance man, but it made me aware that things were veering out of control. I was recording music for a new solo album, working as a book editor with several distinguished titles in development, launching a new charity, working to spring Nelson Mandela from prison, chairing the most important women’s refuge in the world, publishing my own first book, looking for a new home, making my first film and trying, but failing, to write songs for Roger Daltrey.

  This time I wasn’t drinking, or abusing any other substance. I was using my first drug of choice – overwork.


  A few days later The Who reunited for a one-off event: we were on the same stage for Live Aid. I did it for Bob Geldof, the charity’s charismatic creator, whom I adored – and still do – but at one point, when Bob sensed I might refuse to appear, he took the gloves off. ‘If The Who appear we know we will get an additional million pounds of revenue,’ he said forcefully. ‘Every pound we make will save a life. Do the fucking maths. And do the fucking show.’

  I wandered around a little, feeling out of place. The press was flocking mainly to the young black singer Sade, whose sultry beauty was intoxicating. Backstage there was a great sense of community. I talked to Bono, who was never afraid of waxing lyrical at such times. We all felt proud to be there. Bowie had wheeled out a suit from his younger days and was delighted to explain to me how well it still fitted. David Bailey was doing the photos and took a splendid one of me after the show, my working shirt drenched in sweat, looking handsome and weary, which ended up on the wall in the fashionable Caprice restaurant.

  At the end, as he battled to find a place to stand on the stage, it was I who moved to lift Bob Geldof up to join us for the finale, and it was Paul McCartney who moved to my side to help. That was a good moment for me. As for our performance, The Who were out of practice and should probably have left it to Queen and George Michael, who stole the show.

  A few months earlier Eric Clapton and I attended a screening of Prince’s film Purple Rain. I was inspired by the way Prince had folded autobiographical references so elegantly into his film. I decided to create a film of my own, combining street scenes from a London district north of Shepherd’s Bush and music sequences.

  Walter Donahue, an editor at Faber working on the film list, recommended that we also screen a film called Strikebound, directed by a young Australian called Richard Lowenstein, whom I would eventually approach to direct my next project, White City.

  I imagined the narrative would be carried by images, and the words would be lyrical, almost an inner dialogue. In researching the project I spent time in White City, which despite its name was an uneasy mix of many diverse ethnic groups settled in London. A Romany clan had been moved from a camp by the White City stadium, and some had been given homes in empty flats. There was a substantial Caribbean population, which had been there since I was a kid. But there were also newly arrived Asians and Somalis. The entire area was full of streets named after the swan-song days of the British Empire: Commonwealth Road, India Way, Canada Day Way, Bloemfontein Road and so on. Ironically, nowhere was it clearer that the days of Empire were over and a new way of life was beginning.

  The story I wrote worked for me, but not for Richard Lowenstein. He read my script, interviewed me and then presented me with a revised treatment that incorporated my answers.

  The narrator was Pete Townshend the rock star, who has returned to his home town and is talking about his young friend Jimmy. Almost every traumatic moment in my childhood was included, although I’d originally wanted a musical play about my neighbourhood, my family, my friends and the people I was coming into contact with in my new life in the mid-Eighties. Richard hadn’t followed all of my suggestions, but he put together a very tight shooting script, and I finally approved it. I was used to this happening. With every conceptual music project I’d ever worked on I allowed the ideas to come into focus by osmosis rather than through advance preparation. In most cases (Lifehouse being the exception) it had worked. This time the artwork, paintings, drawings and long tracts of writing I’d done were all subsumed in the film.

  The work Karen and I were doing for Refuge brought us face to face with heartbreaking stories. My sympathy was always with the women and children who suffered at the hands of violent men. But I also felt empathy for men, too; many of those I met often seemed like badly behaved boys in big men’s bodies. But they could never be tolerated, or forgiven. White City allowed me to inhabit my own truth, and that of many of the families around me, especially those in my old neighbourhood. Jimmy’s story wasn’t my story, but my story had a bearing on his.

  I wanted White City to be entertaining and colourful as well as real, and although Purple Rain indicated how that might be achieved it offered no clear blueprint. Prince, as an artist, was deliberately romantic and distant – he offered a pathway to his inner self only through his music. In White City the swimming-pool scene with its synchronised swimming sequences, and the fundraising show for the local women’s refuge, were intended to be entertaining while still contributing to the central themes.

  My old friends drugs and alcoholism had returned to my daily life, but now, instead of using them as a means of survival, I put them to work in aid of others. The male hero in White City is a drunk, not to make Jimmy appear helpless or disenfranchised, but to explain his anger and frustration when his ex-wife begins to empower herself.

  The work I was doing with Donald Woods and the Lincoln Trust to free Nelson Mandela also informed White City. Apartheid in South Africa was easy to criticise, but I identified many shades of what could be called apartheid in my own life, and the lives of the people I had chosen as subjects for my project.

  My own therapy was deepening at this time. My analyst had urged me to write about some of my childhood experiences, especially the time with my grandmother from six to seven years old, and my suspicion that I had been sexually abused. She was a Jungian analyst, so my dreams were useful to her, and I had started to try to record them. By the time I related my dreams to her I had usually worked out for myself what they meant, and was often disappointed when she gave me her interpretation.

  I wrote down every dream I could recall and was writing more freely about my abstract thoughts and ideas. When Karen told me she had read some of what I’d written, I pruned and destroyed dozens of notes I had produced, and a number of photographs I had taken throughout the Eighties. One was of Louise and me on our second date. When I’d finished destroying them, I told Karen. She looked sad.

  ‘You didn’t need to do that, Pete,’ she said. ‘All this stuff is yours, it’s your life.’

  When it came to White City, I occasionally spoke with Claire Bland, a smart junior secretary at my office, about the way the themes of sexual abuse might be treated as well. With her advice I retreated from a number of explicit scenes I had documented in conversations with recovering addicts, alcoholics and victims of domestic violence.

  As a collection of songs, the White City album (which accompanied the film) was almost entirely free and clear to be enjoyed as just that.

  My solo career solidified, and I enjoyed my seeming status as a godfather of rock. I decided to do three shows for Double-O, the charity I’d founded, at Brixton Academy, using a new big band based on the one from White City. That had been called Deep End, a name suggested by the swimming-pool setting, and I stuck with it. I also wanted to film the three concerts.

  I had written the title song, ‘Life to Life’, for my friend Harvey Weinstein’s first film as a director, Playing for Keeps. I had first him, and his brother Bob, in Buffalo in December 1979, our first show after the Cincinnati tragedy. The Weinsteins were still music promoters in those days. They used the profits from their company, Harvey & Corky Productions, to start the film distributor Miramax. The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball, their first acquisition, benefited Amnesty International and helped make the human rights organisation viable.

  Playing for Keeps may not have been the same kind of success, but the whole business had drawn Harvey and me closer. Bill Curbishley arranged for Miramax to shoot the Deep End shows and put out a video.

  I surprised myself with my ability to hold the attention of an audience as a singer, without an electric guitar, and how effortlessly I remembered the lyrics – something I’d convinced myself I would never be able to do.

  We had trouble selling out all the concert tickets, so we used the first night for a soundcheck and camera line-up. Seeing me on stage again disturbed Karen, and she skipped the following night.

  I took Deep End to Cannes in
January 1986 to perform at the MIDEM conference for musicians and artists, putting myself before almost every leading light in the music industry. The band was the same as in Brixton, featuring David Gilmour on guitar, Simon Phillips on drums, Rabbit on keyboards, Peter Hope-Evans on mouth organ, Chucho Merchan (from The Eurythmics) on bass and Jody Linscott on percussion. Kick Horns – a five-piece brass section – and Billy Nicholls, leading a group of backing singers, enlarged the music to the point I had wanted all those years ago with Roger.

  Tony Smith, who managed Phil Collins and Genesis, said it was the best show he’d ever seen. My representatives at Atlantic were excited, and hoped I would take the band on tour. After years as a guitar hero I was now a front man. I looked good, sang well and the music – gathered from a wide range of sources as well as my songs for The Who and my solo albums – was terrific. And for once in my life I knew when to draw the line: I told Atlantic International I would take the band no further.

  The music computer had landed in two forms. There was the Fairlight CMI, a synthesiser/sampler workstation beloved of New Romantic bands; by the time I started work on White City I had bought my own. The other system was the Synclavier, a digital FM synthesiser with a microprocessor-controlled sequencer. I realised these developments meant I would soon be able to compose and orchestrate very seriously, without the expense of using real orchestras or the barrier of working with orchestrators like Raphael Rudd or Edwin Astley. I found this incredibly exciting, although I have to add that nothing I’ve ever heard has surpassed what I heard in my imagination as a boy.

  My brilliant Uncle Jack (Dad’s older brother) had always been a rather shy and quiet fellow, and for a period after the war was subject to the Official Secrets Act for his work in the USA on the development of radar and later big-screen television. Uncle Jack introduced me to a colleague of his who demonstrated how digital data could be stored on tape using streams of analogue audio ‘noise’. I could see that digitisation was also going to change the music industry.