Who I Am: A Memoir

by Peter Townshend

  The CD was well established, of course, and digital audio recording had been demonstrated to me at EMI by Tony Lumkin back in 1975. The Mellotron, which used a form of analogue sampling, had been employed by The Beatles and Bee Gees back in the mid-Sixties. Digital sampling had been pioneered by Fairlight, and by Ray Kurzweil, who reserved his first invention for Stevie Wonder. Once I got my hands on a Synclavier, though, I saw that the composer, already king, would become omnipotent, freed from working with session musicians and arrangers and producers for hire. And as soon as the technology arrived to offer the compression of digital music, it could be transmitted down a telephone cable, and artists like me wouldn’t even need record companies.

  I wanted to make an album about dancing, light-hearted and colourful, to be developed into a theatrical musical. My inspiration was Ray Davies’s ‘Come Dancing’; I was never ashamed to emulate that particular hero of mine. While on holiday in Venice I knocked together a list of possible songs. My working title was Beguines, Tangos and Love. ‘All Shall Be Well’ was the leading song, about the inevitable end of South African apartheid in new political fire, but also about the fire of an illicit kiss.

  My colleague at Faber & Faber, Craig Raine, had given me a poem about perfume to set to music. It was a fabulous image: a suitor tells his inamorata that because of her wonderful perfume he senses her prevailing presence as a kind of ghost when she leaves the room.* Indeed, I had proposed a small album of such poems set to music, each with its own video. ‘Save It for Later’, ‘Put a Spell on You’, ‘Boogie-Stop-Shuffle’, ‘That’s All Right Mama’, ‘Barefooting’, ‘Night Train’, ‘Cool Jerk’, Miles Davis’s ‘Walkin’ ’, Mingus’s ‘Don’t Let Them Drop that Bomb on Me’ and a number of other standards I’d performed in Cannes were on my list.

  Deep End had rehearsed all these standards, and they were immensely powerful. I dug into my demos and lyrics for unrecorded material and fixed on ‘Foreign Languages’, ‘Join My Gang’, ‘Ragtime in C’, ‘Still Life’, ‘Larry the Lonely Cowboy’, ‘Can You Really Dance’, ‘Love in Limbo Land’, ‘Love Is an Emergency’, ‘Playing Hard’, ‘Your Kiss Is an Echo’ and ‘The Roxy’. Every song was intended to inspire a video dance sequence. On 20 April 1986 I put together an impossible schedule that started the next day and ran until 18 June. I was planning a stage musical that could be televised.

  As I tried to hang on to this project, I performed at a concert to raise funds after a volcano had ravaged Colombia. Two session players for The Eurythmics, Chucho Merchan and his partner Anna, a classical cellist, had organised the benefit. Annie Lennox, Dave Stewart and Chrissie Hynde all performed. I was reminded of the finale of Live Aid, when David Bowie, Freddie Mercury and George Michael tried to force their way through the mêlée of artists on stage to get to the front. George had won that time. At the Royal Albert Hall the same thing happened, only the cause was Colombia and the winner was Annie Lennox.

  At the Faber summer party I met the poet Ted Hughes for only the second time. I was hoping to create a musical based on his story for children The Iron Man. When I enquired about the status of the rights, I was told they were tied up in some way by a film deal in Australia. Matthew Evans stepped in with the producer Robert Fox, and we persuaded Ted to let me begin to develop the book for a pop musical. I started to scratch out lyrics: ‘Heavy Metal’, ‘A Friend Is a Friend’, ‘Man and Machine’ and ‘Over the Top’. There was even a scratch lyric for a song called ‘Fake It’ that wouldn’t surface on an album until 1993.

  Rob Dickins, who headed Warner Brothers in the UK, pulled White City – he stopped pressing the CDs after 25,000 had been sold. It had done far better in Germany and Australia than Britain, and fairly well in the States – especially on radio. When I went to see him he gave me a White City neck scarf after keeping me waiting for more than ten minutes. ‘You’ve gone all whiter than white and squeaky clean,’ he said. ‘Your fans don’t know who you are any more.’

  Had they ever known? Even now I’m still trying to find out who I am.

  As a result of my meeting with Rob Dickins I decided to repudiate my contract with WEA, the UK arm of our Warner Brothers record label in the USA, for the territories outside the USA and Canada, and WEA were happy to release me. Simon Draper at Virgin, who had built his career (and, some would argue, the founding fortune for Richard Branson) on Mike Oldfield’s concept album Tubular Bells, was excited to work with me on The Iron Man.

  The deal Virgin gave me – we signed the contract later that year, in December 1986 – was terrific, and I used some of the large advance to order my own powerful Synclavier system, and to convert my office above the studios at the boathouse into a new composition suite.

  I was lined up to perform a solo set in June at Giant’s Stadium for the last show on the Conspiracy of Hope tour, in support of Amnesty International. This would be my first solo appearance in the USA, and I was a little nervous, wishing I had Deep End to support me.

  While backstage, waiting for a soundcheck, I got a telephone call that Dad, who had been resting in his little villa in Menorca, had been taken seriously ill. I quickly arranged a charter plane to get Dad back to London, informed the show producers and ran to JFK to catch the last Concorde across the Atlantic. This was the only time in my entire career I put my family’s needs above those of my audience. And I knew I wouldn’t be missed much. The amazing bill included U2, Sting, Bryan Adams, Peter Gabriel, Lou Reed, Joan Baez and The Neville Brothers. I wondered if I would have been able to run to my father’s side so easily if it had been a Who show.

  At Central Middlesex Hospital I asked for my father. The receptionist couldn’t locate him and told me to wait. Instead I dashed away and frantically searched the entire building, eventually finding Dad lying half-naked on a trolley in a basement corridor; he had lost control of his bowels and had been abandoned by whoever had been pushing him. It was pitiful.

  I raised hell and a bed was found. Dad had had a tumour removed from his colon but the remaining cancer had spread very quickly through his body. Seeing Dad in such a dreadful state – months before, he had still seemed vital – threw me over the edge.

  Dad, like his parents before him, had avoided doctors. He had been ill for a long time with what Mum called ‘the squits’. Mum’s answer was to drink heavily, and then rage at him. She had been raging at me too, over the phone, often late at night, and then calling again the next morning having already forgotten. Mum, who had probably done far more for me in practical terms than Dad, was difficult to love, but loving Dad was always easy.

  After a few days the surgeon took me aside and said they wouldn’t do any more operations. The cancer was spreading quickly, and Dad was put on morphine. He talked about the small cacti my brothers had brought for him as gifts, which he loved because they reminded him of the villa in Cala’n Porter in Menorca; he told me over and over again how happy he had been there, and how grateful he was that I had provided it. He reminisced happily about his life, including the girls he had known. Then, on Saturday, the evening of 28 June, I arranged to go and see him just before he went to sleep. When I arrived at about eleven the ward was quiet. Dad had been moved into a side room. I went in, expecting him to be asleep; he was very still, and lying stiffly.

  ‘Are you OK, Dad?’

  ‘No, I’m not OK,’ he barked. ‘And I’ve done enough for you.’ He turned onto his side, then turned back and looked at me reproachfully.

  I was wounded, but Dad wouldn’t say what he meant. I left, still confused. He died later that night.

  The death of my father made me acutely aware of what it is to be an ordinary man turned parent, with all that responsibility. I also became more cognisant of my role in The Who. If Roger led the gang, in charge of the blood, I was its father figure, in charge of the transfusions.

  By summer 1986 I had been home behaving as a dutiful father for over four years. My family and I were used to each other again. My relationship with Karen seemed to have settled
down. I knew that the period of our separation had hurt her deeply, and I had worked hard to make amends. Karen was always easy to adore, and by now I was feeling more secure, less prone to fantasy and negative projection about the future. I lived in the present.

  Emma was seventeen, Minta fifteen. They were great kids, intelligent, funny and loving. I knew they both sensed that I was still finding my feet, but things seemed relaxed between us at last. On holiday in Cornwall, life was fairly straight-cut for me as a dad – the swimming pool, the beaches, the rowing boats. At night I was still writing until the early hours. I wrote about the perils of stardom; about the way I had watched from an early age the sexual dalliances of my parents and my grandmother, and how I had been eroticised by them.†

  I was getting to grips with my Synclavier music computer. To be honest, I had no idea what I was setting myself up for by moving into the unknown world of musical theatre. I had studied orchestration back in 1967 while I was working on Rael, but nothing I’d composed had been recorded by an orchestra. I began to put together a very tight programme for work on The Iron Man, knowing full well it would take me at least two years to crack it. The deal with Virgin required the delivery of the album, a double, by March 1989. I had enough time.

  In September 1986 I decided to put Mum into rehab at Broadreach in Plymouth. She had attempted suicide a couple of times, and was worrying the entire family. I took her for an assessment and she was booked in, after which I wrote a letter to my brothers Paul and Simon and to my Uncle Jack, filling them in on the situation. At least Mum didn’t have to make an adjustment to our new home in Tennyson House.

  At Faber Valerie Eliot invited me on 26 September, among a very small group including Ted Hughes, Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser, to the unveiling of the English Heritage blue plaque for T.S. Eliot. Harold spoke to me about what he saw as growing problems over discrimination against the Kurds in Turkey, which was one of his passions at the time.‡ I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but he was very courteous to me.

  Through my editorial role at Faber I was discovering a different side of myself, and it was a privilege to be exploring it. My last meeting of the year on Faber business was with the comedian and actor Max Wall. I wanted his autobiography. He had played the lead part of Davies in Pinter’s The Caretaker, and told a story about taking the playwright aside one day.

  ‘What the fuck is this about, Harold?’

  That seemed amusing enough, with no other punch line, and we laughed. I tried to tell Harold this story.

  ‘I met Max Wall the other day,’ I said. ‘He told me about his conversation with you about The Caretaker.’

  Harold looked at me with his Darth Vader expression.

  ‘Yes?’ he demanded. ‘What? What?’

  I had to give up. ‘Nothing. Enjoy your evening.’

  He wasn’t a man for small talk. I’d seen a version of The Caretaker at the Young Vic in the Lifehouse years and regard it as Pinter’s masterpiece.

  Max Wall told me he once pursued Mum when she was a young singer. We got on to the subject of music; the friend who accompanied him to our lunch was a trumpeter and played Louis Armstrong-style jazz – what we called Dixieland or trad jazz.

  I told him I had only seen Ken Colyer once, and how peculiar the audience had been. I explained that Colyer was probably the real fount of modern music in Britain, and that it was a shame he was no longer with us.

  ‘I’ll inform him of his death when I see him after his show tonight,’ said Max’s friend.

  It felt unjust. Dad was gone, but Colyer – terrible old seagoing lush that he was – was apparently, and incredibly, still alive and performing.

  My therapy, my analysis, seemed to be over. I’d got to the point where, if I couldn’t remember what happened in my time with my grandmother, it seemed there was no point continuing. I didn’t wish to unlock memories I didn’t really have. I had been attending regular twice-weekly therapy sessions since March 1982, five years with only a few short breaks. In December 1986 I had my last session of analysis. What had I learned?

  I had a problem.

  23

  IRON MAN

  Ted and Carol Hughes lived near Chagford, Devon, on the edge of Dartmoor, one of the most strangely beautiful places in England, with its mischievous wild ponies and wandering sheep that slept in the road. The wooded area around Chagford is exceptional: the light, falling in shafts through ancient trees onto bubbling rivers, sets them to sparkle. I am always inspired by the area, especially by the upper parts of the river Teign.

  Part of the joy of working on The Iron Man was the time I got to spend with Ted. He was a giant, socially speaking, and I found him inspiring company. He was also a big man, physically, with a large handsome face and a full head of hair that crept down his neck and sprouted in his ears. He held court like the Yorkshireman he was, witty and bluff, with no patience for anything that didn’t fit his own literary or philosophical brief. His wife Carol was earthy in the way of a country girl, but dark and sophisticated, an extraordinary mix that was perfect for Ted. A wonderful raconteur, he could hold his own on any topic – his fellow poets, the Greek myths, the Saxons, post-modernism – without coming off as a patronising knob.

  My daughter Emma enjoyed his company especially, comfortably sharing her own formidable knowledge without feeling she was showing off. Ted’s book The Iron Man had become a set book for teenagers studying English Literature for exams. It presented itself as a children’s story, but its themes were powerfully challenging: the mechanisation and computerisation of war, ecology, friendship between different nations and races, even the mythology of the music of the spheres.

  On every level this story engaged and excited me. One very personal resonance was my childhood fantasy, as a ten-year-old, of living inside a large, robotic machine that would carry me to and from school in safety every day, allowing me to be remote from everyone around me.

  The description of the celestial music created by the Iron Man’s enemy, a Space Dragon, chimed with the music I had heard as a child sitting with Aunt Trilby, and on the Thames with the Sea Scouts. There was also in Ted’s book the idea that men who had endured war responded to almost every mystery in militaristic ways; it was hard to convince them that there could be a mystical layer to life, but the beauty of the music of the Space Dragon (who reveals that he is in fact a peaceful Star Spirit, a singer of ‘music of the spheres’) is finally able to spiritually transform mankind and create lasting peace throughout the world.

  In Ted’s story it is the friendship between the Iron Man – the war machine – and the boy Hogarth that solves the problems. Ted’s book connected with me at many levels. It was a postwar book, attending to the futility of the nuclear age: when a single bomb can wipe out an entire country, all conflict is suicidal. By putting a young boy at the centre of his tale, I was also working with the system I knew best: the problems of growing into manhood at such a time, when being a brave soldier was suddenly a counterfeit currency.

  Away from therapy I still used the techniques I’d learned, writing more diary entries than usual, as well as bitterly honest letters I never sent. I was in a creative frame of mind, but, instead of writing fiction, this time I thought seriously about writing my autobiography. I didn’t envisage a conventional book so much as a collection of almost random images, poetry and unpublished lyrics, essays that touched on how I saw the unfolding social politics of the West in my lifetime, where technology might take us, and what artists might do in the future. One short story that I’d written, ‘The Limousine’, formed the basis for a lecture I was asked to give to students at the Royal College of Art.

  ‘The Limousine’ is a dark murder story in which the evil man who owns the limo fills the airtight passenger compartment with tantalising music combined with poisonous gas. Then he robs, rapes, murders and dumps his customers. I told this tale to an initially rapt audience of about 200. Once I had them in the right frame of mind I got to my theme: when music, c
onverted into digital data, could be compressed sufficiently to pass down a telephone line, music as we knew it would end. We would feel as though we were in control, but we would merely be helpless passengers. Composers and musicians would feel they had a direct line to their customers, but they would also open doors to all kinds of mental and spiritual pollution. This was the Lifehouse vision become real.

  Vinyl discs, already endangered, would disappear, as would analogue tape. The CD would be unnecessary. We would use computers, some as small as a watch, to listen to music and share it, and we would be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of sounds we were exposed to. Unable to distinguish good from bad, we would, in the matter of music – metaphorically speaking – be gassed, robbed, raped and murdered. Our luxurious, comfortable limousine was really a hearse.

  Perhaps I was being too dramatic. Maybe it was just shit. But one thing I could see clearly: by the time I got to my punch line most of the audience had walked out.

  I worked through Ted Hughes’s The Iron Man, making personal annotations. Steadily I broke down the book into sections, experimenting with my own variants on the plot line without departing too much from Ted’s story; I was simply trying to set the stage for a brief for each song.

  In April, in Cornwall, I began to work earnestly on completing the lyrics. As I shared my ideas with Ted, he was enthusiastic and encouraging. He particularly liked my image of the Space Dragon as a creature from whose wings hung hundreds of stolen children. I didn’t try to produce a musical that would work only for kids; I responded to Ted’s story from my own childlike heart, and scribbled. I hoped that children who came would enjoy it, but there is no avoiding that The Iron Man is a dark tale, and I wanted to be faithful to that.