Who I Am: A Memoir

by Peter Townshend

  My lawyer John Cohen deserves more than a mention here; so much more than a legal guide, he is a friend and ally, and has been a mentor and protector.

  In preparing this book I have needed time and space, the toughest currencies to generate, something my accountant and dear friend Richard Rosenberg has helped me achieve. In Nick Goderson’s painful absence he has made the impossible seem possible. Indeed, the book is done, so he pulled it off.

  My manager Bill Curbishley is a major protagonist in this book, and his friendship and loyalty to me and Roger is precious and valued in a way that simply cannot be quantified, but every time we work together we try to quantify it! I can’t imagine my career, or my life, without him. His ex-wife Jackie, who managed me as a solo artist, now lives happily in the Bahamas. Bill’s partner Robert Rosenberg is less well known outside music business circles, but is another vitally important man in my life. With their support and that of their team I have found time to complete this book.

  Friends have come and gone. Jimpy, the last time I heard from him, was still alive and kicking, being a grandfather a long time before I made it. Barney is good, living with Nikki (my son Joseph’s ex-infant school teacher), and we were reunited recently with Irish Jack Lyons to confer on all things Mod for the Quadrophenia documentary recently on BBC TV. Lisa Marsh is married with children and did indeed publish a book (about Calvin Klein), and is still a working journalist in the fashion industry. Louise Reay also has several beautiful daughters. She still rides horses. Jackie Vickers is married to Reg Meuross, and lives in Somerset. Reg is a talented folk musician, and I am a great fan. They have two wonderful children. I have three godchildren: Benedict, Bob Pridden’s son, who is in real estate in Yorkshire; Claire Forlani (the Hollywood actress), married to the actor Dougray Scott; and Claire’s brother Christian, who is an adventurer.

  Chris Chappel and Helen Wilkins are in my story but have also been vital to me in my career and were great partygoers with me. Carrie Cooke and Paul Curran work with me now creatively, and they have been important pillars in getting this book moving, and will assist in keeping it in the marketplace.

  I want to thank the two major music producers in my life, Chris Thomas and Glyn Johns.

  Bob Pridden, The Who’s soundman since 1967, has been my strongest supporter, through thick and thin, on the road, in the studio and all my wildest experiments. He’s been the best-behaved member of our travelling asylum – always a gentleman, mostly with his trousers on.

  Alan Rogan has been with me as guitar technician and stalwart friend and aide-de-camp since 1975. No one has done more to help advance me as a guitarist; he has brought me many wonderful instruments I never thought I needed, and now cannot live without.

  Mike Shaw recovered from his car crash. He managed to get some use of his hands, and was one of the idiots who worked at Track Records in its Jimi Hendrix heyday. Later he was involved in many special projects for The Who and other artists associated with Track. He now lives facing the wild Cornish sea in St Austell.

  Two people who might be surprised to hear this from me are the Lords Matthew Evans, my old boss at Faber & Faber, and Melvyn Bragg, who commissioned me to write my first real play (sadly never filmed). Both have recently helped me to believe I could do this book, and make it work at more than one level.

  I want to thank my doctor, Adrian Whiteson. As of now I am in good health, but he has been more than a doctor to me; he has been a friend and guide in my charity work, steering me (and Roger too) in one of the greatest challenges we have ever faced together, to help him fight the battle against cancer, especially in its most unfair manifestation, when it hits young people.

  My two brothers, Paul and Simon, have growing families. Paul and his wife Sandy have Jessie and Jacob. Simon and Janie have Ben (recently married), Josh and Hannah. They both still live at the Townshend family home in Ealing. Paul is a fastidious painter and decorator; that’s where his artistic temperament has taken him. Simon is a musician, with a solo career, and tours with The Who.

  Aunt Trilby died many years ago. She was my creative angel.

  My wonderfully tempestuous mother Betty died last year. We were all around her bedside. Somehow, as she breathed her last few breaths, we all wondered how she would manage to continue to create havoc from the other side. Some of my nephews and neices are certain she is still dropping coins onto their shoes, something she did when they were infants. Pennies from heaven.

  My ex-wife Karen’s sister Virginia Astley is still making music, and also working on a book about the river Thames at the moment. Her daughter Florence is also a musician, playing classical piano and harp.

  Karen’s two brothers are still close to me. Gareth is a serious sailor, as is his older brother Jon, who has worked closely with The Who since 1976. We have all sailed together on some great adventures.

  Karen’s mother Hazel, who taught me how to properly spend Sunday in the English countryside, still lives in Goring-on-Thames where Quadrophenia was mixed while the river glistened. Karen’s late father Edwin Astley – Ted to us, and a wonderful composer – is remembered here so fondly; he took me seriously as a composer.

  My daughter Emma lives in Ealing, and now writes a gardening column for the Independent on Sunday magazine. She has published a book about Darwin’s dogs, but doesn’t do music professionally any more. She presented me with my only grandchild so far, Kester, who is now two, and thankfully very keen on boats. I have an excuse to paraphrase a line from Jaws: ‘We need a bigger boat.’ Her partner William is a graphic designer who works in publishing. Aminta, still a fine linguist, no longer works on feature films, but is still involved in media, at the moment for a growing internet events company. She lives in Shepherd’s Bush, Who stamping ground. My son Joseph is at Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design and I’m glad to say I see a lot of him. He is full of the most exciting ideas and works really hard with them. He lives near Kennington Oval.

  This leads me to my greatest supporters and allies – my fans and those fans of The Who. Thank you for giving me a day job, and not sacking me when I didn’t show up for work. You’ve been the best boss a man could ever have.

  To those who are gone, Kit Lambert, Keith Moon, John Entwistle, Ronnie Lane, Brian Jones, David Platz, Keith Grant, Ahmet Ertegun, Ken Russell, Bill Graham, Nick Goderson, Denny, Trilby, Horry, Dot, Mum, Dad, Uncle Jack, Jenny, Robin, Delia DeLeon, Ivy Duce, Meher Baba, Adi K. Irani and the guy who stole my $50,000, I can’t wait to catch up with you wherever you are.

  Finally I must acknowledge my partner Rachel Fuller. We’ve been together for fifteen years, and she is one intuitive romantic hunch that came right for me. Beautiful, funny, sexy, talented and completely nuts, Rachel has enriched these years that Chris Stamp calls ‘The Gravy’ to such an extent that I am sometimes described by cynics determined to mix metaphors as looking like the cat who got the cream. She plays Chopin like Chopin, and sings like Baez to my Dylan. Rachel and I have written songs together, so she broke my hex there. We don’t have children, and it is too late for me now, but Rachel has made up for it with seven dogs – Flash, Wistle, Spud, Harry, Barney, Cracker and Skrapovski (a Russian Yorkshire terrier who lives in Cannes).

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PETE TOWNSHEND is the legendary lead guitarist and principal songwriter for The Who, one of the most influential rock-and-roll bands of all time. Townshend is responsible for having written over 100 songs and rock operas in the band’s important catalogue. He is one of Rolling Stone’s “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990. He resides in West London, where he was raised.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  CREDITS

  Cover design by Milan Bozic

  Front cover photography by Terry O’Neill / Getty Images

  COPYRIGHT

  WHO I AM. Copyright © 2012 by Pete Townshend. All rights reserved under Intern
ational and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

  Published in a slightly different form in Great Britain in 2012 by HarperCollins Publishers.

  Permission to reproduce extracts from letters is gratefully acknowledged to Roger Daltrey, Bill Curbishley and Jackie Curbishley.

  Melody Maker extracts in chapter 13 and 14 © IPC Media/IPC+ Syndication.

  Frontispiece © Michael Ochs Archives/Corbis

  FIRST EDITION

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Townshend, Pete.

  Who I am : a memoir / by Pete Townshend.—US ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  ISBN: 978-0-06-212724-2 (Hardcover)

  1. Townshend, Pete. 2. Rock musicians—England—Biography. 3. Who (Musical group) I. Title.

  ML410.T69A3 2012

  782.42166092—dc23

  [B]2012032303

  Epub Edition © OCTOBER 2012 ISBN: 9780062127266

  12 13 14 15 16 UK-DIX/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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  * Ascott’s personal manifesto emerges in his course description: ‘The Questioning of Preconceptions. Analytical study of Nature and Machines introduces the student to structure, growth and form, cyclic and serial situations, and environmental problems. These practical activities are complemented by seminars in Cybernetics, Semiotics, Psychology …’ For more details, see www.frieze.com/issue/article/degree_zero

  * See Appendix.

  * This was used as the basis for ‘I Love My Dog’, released in autumn 1966 by Cat Stevens, and an immediate hit. Cat (born Steven Georgiou, later renamed Yusuf Islam) now pays back-royalties to Lateef. I remember him fondly – I spoke to him once in Brewer Street when he was a teenager. His family owned a restaurant around the corner from my Wardour Street flat. He was three years younger than me, but that would have been quite a gap between such young men. He had caught me in my big, blue Lincoln, seemed to know of me and where I lived, and fired a number of questions at me about songwriting and guitars.

  * More details on Tommy’s genesis are available at www.TheWho.com.

  † The full transcript of the Jann Wenner interview is available at www.TheWho.com.

  ‡ This TV film was called The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus but was not released until 1996.

  * In the US, the Library of Congress Grand Right is a copyright that aggregates three creative strands – music, lyrics and story. No such right exists in the UK but the form is respected as a rule.

  * It is now known as the internet or the World Wide Web.

  † For a complete exposition on the concept and history of Lifehouse, and its various incarnations, see www.TheWho.com.

  ‡ Melody Maker, 19 September 1970.

  § OVERTURE: The farmers – Life – Beauty – Celebration, LIFEHOUSE: The City – Rock – Youth against finance – Individuals working for the whole, GLORIFICATION: They disappear – they triumph, leaving everyone behind.

  * The first workshop was held during the day, so attended only by truants. Also, frightened we would be overrun, we made no announcements at all. So in fact no one knew what we were doing. I felt the workshops would be best allowed to grow exponentially.

  * I may have sacked Kit as a record producer but he was still The Who’s manager and we were still on Track records, the label owned by Kit and Chris.

  † Commercially it reached the highest position of any Who album in the States at No. 2 and in the long term has achieved the recognition I hoped for it. IGN, for instance, placed Quadrophenia at No. 1 in their list of the greatest classic rock albums of all time.

  * There were many contracts to sign and I did not sign the assignment of copyright to Kit and The Who (I saw it as mine entirely). At a later date it appeared that I had signed this particular contract (in the presence of my PA Judi Waring) but my signature was stapled onto the bottom of the other signatures and Judi had not even been at the show. So we both agreed that it must have been literally chopped from a different contract.

  † http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Who_by_Numbers.

  ‡ Roy Carr, ‘The Punk as Godfather’, interview with Pete Townshend, New Musical Express, 31 May 1975.

  * For example, Roy Carr, ‘The Punk as Godfather’, interview with Pete Townshend, New Musical Express, 31 May 1975.

  * Keith’s new doctor, Geoffrey Dymond, unaware of his history of prescription sedative abuse, gave him a full bottle of 100 sedative pills to alleviate his alcohol- withdrawal symptoms as he tried to dry out. Keith had taken 32 tablets.

  * First screened in the UK on BBC4 on 29 June 2012.

  * My version was never finished, but much later the general idea was used by Rachel Fuller for a song called ‘Ghost in Your Room’, told from the girl’s point of view.

  † I am using the word ‘eroticised’ here as it is used in therapy as a way of describing the way children’s sexuality is distorted by seeing sexual scenes too soon in their lives.

  ‡ This was to be an underlying theme of Pinter’s 1988 play Mountain Language.

  * I was still very proud of both Tommy and Quadrophenia, and my involvement in and commitment to these new incarnations was extensive, but I don’t propose to write any more about them in this book, except in passing, where they related to other events in my life, not only for reasons of space but because, in spite of their importance for me in my work, they essentially belonged to the past as far as this narrative of my life is concerned. Anyone who wants to read about these adaptations and my personal involvement in them can find them on my website at www.TheWho.com.

  * David later wrote a terrific book about his son Nic’s meth addiction: Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction (Houghton Mifflin, 2008).

  * For more details on the subsequent legal wrangling over this, see www.TheWho.com.

  * For the full text, go to www.thewho.com/news/title/john-entwistle.

  * The White Knight Syndrome by Mary Lamia and Marilyn Krieger suggests that ‘though most white knights feel that they are selfless and sacrificing, their rescuing behaviour is often misguided’. Helping others can cause delusions of grandeur – everything can be fine until someone the white knight is ‘helping’ falls by the wayside.

  * Bob Long was producing a BBC documentary series called Police Protecting Children, commissioned as a result of the publicity surrounding Operation Ore. I believe that Bob Long and his team were following the work of the Metropolitan Police’s Child Protection Unit as they made various arrests, one of which happened to be mine. The filming of my statement was includ
ed in the second episode, screened a year later on 30 March 2004.

  † So many letters came that I have not replied to them all. If you wrote, I will never forget your kindness. I still have your letter.

  ‡ I could have added ‘and in my forthcoming memoirs’.

  § ‘Her songs are elegant and graceful affairs musically, and wonderfully gritty, vulnerable slice-of-life stories lyrically. The combination of the two creates a kind of emotional tension that pulls the listener in many directions, making equanimity all but impossible. […] This is adult music. It looks at the pop song as a way of expressing what is normally felt but nearly always hidden away; its expression of hope and willingness is tempered and strengthened by its wondrous candor and musical sophistication.’ (www.allmusic.com/album/cigarettes-housework-mw0000686253)