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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/eve...nterview-decade-just-cause-big-sensation.html
'Pete came at me. I knocked him spark out': Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend give their first interview in a decade... and it just might cause a big sensation
By ADRIAN DEEVOY/PUBLISHED: 25 October 2014
The real reason Roger punched Pete, why he still feels guilty about Keith Moon’s death... and his problem with immigration. Pete’s heroin overdose, his man crush on Mick Jagger... and how he’d never have written My Generation without the Queen Mum. It’s the double interview Who fans have waited nearly a decade for... and it’s only in Event
The Queen Mother, God bless her, can’t claim responsibility for many rock songs.
But she can take considerable credit for The Who’s My Generation, the loudest, snottiest rock ’n’ roll anthem of them all.
A howl of teenage angst that still reverberates through the music of U2, Oasis, Robbie Williams and even One Direction, the song takes pride of place on their latest release, The Who Hits 50, and is certain to feature in all its live and livid glory when they start their two-year ‘Beginning Of The Long Goodbye’ tour next month, celebrating The Who’s half-century.
My Generation came kicking and screaming into the world in late 1964, when Pete Townshend, The Who’s guitarist and principal songwriter, purchased an ancient Packard V12 hearse for £90 and parked it proudly outside his flat in Belgravia.
Fifty years later, Townshend picks up the story.
‘I wasn’t made to feel particularly welcome in that area,’ he recalls.
‘I thought they were snobs. I was an angry, cocky young man but I felt pushed around.
'The funny thing back then was that you didn’t have to pay for parking, so I plonked it outside my place thinking it looked rather cool.’
‘I think the Queen is remarkable. She is fabulous but I feel for her. It must be very difficult for her. I can’t understand people thinking she leads a life of luxury. She works her socks off,' said Roger
Within days, the vehicle had vanished. A mysterious telephone call informed Townshend that the car had been impounded upon the request of the Queen Mother, as she had to pass it every day and it brought to mind her late husband King George VI’s funeral 12 years earlier.
Recovery would cost an extortionate £250, but the caller offered to pay this fee in exchange for ownership of the majestic motor.
Whether or not the enigmatic Royal representative ever really existed we’ll never know.
But Townshend resentfully agreed to the dubious deal then, suitably incensed, finished writing My Generation (‘which I’d had brewing’) and dedicated it to the Queen Mum.
‘I saw her as a boring old lady who had nothing better to do than go around taking away teenagers’ cars,’ he says now. ‘But I got a rather decent song out of it, so, cheers, Ma’am.’
The Queen Mother’s regal reaction to the stuttering sturm und drang smash went unrecorded, but as The Who prepare for their Golden Jubilee jolly-up, singer Roger Daltrey CBE remains a big fan of her daughter’s work.
‘I think the Queen is remarkable,’ Daltrey enthuses.
‘She is fabulous but I feel for her. It must be very difficult for her. I can’t understand people thinking she leads a life of luxury.
'She works her socks off. I’m hard-working, I don’t stop, but she’d out-run me any day of the week. And she’s 19 years older than me.’
The Who’s busy main men, who run a £180 million business with a highly profitable two-year projection, have agreed to talk exclusively to Event, and talk they do.
Roger Daltrey gives his longest interview in recent memory, the new ‘Chatty Rog’ amazing his management team.
After an exhaustive discussion, Pete Townshend offers Event a lift home in order to continue the conversation (‘I’m enjoying this!’) into the night.
The pair preferred to be interviewed separately on this occasion to avoid any unseemly squabbling – they don’t want to cause a big sensation – but, as with their music, they complement each other perfectly.
Daltrey: gutsy, down to earth. Townshend: poetic, head in the clouds.
To have them both salute The Who’s 50th, with the only interview commemorating this significant birthday, is a rare treat.
Controversially, Townshend claims that the band have only technically been together for 33 years, as they effectively split as a touring and recording unit between 1982-99, but ignore the old grouch – The Who are 50. Let’s all have a smashing time.
In the pantheon of great British rock groups of a certain vintage, The Beatles were bigger, the Rolling Stones sexier, The Kinks cooler, Pink Floyd more psychedelic and Led Zeppelin were bluesier. But The Who were tougher.
Sonically, psychologically and, when required, physically. Their incendiary live appearances had a blast-furnace intensity, the music juddering like a jet engine, the songs seething with violent intent.
The Who elevated anger to an art form and produced hit after hit: I Can’t Explain, My Generation, Substitute, Pinball Wizard, Baba O’Riley, Won’t Get Fooled Again, Who Are You?
Onstage, the west London quartet would all but combust with rage. They were so furious with society that they wanted to die before they got old.
Two of them regrettably did. The band’s famously eccentric drummer, Keith Moon, died from an overdose of clomethiazole, an alcohol-withdrawal drug, in 1978.
Their uniquely gifted bassist, John Entwistle, succumbed to a cocaine-induced heart attack in the company of a prostitute at the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel prior to The Who’s 2002 US tour.
‘I’ve lost a lot of friends to coke,’ rues Daltrey. ‘Horrible, horrible drug. I’ve never taken it, only at the dentist.
'Never done chemicals. I’ve seen too many wonderful people turn into absolute a***holes overnight. I used to stay away from it – everyone else would be up all night and I’d shut myself away but I was incredibly naive.’
The relationship between Townshend, the pontificating art-school progeny of professional musicians, and Daltrey, the street-fighting son of Shepherd’s Bush, is a complex and contradictory one.
‘A longstanding friendship that has turned into a bonded love, founded on a deeper understanding of each other’s limitations,’ is how Townshend puts it.
‘I love him,’ shrugs Daltrey. ‘We’re like brothers, I suppose.’
Both born to hold opinions and prepared to die defending them, it is remarkable that two such diametrically opposed souls have only come to blows once.
‘Ironically, we were filming Love Reign O’er Me for the Quadrophenia movie,’ chuckles Daltrey.
‘Pete was very drunk and has come at me with a guitar, then he’s tried to punch me so I ducked the punch and hit him. It was a very clean uppercut and it knocked him spark out. He still reckons that’s what caused his bald spot.’
‘I probably deserved to get knocked out,’ sighs Townshend, tugging at the collar of a stylish black shirt. ‘It wasn’t a fight, I just stood there and let him hit me.
'What’s interesting is that he could have killed me. I went out like a light. It took me a while to piece things back together.
'It was a hell of a punch. But it was the only one – there was too much respect there for it to happen again.’
Whereas Daltrey has been content to work on his country pile (an interviewer once arrived to find him shirtless and happily mixing cement), Townshend has, in his donnish way, generally enjoyed a party.
At a David Bowie after-show bash in London at the end of 1999, I joined Townshend, Mick Jagger, Bob Geldof and Bowie in a conversation about Chinese space travel and quality knitwear (it was winter and most of us were wearing what was comically referred to by the assembled Londoners as ‘a larvely bit of cashmere’).
‘I had a homoerotic crush on Mick Jagger when he was young and beautiful,’ Townshend admits, although his autobiography puts it more robustly.
‘It was fashionable at the time and it was something I was trying to foster.’
‘Bowie’s also very beautiful to look at and always has been,’ he muses.
‘When we did Tommy at the Royal Albert Hall in 1970 he came up to me afterwards and took hold of me and said, “This is what I want to be doing – spectacle and storytelling.” And of course he went on to do it with Ziggy Stardust.’
Daltrey, who unlike Townshend doesn’t appear to have a highly developed feminine side, eschews the luxurious leather sofas at The Who’s Camden Town management office and squeezes into the cramped kitchen to chat. We perch upon steel chairs.
He left Holmshurst Manor in East Sussex early this morning, where he resides in 35-acre Jacobean splendour, and took the train to London to see hypnotist Paul McKenna, ‘a brilliant man’, about a TV show.
Daltrey’s teenage reminiscences are studded with ‘horrible fights’ and ‘terrible behaviour’. Even at 70, you wouldn’t want to take Daltrey on. Fit and compact, with a full head of hair, he cuts a foreboding figure in his fitted waistcoat and snug Levi’s.
‘I had a really bad fight with a very good friend of mine, which I’ve always regretted,’ he frowns.
‘I almost killed him. I could never back off from a fight. And I was a sheet metal worker, so I was strong. I had a pair of shoulders on me and my hands were like rocks. It was like being hit with a club hammer.’
In a brusque bark, he talks with refreshing candour about the Sixties. Woodstock was a ‘s***hole’.
He ‘got p***ed’ with The Doors’ Jim Morrison on Southern Comfort at the 1970 Isle Of Wight concert. Jimi Hendrix may have written Foxy Lady for Daltrey’s wife-to-be Heather ‘but she came home with me. There you go. How lucky was I?’
The couple married in 1971 and have had three children. Daltrey had one child from his four-year marriage to Jackie Rickman in 1964, another son was born in 1968 as a result of an affair with model Elisabeth Aronsson.
Townshend’s 40-year marriage to Karen Astley, which bore three children, ended in 2009, although they had been separated for 15 years and have remained friends. He now lives with his long-time girlfriend, musician Rachel Fuller, 41.
Both men are modestly bemused by their time as ‘highly unlikely sex symbols’, although Townshend concedes that in their pomp ‘Roger looked like a god’.
‘It’s called youth, dear boy!’ hoots Daltrey. ‘But it was also confidence.
'My wife really liked my curly hair and previous to that I’d always straightened it. But she said it was beautiful and that gave me enormous self-belief.’
‘Before that it was always there but it was sort of squashed. Maybe I have a built-in paranoia from being bullied.
'When I was young I’d broken my jaw and in proportion I had a very big chin and used to get terribly picked on. Young kids are cruel.
‘But my whole look just seemed to come together. The look I was trying to create, particularly with Tommy, was a visual of a spirit.’
It was during this time of spiritual searching that Daltrey’s jeans became so tight it looked as if they might cause him problems in later life.
‘They caused me problems in my early life!’ he laughs, like a Victorian circus master.
‘But we wore them tight. It was like the Shakespearean codpiece, it was showing off the wares. Nothing’s changed, it’s just that now kids want to show off their a**es. Personally, I preferred to show off the front view.’
We witness the legendary Daltrey ire when his 1985 American Express advert is mentioned. Wasn’t the tweedy gentleman rocker on his trout farm rather rubbing his fans’ noses in it?
‘What did they want me to say, I’m a pauper?’ he huffs. ‘I’m in one of the biggest rock ’n’ roll bands in the world and yet I’ve got no money? Bulls***!’
Pete Townshend opens the grand front door to his Georgian house on the Richmond riverside grumbling about The Great British Bake Off.
‘They were making bread with a ton of sugar and cherries in it,’ tuts the tall, slim 69-year-old, immediately making tea and polite conversation. He exhales gently.
The subject of Townshend’s arrest in 2003 for using his credit card to access a website containing indecent images of children in 1999 is not up for discussion this evening.
Townshend addressed the matter in detail over 14 pages in his 2012 autobiography Who I Am. He was cautioned by police and cleared of all charges 11 years ago.
In his book he wrote: ‘Dozens of people spoke on my behalf but Roger was the most vocal, allowing himself to get angry about the absurdity of my arrest.
'Clearly his own future was at risk if I was convicted but he went further than he needed to on my behalf.
'His solidarity with me, his faith in me and his rage at the injustice against me is something I will never forget.’
For Townshend this chapter of his life is now closed.
Earlier, Daltrey had rather abruptly said that he hadn’t read Townshend’s book, nor did he intend to.
‘Why would I need to?’ he asked, the distinctive jaw setting hard.
‘It might interfere with our relationship. So, best not to. I’ve known him for over 50 years.’
The Thames glitters at the bottom of Townshend’s garden; there is modern art on the walls that would make the Taint’s curators twitch with envy and an acoustic guitar in the corner that costs more than most cars.
The venerable rocker sits at a long table in his workroom – part mod prophet, part mad professor – steeples his hands thoughtfully and addresses tonight’s first query: why on earth are The Who touring again?
‘I’m sort of asking myself the same question,’ he laughs. ‘It seemed like a good idea about six months ago but I hate performing and The Who and touring.
'But I’m innately good at it, I don’t find it hard. I feel empowered on stage – not possessed as has been suggested.
‘We tour because we can. I’m still very fit. I wouldn’t be complaining at my age if I had Alzheimer’s. My dad died when he was 69. I feel very lucky to be alive and well.’
Townshend’s anecdotes are much like his extended guitar solos on The Who’s peerless 1970 Live At Leeds album, riffing on a theme before moving into more mind-bending territory. He is, however, nakedly honest.
‘I’m a rock star,’ he says. ‘Exalted one minute, brought down the next, under constant examination. You have no rights, but you can also do things that no one else can do. You can get at a table at The Ivy, if that’s what you want.
‘When you hit 70, which I almost have, it’s nice to have a luxurious life, but it’s not about money. Time is the most valuable commodity now.’
The Who have been a proudly apolitical band throughout their long career although, in the Camden kitchen, Daltrey says that Won’t Get Fooled Again, replete with its primal scream of discontent, ‘is a political song to me at the moment’.
‘I try not to support any political party because as an artist I don’t think you should. But I would dearly love to get out of Europe.
'I wouldn’t vote Ukip because I don’t think they’re going to get us out, although I think Nigel Farage is very clever. I don’t dislike him.’
‘I’ve always been centrist,’ grimaces Townshend. ‘But as I get older I start to value the past and traditions. A more conservative view of British life, island life.’
‘I don’t think I’ll ever forgive Labour for the state they left us in,’ Daltrey glowers, looking as if he is about to spit.
‘If Margaret Thatcher hadn’t got in, then we would have had to have left the country.
'We struggled to stay here throughout the Seventies. We were the only band that didn’t leave.
'Tax was 83 per cent. If the Tories hadn’t won I’d have gone to America like everyone else did. I’d have been a really, really, really rich man now.
‘But I’m not a Tory.’
Daltrey, a millionaire many times over, drains his mug, and warms to his theme.
‘We’re employing an ever-cheaper workforce, which can only drive the people at the bottom in this country further down the ladder.
'I’m not anti-immigrant or anti-immigration. I’m an immigrant! I don’t blame the people who came over – it’s not the people, it’s the politics.
'But it’s pulling our country down and that’s not the answer.
'Keep us where we are and pull them up. It’s destroying ambition. They brought five million people into this country and we can’t get into our hospitals now.’
His rant, in a roundabout way, brings up the sore subject of The Who’s own health issues.
Working at high volume and relying on high-risk stagecraft has taken its toll on both founder Who members.
Townshend still uses his trademark ‘wind-milling’ guitar technique, while Daltrey continues to recklessly swing his microphone around the stage.
As a result, the guitarist is partially deaf (‘my hearing “rolls off” at the high end’) and his right hand is ‘a mess, the wrist is only connected to the hand by cartilage.’
Meanwhile, Daltrey complains of ‘flat feet and arthritis’ and in 1996 almost lost an eye when he ‘got clumped in the face by a mike stand’.
Yet these ailments are small fry compared to Townshend having once actually died.
‘That’s what they say, if that indeed was death,’ he muses philosophically of his collapse in a nightclub during the early Eighties. ‘I don’t know what I’d taken or been given.
'I certainly know I was turning blue. Is that a heroin overdose? Maybe. But apparently I died for a while. They had to inject adrenaline directly into my heart then take me to hospital and beat me back to life.’
‘For a brief period I hung out with the The Sex Pistols,’ Townshend remembers fondly.
‘Steve Jones and Paul Cook once carried me down to a girl’s place down by the river and when they got me there I was in a bit of a stupor, but as soon as they’d gone I woke up and had a three-hour sex session with a pretty girl. So I couldn’t have been that bad.’
‘Pete’s drinking had got very bad by ’82,’ Daltrey contends. ‘That’s why I stopped the band. Two bottles of brandy a day and who knows what else. It was going to kill him. And I didn’t want to kill Pete Townshend.
‘So I went to see him, tell him I love him. Why are you doing this to yourself? It wasn’t pretty but he listened and went into rehab the next day. I think we still all had a lot of guilt about not saving Keith.’
Daltrey confesses that his last physical fight had been with Moon in 1965. The bright blue eyes switch to full beam as he recounts the incident.
‘Keith hit me with a tambourine; we got into a proper punch-up and I got thrown out of the band,’ he recounts.
‘I had flushed the band’s purple hearts, speed pills, down the toilet – not on a drug principle but on a music principle. I was on probation with The Who after that, but they stopped taking the drugs onstage, for a while at least. Keith still took the occasional monkey tranquiliser. But he should never have gone for me.’
When the news about Moon’s demise broke in 1978, Townshend phoned Daltrey, who simply said, ‘He’s done it.’
Remind Roger that Keith was just 32 when he died and he shudders.
‘My son is 32 now,’ he says quietly. ‘But in truth you couldn’t imagine Keith Moon becoming an old man, he just burned too brightly.’
‘As that four-piece,’ says Townshend, ‘me, Roger, John and Keith, we were the best rock band on the planet. Were...’ he mutters to himself.
In 2006, The Who received an unanticipated reboot when Townshend, a fan of grumpy detective Kurt Wallander, agreed to his song Who Are You? being used for the TV drama series CSI.
‘I knew it would help me financially,’ says the Ferrari-fancying artist reputed to be worth £40 million. ‘Because every time it’s on you get about 300 quid.
‘I also think it helped The Who, because we were coming off the radar at that point and it re-established us in people’s minds.’
Townshend could therefore afford to be magnanimous last year when it was noted that One Direction’s Best Song Ever bore suspicious similarities to The Who’s Baba O’Riley.
‘It wasn’t important enough to get excited about,’ he sniffs. ‘I could hear a bit of The Who in it, but so what? Considering the stuff we ripped off over the years, it doesn’t really matter.’
Daltrey is less keen on the young pop pretenders.
‘Here we are with the world in the state it is in and we’ve got One Direction,’ he scowls.
‘Where are the artists writing with any real sense of angst and purpose? There are no movements at the moment: we had mod and then there was punk, but it’s so hard to start a movement now. Unless it’s ISIS.’
The sun has long since set on the river and in the fading light Pete Townshend remembers his friend John Entwistle.
It is a moving eulogy, which concludes in Townshend revealing that his miniature Yorkshire terrier was named Wistle after his beloved mate and mentor. Townshend tugs at his collar again.
We move on. A movie about Keith Moon is still in development, although the process has been so protracted that Robert Downey Jr, originally earmarked for the part, is ‘too old now’, according to Daltrey, for the lead role.
Meanwhile, The Who have tentatively started work on their 12th studio album. But will they be emulating their devoted Who disciples U2 and ‘give away’ their music?
‘I don’t think that was such a great mistake,’ says Townshend evenly.
‘What Bono said is very true: it was a moment of grandiosity and arrogance mixed with generosity. That kind of sums him up.
'He gets very bad press and we all know why: he is a megalomaniacal man but that’s what makes him a singer in such a big band.’
Townshend turns on a lamp, strokes his silver beard and once again ponders The Who turning 50.
‘I still really like My Generation,’ he smiles, returning to his Queen Mother-indebted classic.
‘The meaning has changed over the years but it says, “Don’t tell me what to do”, which I love. It’s still f****** anarchic.’
'Pete came at me. I knocked him spark out': Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend give their first interview in a decade... and it just might cause a big sensation
By ADRIAN DEEVOY/PUBLISHED: 25 October 2014
The real reason Roger punched Pete, why he still feels guilty about Keith Moon’s death... and his problem with immigration. Pete’s heroin overdose, his man crush on Mick Jagger... and how he’d never have written My Generation without the Queen Mum. It’s the double interview Who fans have waited nearly a decade for... and it’s only in Event
The Queen Mother, God bless her, can’t claim responsibility for many rock songs.
But she can take considerable credit for The Who’s My Generation, the loudest, snottiest rock ’n’ roll anthem of them all.
A howl of teenage angst that still reverberates through the music of U2, Oasis, Robbie Williams and even One Direction, the song takes pride of place on their latest release, The Who Hits 50, and is certain to feature in all its live and livid glory when they start their two-year ‘Beginning Of The Long Goodbye’ tour next month, celebrating The Who’s half-century.
My Generation came kicking and screaming into the world in late 1964, when Pete Townshend, The Who’s guitarist and principal songwriter, purchased an ancient Packard V12 hearse for £90 and parked it proudly outside his flat in Belgravia.
Fifty years later, Townshend picks up the story.
‘I wasn’t made to feel particularly welcome in that area,’ he recalls.
‘I thought they were snobs. I was an angry, cocky young man but I felt pushed around.
'The funny thing back then was that you didn’t have to pay for parking, so I plonked it outside my place thinking it looked rather cool.’
‘I think the Queen is remarkable. She is fabulous but I feel for her. It must be very difficult for her. I can’t understand people thinking she leads a life of luxury. She works her socks off,' said Roger
Within days, the vehicle had vanished. A mysterious telephone call informed Townshend that the car had been impounded upon the request of the Queen Mother, as she had to pass it every day and it brought to mind her late husband King George VI’s funeral 12 years earlier.
Recovery would cost an extortionate £250, but the caller offered to pay this fee in exchange for ownership of the majestic motor.
Whether or not the enigmatic Royal representative ever really existed we’ll never know.
But Townshend resentfully agreed to the dubious deal then, suitably incensed, finished writing My Generation (‘which I’d had brewing’) and dedicated it to the Queen Mum.
‘I saw her as a boring old lady who had nothing better to do than go around taking away teenagers’ cars,’ he says now. ‘But I got a rather decent song out of it, so, cheers, Ma’am.’
The Queen Mother’s regal reaction to the stuttering sturm und drang smash went unrecorded, but as The Who prepare for their Golden Jubilee jolly-up, singer Roger Daltrey CBE remains a big fan of her daughter’s work.
‘I think the Queen is remarkable,’ Daltrey enthuses.
‘She is fabulous but I feel for her. It must be very difficult for her. I can’t understand people thinking she leads a life of luxury.
'She works her socks off. I’m hard-working, I don’t stop, but she’d out-run me any day of the week. And she’s 19 years older than me.’
The Who’s busy main men, who run a £180 million business with a highly profitable two-year projection, have agreed to talk exclusively to Event, and talk they do.
Roger Daltrey gives his longest interview in recent memory, the new ‘Chatty Rog’ amazing his management team.
After an exhaustive discussion, Pete Townshend offers Event a lift home in order to continue the conversation (‘I’m enjoying this!’) into the night.
The pair preferred to be interviewed separately on this occasion to avoid any unseemly squabbling – they don’t want to cause a big sensation – but, as with their music, they complement each other perfectly.
Daltrey: gutsy, down to earth. Townshend: poetic, head in the clouds.
To have them both salute The Who’s 50th, with the only interview commemorating this significant birthday, is a rare treat.
Controversially, Townshend claims that the band have only technically been together for 33 years, as they effectively split as a touring and recording unit between 1982-99, but ignore the old grouch – The Who are 50. Let’s all have a smashing time.
In the pantheon of great British rock groups of a certain vintage, The Beatles were bigger, the Rolling Stones sexier, The Kinks cooler, Pink Floyd more psychedelic and Led Zeppelin were bluesier. But The Who were tougher.
Sonically, psychologically and, when required, physically. Their incendiary live appearances had a blast-furnace intensity, the music juddering like a jet engine, the songs seething with violent intent.
The Who elevated anger to an art form and produced hit after hit: I Can’t Explain, My Generation, Substitute, Pinball Wizard, Baba O’Riley, Won’t Get Fooled Again, Who Are You?
Onstage, the west London quartet would all but combust with rage. They were so furious with society that they wanted to die before they got old.
Two of them regrettably did. The band’s famously eccentric drummer, Keith Moon, died from an overdose of clomethiazole, an alcohol-withdrawal drug, in 1978.
Their uniquely gifted bassist, John Entwistle, succumbed to a cocaine-induced heart attack in the company of a prostitute at the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel prior to The Who’s 2002 US tour.
‘I’ve lost a lot of friends to coke,’ rues Daltrey. ‘Horrible, horrible drug. I’ve never taken it, only at the dentist.
'Never done chemicals. I’ve seen too many wonderful people turn into absolute a***holes overnight. I used to stay away from it – everyone else would be up all night and I’d shut myself away but I was incredibly naive.’
The relationship between Townshend, the pontificating art-school progeny of professional musicians, and Daltrey, the street-fighting son of Shepherd’s Bush, is a complex and contradictory one.
‘A longstanding friendship that has turned into a bonded love, founded on a deeper understanding of each other’s limitations,’ is how Townshend puts it.
‘I love him,’ shrugs Daltrey. ‘We’re like brothers, I suppose.’
Both born to hold opinions and prepared to die defending them, it is remarkable that two such diametrically opposed souls have only come to blows once.
‘Ironically, we were filming Love Reign O’er Me for the Quadrophenia movie,’ chuckles Daltrey.
‘Pete was very drunk and has come at me with a guitar, then he’s tried to punch me so I ducked the punch and hit him. It was a very clean uppercut and it knocked him spark out. He still reckons that’s what caused his bald spot.’
‘I probably deserved to get knocked out,’ sighs Townshend, tugging at the collar of a stylish black shirt. ‘It wasn’t a fight, I just stood there and let him hit me.
'What’s interesting is that he could have killed me. I went out like a light. It took me a while to piece things back together.
'It was a hell of a punch. But it was the only one – there was too much respect there for it to happen again.’
Whereas Daltrey has been content to work on his country pile (an interviewer once arrived to find him shirtless and happily mixing cement), Townshend has, in his donnish way, generally enjoyed a party.
At a David Bowie after-show bash in London at the end of 1999, I joined Townshend, Mick Jagger, Bob Geldof and Bowie in a conversation about Chinese space travel and quality knitwear (it was winter and most of us were wearing what was comically referred to by the assembled Londoners as ‘a larvely bit of cashmere’).
‘I had a homoerotic crush on Mick Jagger when he was young and beautiful,’ Townshend admits, although his autobiography puts it more robustly.
‘It was fashionable at the time and it was something I was trying to foster.’
‘Bowie’s also very beautiful to look at and always has been,’ he muses.
‘When we did Tommy at the Royal Albert Hall in 1970 he came up to me afterwards and took hold of me and said, “This is what I want to be doing – spectacle and storytelling.” And of course he went on to do it with Ziggy Stardust.’
Daltrey, who unlike Townshend doesn’t appear to have a highly developed feminine side, eschews the luxurious leather sofas at The Who’s Camden Town management office and squeezes into the cramped kitchen to chat. We perch upon steel chairs.
He left Holmshurst Manor in East Sussex early this morning, where he resides in 35-acre Jacobean splendour, and took the train to London to see hypnotist Paul McKenna, ‘a brilliant man’, about a TV show.
Daltrey’s teenage reminiscences are studded with ‘horrible fights’ and ‘terrible behaviour’. Even at 70, you wouldn’t want to take Daltrey on. Fit and compact, with a full head of hair, he cuts a foreboding figure in his fitted waistcoat and snug Levi’s.
‘I had a really bad fight with a very good friend of mine, which I’ve always regretted,’ he frowns.
‘I almost killed him. I could never back off from a fight. And I was a sheet metal worker, so I was strong. I had a pair of shoulders on me and my hands were like rocks. It was like being hit with a club hammer.’
In a brusque bark, he talks with refreshing candour about the Sixties. Woodstock was a ‘s***hole’.
He ‘got p***ed’ with The Doors’ Jim Morrison on Southern Comfort at the 1970 Isle Of Wight concert. Jimi Hendrix may have written Foxy Lady for Daltrey’s wife-to-be Heather ‘but she came home with me. There you go. How lucky was I?’
The couple married in 1971 and have had three children. Daltrey had one child from his four-year marriage to Jackie Rickman in 1964, another son was born in 1968 as a result of an affair with model Elisabeth Aronsson.
Townshend’s 40-year marriage to Karen Astley, which bore three children, ended in 2009, although they had been separated for 15 years and have remained friends. He now lives with his long-time girlfriend, musician Rachel Fuller, 41.
Both men are modestly bemused by their time as ‘highly unlikely sex symbols’, although Townshend concedes that in their pomp ‘Roger looked like a god’.
‘It’s called youth, dear boy!’ hoots Daltrey. ‘But it was also confidence.
'My wife really liked my curly hair and previous to that I’d always straightened it. But she said it was beautiful and that gave me enormous self-belief.’
‘Before that it was always there but it was sort of squashed. Maybe I have a built-in paranoia from being bullied.
'When I was young I’d broken my jaw and in proportion I had a very big chin and used to get terribly picked on. Young kids are cruel.
‘But my whole look just seemed to come together. The look I was trying to create, particularly with Tommy, was a visual of a spirit.’
It was during this time of spiritual searching that Daltrey’s jeans became so tight it looked as if they might cause him problems in later life.
‘They caused me problems in my early life!’ he laughs, like a Victorian circus master.
‘But we wore them tight. It was like the Shakespearean codpiece, it was showing off the wares. Nothing’s changed, it’s just that now kids want to show off their a**es. Personally, I preferred to show off the front view.’
We witness the legendary Daltrey ire when his 1985 American Express advert is mentioned. Wasn’t the tweedy gentleman rocker on his trout farm rather rubbing his fans’ noses in it?
‘What did they want me to say, I’m a pauper?’ he huffs. ‘I’m in one of the biggest rock ’n’ roll bands in the world and yet I’ve got no money? Bulls***!’
Pete Townshend opens the grand front door to his Georgian house on the Richmond riverside grumbling about The Great British Bake Off.
‘They were making bread with a ton of sugar and cherries in it,’ tuts the tall, slim 69-year-old, immediately making tea and polite conversation. He exhales gently.
The subject of Townshend’s arrest in 2003 for using his credit card to access a website containing indecent images of children in 1999 is not up for discussion this evening.
Townshend addressed the matter in detail over 14 pages in his 2012 autobiography Who I Am. He was cautioned by police and cleared of all charges 11 years ago.
In his book he wrote: ‘Dozens of people spoke on my behalf but Roger was the most vocal, allowing himself to get angry about the absurdity of my arrest.
'Clearly his own future was at risk if I was convicted but he went further than he needed to on my behalf.
'His solidarity with me, his faith in me and his rage at the injustice against me is something I will never forget.’
For Townshend this chapter of his life is now closed.
Earlier, Daltrey had rather abruptly said that he hadn’t read Townshend’s book, nor did he intend to.
‘Why would I need to?’ he asked, the distinctive jaw setting hard.
‘It might interfere with our relationship. So, best not to. I’ve known him for over 50 years.’
The Thames glitters at the bottom of Townshend’s garden; there is modern art on the walls that would make the Taint’s curators twitch with envy and an acoustic guitar in the corner that costs more than most cars.
The venerable rocker sits at a long table in his workroom – part mod prophet, part mad professor – steeples his hands thoughtfully and addresses tonight’s first query: why on earth are The Who touring again?
‘I’m sort of asking myself the same question,’ he laughs. ‘It seemed like a good idea about six months ago but I hate performing and The Who and touring.
'But I’m innately good at it, I don’t find it hard. I feel empowered on stage – not possessed as has been suggested.
‘We tour because we can. I’m still very fit. I wouldn’t be complaining at my age if I had Alzheimer’s. My dad died when he was 69. I feel very lucky to be alive and well.’
Townshend’s anecdotes are much like his extended guitar solos on The Who’s peerless 1970 Live At Leeds album, riffing on a theme before moving into more mind-bending territory. He is, however, nakedly honest.
‘I’m a rock star,’ he says. ‘Exalted one minute, brought down the next, under constant examination. You have no rights, but you can also do things that no one else can do. You can get at a table at The Ivy, if that’s what you want.
‘When you hit 70, which I almost have, it’s nice to have a luxurious life, but it’s not about money. Time is the most valuable commodity now.’
The Who have been a proudly apolitical band throughout their long career although, in the Camden kitchen, Daltrey says that Won’t Get Fooled Again, replete with its primal scream of discontent, ‘is a political song to me at the moment’.
‘I try not to support any political party because as an artist I don’t think you should. But I would dearly love to get out of Europe.
'I wouldn’t vote Ukip because I don’t think they’re going to get us out, although I think Nigel Farage is very clever. I don’t dislike him.’
‘I’ve always been centrist,’ grimaces Townshend. ‘But as I get older I start to value the past and traditions. A more conservative view of British life, island life.’
‘I don’t think I’ll ever forgive Labour for the state they left us in,’ Daltrey glowers, looking as if he is about to spit.
‘If Margaret Thatcher hadn’t got in, then we would have had to have left the country.
'We struggled to stay here throughout the Seventies. We were the only band that didn’t leave.
'Tax was 83 per cent. If the Tories hadn’t won I’d have gone to America like everyone else did. I’d have been a really, really, really rich man now.
‘But I’m not a Tory.’
Daltrey, a millionaire many times over, drains his mug, and warms to his theme.
‘We’re employing an ever-cheaper workforce, which can only drive the people at the bottom in this country further down the ladder.
'I’m not anti-immigrant or anti-immigration. I’m an immigrant! I don’t blame the people who came over – it’s not the people, it’s the politics.
'But it’s pulling our country down and that’s not the answer.
'Keep us where we are and pull them up. It’s destroying ambition. They brought five million people into this country and we can’t get into our hospitals now.’
His rant, in a roundabout way, brings up the sore subject of The Who’s own health issues.
Working at high volume and relying on high-risk stagecraft has taken its toll on both founder Who members.
Townshend still uses his trademark ‘wind-milling’ guitar technique, while Daltrey continues to recklessly swing his microphone around the stage.
As a result, the guitarist is partially deaf (‘my hearing “rolls off” at the high end’) and his right hand is ‘a mess, the wrist is only connected to the hand by cartilage.’
Meanwhile, Daltrey complains of ‘flat feet and arthritis’ and in 1996 almost lost an eye when he ‘got clumped in the face by a mike stand’.
Yet these ailments are small fry compared to Townshend having once actually died.
‘That’s what they say, if that indeed was death,’ he muses philosophically of his collapse in a nightclub during the early Eighties. ‘I don’t know what I’d taken or been given.
'I certainly know I was turning blue. Is that a heroin overdose? Maybe. But apparently I died for a while. They had to inject adrenaline directly into my heart then take me to hospital and beat me back to life.’
‘For a brief period I hung out with the The Sex Pistols,’ Townshend remembers fondly.
‘Steve Jones and Paul Cook once carried me down to a girl’s place down by the river and when they got me there I was in a bit of a stupor, but as soon as they’d gone I woke up and had a three-hour sex session with a pretty girl. So I couldn’t have been that bad.’
‘Pete’s drinking had got very bad by ’82,’ Daltrey contends. ‘That’s why I stopped the band. Two bottles of brandy a day and who knows what else. It was going to kill him. And I didn’t want to kill Pete Townshend.
‘So I went to see him, tell him I love him. Why are you doing this to yourself? It wasn’t pretty but he listened and went into rehab the next day. I think we still all had a lot of guilt about not saving Keith.’
Daltrey confesses that his last physical fight had been with Moon in 1965. The bright blue eyes switch to full beam as he recounts the incident.
‘Keith hit me with a tambourine; we got into a proper punch-up and I got thrown out of the band,’ he recounts.
‘I had flushed the band’s purple hearts, speed pills, down the toilet – not on a drug principle but on a music principle. I was on probation with The Who after that, but they stopped taking the drugs onstage, for a while at least. Keith still took the occasional monkey tranquiliser. But he should never have gone for me.’
When the news about Moon’s demise broke in 1978, Townshend phoned Daltrey, who simply said, ‘He’s done it.’
Remind Roger that Keith was just 32 when he died and he shudders.
‘My son is 32 now,’ he says quietly. ‘But in truth you couldn’t imagine Keith Moon becoming an old man, he just burned too brightly.’
‘As that four-piece,’ says Townshend, ‘me, Roger, John and Keith, we were the best rock band on the planet. Were...’ he mutters to himself.
In 2006, The Who received an unanticipated reboot when Townshend, a fan of grumpy detective Kurt Wallander, agreed to his song Who Are You? being used for the TV drama series CSI.
‘I knew it would help me financially,’ says the Ferrari-fancying artist reputed to be worth £40 million. ‘Because every time it’s on you get about 300 quid.
‘I also think it helped The Who, because we were coming off the radar at that point and it re-established us in people’s minds.’
Townshend could therefore afford to be magnanimous last year when it was noted that One Direction’s Best Song Ever bore suspicious similarities to The Who’s Baba O’Riley.
‘It wasn’t important enough to get excited about,’ he sniffs. ‘I could hear a bit of The Who in it, but so what? Considering the stuff we ripped off over the years, it doesn’t really matter.’
Daltrey is less keen on the young pop pretenders.
‘Here we are with the world in the state it is in and we’ve got One Direction,’ he scowls.
‘Where are the artists writing with any real sense of angst and purpose? There are no movements at the moment: we had mod and then there was punk, but it’s so hard to start a movement now. Unless it’s ISIS.’
The sun has long since set on the river and in the fading light Pete Townshend remembers his friend John Entwistle.
It is a moving eulogy, which concludes in Townshend revealing that his miniature Yorkshire terrier was named Wistle after his beloved mate and mentor. Townshend tugs at his collar again.
We move on. A movie about Keith Moon is still in development, although the process has been so protracted that Robert Downey Jr, originally earmarked for the part, is ‘too old now’, according to Daltrey, for the lead role.
Meanwhile, The Who have tentatively started work on their 12th studio album. But will they be emulating their devoted Who disciples U2 and ‘give away’ their music?
‘I don’t think that was such a great mistake,’ says Townshend evenly.
‘What Bono said is very true: it was a moment of grandiosity and arrogance mixed with generosity. That kind of sums him up.
'He gets very bad press and we all know why: he is a megalomaniacal man but that’s what makes him a singer in such a big band.’
Townshend turns on a lamp, strokes his silver beard and once again ponders The Who turning 50.
‘I still really like My Generation,’ he smiles, returning to his Queen Mother-indebted classic.
‘The meaning has changed over the years but it says, “Don’t tell me what to do”, which I love. It’s still f****** anarchic.’
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Pete Townshend is the most incredible musician I have ever seen live. His stage presence is incredible. He just takes over the performance.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/eve...nterview-decade-just-cause-big-sensation.html
'Pete came at me. I knocked him spark out': Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend give their first interview in a decade... and it just might cause a big sensation
By ADRIAN DEEVOY/PUBLISHED: 25 October 2014
The real reason Roger punched Pete, why he still feels guilty about Keith Moon’s death... and his problem with immigration. Pete’s heroin overdose, his man crush on Mick Jagger... and how he’d never have written My Generation without the Queen Mum. It’s the double interview Who fans have waited nearly a decade for... and it’s only in Event
The Queen Mother, God bless her, can’t claim responsibility for many rock songs.
But she can take considerable credit for The Who’s My Generation, the loudest, snottiest rock ’n’ roll anthem of them all.
A howl of teenage angst that still reverberates through the music of U2, Oasis, Robbie Williams and even One Direction, the song takes pride of place on their latest release, The Who Hits 50, and is certain to feature in all its live and livid glory when they start their two-year ‘Beginning Of The Long Goodbye’ tour next month, celebrating The Who’s half-century.
My Generation came kicking and screaming into the world in late 1964, when Pete Townshend, The Who’s guitarist and principal songwriter, purchased an ancient Packard V12 hearse for £90 and parked it proudly outside his flat in Belgravia.
Fifty years later, Townshend picks up the story.
‘I wasn’t made to feel particularly welcome in that area,’ he recalls.
‘I thought they were snobs. I was an angry, cocky young man but I felt pushed around.
'The funny thing back then was that you didn’t have to pay for parking, so I plonked it outside my place thinking it looked rather cool.’
‘I think the Queen is remarkable. She is fabulous but I feel for her. It must be very difficult for her. I can’t understand people thinking she leads a life of luxury. She works her socks off,' said Roger
Within days, the vehicle had vanished. A mysterious telephone call informed Townshend that the car had been impounded upon the request of the Queen Mother, as she had to pass it every day and it brought to mind her late husband King George VI’s funeral 12 years earlier.
Recovery would cost an extortionate £250, but the caller offered to pay this fee in exchange for ownership of the majestic motor.
Whether or not the enigmatic Royal representative ever really existed we’ll never know.
But Townshend resentfully agreed to the dubious deal then, suitably incensed, finished writing My Generation (‘which I’d had brewing’) and dedicated it to the Queen Mum.
‘I saw her as a boring old lady who had nothing better to do than go around taking away teenagers’ cars,’ he says now. ‘But I got a rather decent song out of it, so, cheers, Ma’am.’
The Queen Mother’s regal reaction to the stuttering sturm und drang smash went unrecorded, but as The Who prepare for their Golden Jubilee jolly-up, singer Roger Daltrey CBE remains a big fan of her daughter’s work.
‘I think the Queen is remarkable,’ Daltrey enthuses.
‘She is fabulous but I feel for her. It must be very difficult for her. I can’t understand people thinking she leads a life of luxury.
'She works her socks off. I’m hard-working, I don’t stop, but she’d out-run me any day of the week. And she’s 19 years older than me.’
The Who’s busy main men, who run a £180 million business with a highly profitable two-year projection, have agreed to talk exclusively to Event, and talk they do.
Roger Daltrey gives his longest interview in recent memory, the new ‘Chatty Rog’ amazing his management team.
After an exhaustive discussion, Pete Townshend offers Event a lift home in order to continue the conversation (‘I’m enjoying this!’) into the night.
The pair preferred to be interviewed separately on this occasion to avoid any unseemly squabbling – they don’t want to cause a big sensation – but, as with their music, they complement each other perfectly.
Daltrey: gutsy, down to earth. Townshend: poetic, head in the clouds.
To have them both salute The Who’s 50th, with the only interview commemorating this significant birthday, is a rare treat.
Controversially, Townshend claims that the band have only technically been together for 33 years, as they effectively split as a touring and recording unit between 1982-99, but ignore the old grouch – The Who are 50. Let’s all have a smashing time.
In the pantheon of great British rock groups of a certain vintage, The Beatles were bigger, the Rolling Stones sexier, The Kinks cooler, Pink Floyd more psychedelic and Led Zeppelin were bluesier. But The Who were tougher.
Sonically, psychologically and, when required, physically. Their incendiary live appearances had a blast-furnace intensity, the music juddering like a jet engine, the songs seething with violent intent.
The Who elevated anger to an art form and produced hit after hit: I Can’t Explain, My Generation, Substitute, Pinball Wizard, Baba O’Riley, Won’t Get Fooled Again, Who Are You?
Onstage, the west London quartet would all but combust with rage. They were so furious with society that they wanted to die before they got old.
Two of them regrettably did. The band’s famously eccentric drummer, Keith Moon, died from an overdose of clomethiazole, an alcohol-withdrawal drug, in 1978.
Their uniquely gifted bassist, John Entwistle, succumbed to a cocaine-induced heart attack in the company of a prostitute at the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel prior to The Who’s 2002 US tour.
‘I’ve lost a lot of friends to coke,’ rues Daltrey. ‘Horrible, horrible drug. I’ve never taken it, only at the dentist.
'Never done chemicals. I’ve seen too many wonderful people turn into absolute a***holes overnight. I used to stay away from it – everyone else would be up all night and I’d shut myself away but I was incredibly naive.’
The relationship between Townshend, the pontificating art-school progeny of professional musicians, and Daltrey, the street-fighting son of Shepherd’s Bush, is a complex and contradictory one.
‘A longstanding friendship that has turned into a bonded love, founded on a deeper understanding of each other’s limitations,’ is how Townshend puts it.
‘I love him,’ shrugs Daltrey. ‘We’re like brothers, I suppose.’
Both born to hold opinions and prepared to die defending them, it is remarkable that two such diametrically opposed souls have only come to blows once.
‘Ironically, we were filming Love Reign O’er Me for the Quadrophenia movie,’ chuckles Daltrey.
‘Pete was very drunk and has come at me with a guitar, then he’s tried to punch me so I ducked the punch and hit him. It was a very clean uppercut and it knocked him spark out. He still reckons that’s what caused his bald spot.’
‘I probably deserved to get knocked out,’ sighs Townshend, tugging at the collar of a stylish black shirt. ‘It wasn’t a fight, I just stood there and let him hit me.
'What’s interesting is that he could have killed me. I went out like a light. It took me a while to piece things back together.
'It was a hell of a punch. But it was the only one – there was too much respect there for it to happen again.’
Whereas Daltrey has been content to work on his country pile (an interviewer once arrived to find him shirtless and happily mixing cement), Townshend has, in his donnish way, generally enjoyed a party.
At a David Bowie after-show bash in London at the end of 1999, I joined Townshend, Mick Jagger, Bob Geldof and Bowie in a conversation about Chinese space travel and quality knitwear (it was winter and most of us were wearing what was comically referred to by the assembled Londoners as ‘a larvely bit of cashmere’).
‘I had a homoerotic crush on Mick Jagger when he was young and beautiful,’ Townshend admits, although his autobiography puts it more robustly.
‘It was fashionable at the time and it was something I was trying to foster.’
‘Bowie’s also very beautiful to look at and always has been,’ he muses.
‘When we did Tommy at the Royal Albert Hall in 1970 he came up to me afterwards and took hold of me and said, “This is what I want to be doing – spectacle and storytelling.” And of course he went on to do it with Ziggy Stardust.’
Daltrey, who unlike Townshend doesn’t appear to have a highly developed feminine side, eschews the luxurious leather sofas at The Who’s Camden Town management office and squeezes into the cramped kitchen to chat. We perch upon steel chairs.
He left Holmshurst Manor in East Sussex early this morning, where he resides in 35-acre Jacobean splendour, and took the train to London to see hypnotist Paul McKenna, ‘a brilliant man’, about a TV show.
Daltrey’s teenage reminiscences are studded with ‘horrible fights’ and ‘terrible behaviour’. Even at 70, you wouldn’t want to take Daltrey on. Fit and compact, with a full head of hair, he cuts a foreboding figure in his fitted waistcoat and snug Levi’s.
‘I had a really bad fight with a very good friend of mine, which I’ve always regretted,’ he frowns.
‘I almost killed him. I could never back off from a fight. And I was a sheet metal worker, so I was strong. I had a pair of shoulders on me and my hands were like rocks. It was like being hit with a club hammer.’
In a brusque bark, he talks with refreshing candour about the Sixties. Woodstock was a ‘s***hole’.
He ‘got p***ed’ with The Doors’ Jim Morrison on Southern Comfort at the 1970 Isle Of Wight concert. Jimi Hendrix may have written Foxy Lady for Daltrey’s wife-to-be Heather ‘but she came home with me. There you go. How lucky was I?’
The couple married in 1971 and have had three children. Daltrey had one child from his four-year marriage to Jackie Rickman in 1964, another son was born in 1968 as a result of an affair with model Elisabeth Aronsson.
Townshend’s 40-year marriage to Karen Astley, which bore three children, ended in 2009, although they had been separated for 15 years and have remained friends. He now lives with his long-time girlfriend, musician Rachel Fuller, 41.
Both men are modestly bemused by their time as ‘highly unlikely sex symbols’, although Townshend concedes that in their pomp ‘Roger looked like a god’.
‘It’s called youth, dear boy!’ hoots Daltrey. ‘But it was also confidence.
'My wife really liked my curly hair and previous to that I’d always straightened it. But she said it was beautiful and that gave me enormous self-belief.’
‘Before that it was always there but it was sort of squashed. Maybe I have a built-in paranoia from being bullied.
'When I was young I’d broken my jaw and in proportion I had a very big chin and used to get terribly picked on. Young kids are cruel.
‘But my whole look just seemed to come together. The look I was trying to create, particularly with Tommy, was a visual of a spirit.’
It was during this time of spiritual searching that Daltrey’s jeans became so tight it looked as if they might cause him problems in later life.
‘They caused me problems in my early life!’ he laughs, like a Victorian circus master.
‘But we wore them tight. It was like the Shakespearean codpiece, it was showing off the wares. Nothing’s changed, it’s just that now kids want to show off their a**es. Personally, I preferred to show off the front view.’
We witness the legendary Daltrey ire when his 1985 American Express advert is mentioned. Wasn’t the tweedy gentleman rocker on his trout farm rather rubbing his fans’ noses in it?
‘What did they want me to say, I’m a pauper?’ he huffs. ‘I’m in one of the biggest rock ’n’ roll bands in the world and yet I’ve got no money? Bulls***!’
Pete Townshend opens the grand front door to his Georgian house on the Richmond riverside grumbling about The Great British Bake Off.
‘They were making bread with a ton of sugar and cherries in it,’ tuts the tall, slim 69-year-old, immediately making tea and polite conversation. He exhales gently.
The subject of Townshend’s arrest in 2003 for using his credit card to access a website containing indecent images of children in 1999 is not up for discussion this evening.
Townshend addressed the matter in detail over 14 pages in his 2012 autobiography Who I Am. He was cautioned by police and cleared of all charges 11 years ago.
In his book he wrote: ‘Dozens of people spoke on my behalf but Roger was the most vocal, allowing himself to get angry about the absurdity of my arrest.
'Clearly his own future was at risk if I was convicted but he went further than he needed to on my behalf.
'His solidarity with me, his faith in me and his rage at the injustice against me is something I will never forget.’
For Townshend this chapter of his life is now closed.
Earlier, Daltrey had rather abruptly said that he hadn’t read Townshend’s book, nor did he intend to.
‘Why would I need to?’ he asked, the distinctive jaw setting hard.
‘It might interfere with our relationship. So, best not to. I’ve known him for over 50 years.’
The Thames glitters at the bottom of Townshend’s garden; there is modern art on the walls that would make the Taint’s curators twitch with envy and an acoustic guitar in the corner that costs more than most cars.
The venerable rocker sits at a long table in his workroom – part mod prophet, part mad professor – steeples his hands thoughtfully and addresses tonight’s first query: why on earth are The Who touring again?
‘I’m sort of asking myself the same question,’ he laughs. ‘It seemed like a good idea about six months ago but I hate performing and The Who and touring.
'But I’m innately good at it, I don’t find it hard. I feel empowered on stage – not possessed as has been suggested.
‘We tour because we can. I’m still very fit. I wouldn’t be complaining at my age if I had Alzheimer’s. My dad died when he was 69. I feel very lucky to be alive and well.’
Townshend’s anecdotes are much like his extended guitar solos on The Who’s peerless 1970 Live At Leeds album, riffing on a theme before moving into more mind-bending territory. He is, however, nakedly honest.
‘I’m a rock star,’ he says. ‘Exalted one minute, brought down the next, under constant examination. You have no rights, but you can also do things that no one else can do. You can get at a table at The Ivy, if that’s what you want.
‘When you hit 70, which I almost have, it’s nice to have a luxurious life, but it’s not about money. Time is the most valuable commodity now.’
The Who have been a proudly apolitical band throughout their long career although, in the Camden kitchen, Daltrey says that Won’t Get Fooled Again, replete with its primal scream of discontent, ‘is a political song to me at the moment’.
‘I try not to support any political party because as an artist I don’t think you should. But I would dearly love to get out of Europe.
'I wouldn’t vote Ukip because I don’t think they’re going to get us out, although I think Nigel Farage is very clever. I don’t dislike him.’
‘I’ve always been centrist,’ grimaces Townshend. ‘But as I get older I start to value the past and traditions. A more conservative view of British life, island life.’
‘I don’t think I’ll ever forgive Labour for the state they left us in,’ Daltrey glowers, looking as if he is about to spit.
‘If Margaret Thatcher hadn’t got in, then we would have had to have left the country.
'We struggled to stay here throughout the Seventies. We were the only band that didn’t leave.
'Tax was 83 per cent. If the Tories hadn’t won I’d have gone to America like everyone else did. I’d have been a really, really, really rich man now.
‘But I’m not a Tory.’
Daltrey, a millionaire many times over, drains his mug, and warms to his theme.
‘We’re employing an ever-cheaper workforce, which can only drive the people at the bottom in this country further down the ladder.
'I’m not anti-immigrant or anti-immigration. I’m an immigrant! I don’t blame the people who came over – it’s not the people, it’s the politics.
'But it’s pulling our country down and that’s not the answer.
'Keep us where we are and pull them up. It’s destroying ambition. They brought five million people into this country and we can’t get into our hospitals now.’
His rant, in a roundabout way, brings up the sore subject of The Who’s own health issues.
Working at high volume and relying on high-risk stagecraft has taken its toll on both founder Who members.
Townshend still uses his trademark ‘wind-milling’ guitar technique, while Daltrey continues to recklessly swing his microphone around the stage.
As a result, the guitarist is partially deaf (‘my hearing “rolls off” at the high end’) and his right hand is ‘a mess, the wrist is only connected to the hand by cartilage.’
Meanwhile, Daltrey complains of ‘flat feet and arthritis’ and in 1996 almost lost an eye when he ‘got clumped in the face by a mike stand’.
Yet these ailments are small fry compared to Townshend having once actually died.
‘That’s what they say, if that indeed was death,’ he muses philosophically of his collapse in a nightclub during the early Eighties. ‘I don’t know what I’d taken or been given.
'I certainly know I was turning blue. Is that a heroin overdose? Maybe. But apparently I died for a while. They had to inject adrenaline directly into my heart then take me to hospital and beat me back to life.’
‘For a brief period I hung out with the The Sex Pistols,’ Townshend remembers fondly.
‘Steve Jones and Paul Cook once carried me down to a girl’s place down by the river and when they got me there I was in a bit of a stupor, but as soon as they’d gone I woke up and had a three-hour sex session with a pretty girl. So I couldn’t have been that bad.’
‘Pete’s drinking had got very bad by ’82,’ Daltrey contends. ‘That’s why I stopped the band. Two bottles of brandy a day and who knows what else. It was going to kill him. And I didn’t want to kill Pete Townshend.
‘So I went to see him, tell him I love him. Why are you doing this to yourself? It wasn’t pretty but he listened and went into rehab the next day. I think we still all had a lot of guilt about not saving Keith.’
Daltrey confesses that his last physical fight had been with Moon in 1965. The bright blue eyes switch to full beam as he recounts the incident.
‘Keith hit me with a tambourine; we got into a proper punch-up and I got thrown out of the band,’ he recounts.
‘I had flushed the band’s purple hearts, speed pills, down the toilet – not on a drug principle but on a music principle. I was on probation with The Who after that, but they stopped taking the drugs onstage, for a while at least. Keith still took the occasional monkey tranquiliser. But he should never have gone for me.’
When the news about Moon’s demise broke in 1978, Townshend phoned Daltrey, who simply said, ‘He’s done it.’
Remind Roger that Keith was just 32 when he died and he shudders.
‘My son is 32 now,’ he says quietly. ‘But in truth you couldn’t imagine Keith Moon becoming an old man, he just burned too brightly.’
‘As that four-piece,’ says Townshend, ‘me, Roger, John and Keith, we were the best rock band on the planet. Were...’ he mutters to himself.
In 2006, The Who received an unanticipated reboot when Townshend, a fan of grumpy detective Kurt Wallander, agreed to his song Who Are You? being used for the TV drama series CSI.
‘I knew it would help me financially,’ says the Ferrari-fancying artist reputed to be worth £40 million. ‘Because every time it’s on you get about 300 quid.
‘I also think it helped The Who, because we were coming off the radar at that point and it re-established us in people’s minds.’
Townshend could therefore afford to be magnanimous last year when it was noted that One Direction’s Best Song Ever bore suspicious similarities to The Who’s Baba O’Riley.
‘It wasn’t important enough to get excited about,’ he sniffs. ‘I could hear a bit of The Who in it, but so what? Considering the stuff we ripped off over the years, it doesn’t really matter.’
Daltrey is less keen on the young pop pretenders.
‘Here we are with the world in the state it is in and we’ve got One Direction,’ he scowls.
‘Where are the artists writing with any real sense of angst and purpose? There are no movements at the moment: we had mod and then there was punk, but it’s so hard to start a movement now. Unless it’s ISIS.’
The sun has long since set on the river and in the fading light Pete Townshend remembers his friend John Entwistle.
It is a moving eulogy, which concludes in Townshend revealing that his miniature Yorkshire terrier was named Wistle after his beloved mate and mentor. Townshend tugs at his collar again.
We move on. A movie about Keith Moon is still in development, although the process has been so protracted that Robert Downey Jr, originally earmarked for the part, is ‘too old now’, according to Daltrey, for the lead role.
Meanwhile, The Who have tentatively started work on their 12th studio album. But will they be emulating their devoted Who disciples U2 and ‘give away’ their music?
‘I don’t think that was such a great mistake,’ says Townshend evenly.
‘What Bono said is very true: it was a moment of grandiosity and arrogance mixed with generosity. That kind of sums him up.
'He gets very bad press and we all know why: he is a megalomaniacal man but that’s what makes him a singer in such a big band.’
Townshend turns on a lamp, strokes his silver beard and once again ponders The Who turning 50.
‘I still really like My Generation,’ he smiles, returning to his Queen Mother-indebted classic.
‘The meaning has changed over the years but it says, “Don’t tell me what to do”, which I love. It’s still f****** anarchic.’
And Roger Daltrey is a scumbag who made moves backstage on my 1st wife, when she was still a teenager
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Never got to see the Who live. Loved their music from the very beginning and still do today. Ever since I read that interview and posted it, I've had 'Baba O' Riley' stuck in my head. :rockon:
Stranger
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Of all places, I saw them at the LA Coliseum.
PS. I edited/updated my earlier post. Check out these 2nd little line I added
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And Roger Daltrey is a scumbag who made moves backstage on my 1st wife, when she was still a teenager
He was probably a youngster then too. Anyway she picked you over him so there's that.
Back in the early 80's this band from Australia, called the Church, came to San Jose. This guy I knew, his wife and one of her girlfriends went to see them play. His wife ran off with one of the guy's in the band and moved to Australia with him. Poor bastard...or maybe not.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9wm7eKzti8
Stranger
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He was probably a youngster then too. Anyway she picked you over him so there's that.
Back in the early 80's this band from Australia, called the Church, came to San Jose. This guy I knew, his wife and one of her girlfriends went to see them play. His wife ran off with one of the guy's in the band and moved to Australia with him. Poor bastard...or maybe not.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9wm7eKzti8
Now that's a funny story. Mostly because my 1st wife was also Australian, and drug me to OZ for 10years.
Any idea where his wife is now living? My daughter is big in the Aussie music production scene - would be even more funny if she knows of them.
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Nah, I lost touch with him a long time ago, in fact I don't even remember his name or his wife's name. But it's one of those incidents that stays with you cause it's so messed up. If your wife becomes a groupie chasing after some band then let her go man. It's over. I did like that one song I posted though.
CodeMonkey
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