Who I Am: A Memoir (37 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.