Who I Am: A Memoir (48 page)
Read Who I Am: A Memoir Online
Authors: Pete Townshend
I was invited to give the first John Peel Lecture at the BBC in November 2011 in honour of the great broadcaster and DJ.
*
I talked about Peelism, the approach of someone who had actually taken the trouble to spend time listening – and I had first really learned the supreme importance of listening from Roland Kirk in the 1960s. I talked about my own inner artist and pointed out that my £6 fee would be passed to the Musicians Union Benevolent Fund.
When you get to my age, charity work becomes a necessary fact of life, but through it we old rock stars get to stay in contact with the rigours of the real world, and also get to meet many new people. It is service of the most humbling kind, and one of the most levelling aspects is being ticked off by press diarists who seem to believe we only do it for some selfish, self-serving motive, to which I can only say: if you don’t like my trumpet go try blowing one of your own.
Three years earlier, in December 2008, The Who had been guests of George W. Bush and the Kennedy Center Honors Committee. This is an honour given to artists, and has nothing to do with politics. But I have to accept that it is doubtful I will ever be offered any similar kind of honour in my home country now. I will be denied that Pinteresque moment of being able to explain why I am turning it down.
Nevertheless, I trust in Britain and its democratic process. I am proud that what I do provides jobs, and although I am wealthy and privileged, in my heart and my actions I am still a socialist and activist, ready to stand by the underdog and the beaten down, and to entertain them if I can.
It would be disingenuous to say that I haven’t been affected by the perception of me shown by people who do not know me or anything about me apart from what they may have read in tabloid newspapers around the time of my arrest in 2003. I have long since abandoned my White Knight efforts in that department, but I am still painfully aware of the repercussions this might have had on the charities in which I had played an active part, and in which I am now obliged to maintain a low profile.
Just one click of my mouse to prove a point has caused a mountain of misunderstanding.
I have moved on. I have always carried within me a defiant, sometimes argumentative and combative pride. It still sits very close to the surface of my psyche, just under the skin, ready to flare up in anger, to leap out and fight. It is in my soul.
What happened to that kid brother inside me? The letter I wrote to my eight-year-old self is still one of the most important affirmations in my life. ‘Remember,’ I told him, ‘that the bad feelings you sometimes have today are helping to make you strong and talented and empathetic to the pain that other people feel. But you have a good heart and you will be OK in the end. Life can be hard, and what you will find hard is accepting how wonderful the life you are going to have actually is. This is because for some reason you don’t feel you deserve all this.
‘You have a brilliant mind. Unfortunately you are not going to exercise it quite as much as you should. Your self-esteem is too low and you will lapse into laziness that will slow you up. You have a brilliant imagination, and that will suffice to some extent. But you must be careful to try to respect facts. You cannot simply make up what you have failed to learn. Your academic failure has been a fundamental part of the engine that drives you to artistic inspiration.
‘When your mother criticises or demeans the way you look she is conveying how she feels about herself. She felt her mother must have had some reason to leave her. You too will go through an awkward adolescence. But today you are adorable, a lovely boy. Respect yourself. Try to remember that not everything in life can be perfect. You will make mistakes. That’s inevitable. But you are not ugly. You will only be ugly when you behave in an ugly way.
‘Enjoy life. And be careful what you pray for – remember, you will get it all.’
I am about to open for the first time a small blue envelope addressed to me and posted to The Who’s fan club forty-five years ago, on 16 January 1967. There’s a little arrow over the letter ‘o’ in ‘Who’.
It is very peculiar to be opening this letter to me from so long ago, from the halcyon days of the explosion of the pop-culture revolution of the Sixties. If a group of sixteen-year-old girls had written to me when I was, say, in my mid-thirties, I would have replied. By the time I hit my early forties I employed two secretaries to help me process the thousand or so letters I received every month.
The letter in question is from Anne, who writes in a familiar way.
How are you? You were great on
Top of the Pops
last week. Keith looked knockout, and dig your crazy coat. Fantastic!
She goes on to say that she’s gone off ‘Jack’ (‘Happy Jack’). She hates it. It is on its way out of the charts. She also advises ‘Mooney’ to come clean about being married to Kim, an event that hadn’t happened yet. She observes accurately that she’s not sure she believes the rumours because
Keith is the sort to say anything for publicity
.
She also chides John Entwistle for keeping secret his engagement to his school friend Alison. She then asks if I read
Disc
the previous week – a correspondent had said I was beautiful.
Anne then lines up twenty-two ‘ha ha’s to indicate how funny she thought the idea.
Fascinating looking, but not beautiful
.
Do you think you’re beautiful? Does Karen?
She closes her letter by saying
my time is short, and you’re so BEAUTIFUL
.
The secret that I had a partner was obviously out; our insider fans already knew her name, and Anne was clearly an insider. She seems annoyed that I too am out of the running as a prospect, even though she also makes it clear she is attracted to Keith and John too.
She doesn’t mention Roger once in her letter. Roger had secretly married Jackie way back in 1964 – and Anne, of course, knew it. So he was completely out of the running, as far as Anne was concerned.
What I could never have seen, which I can see easily today, is that Anne loved me. I don’t mean that she was in love with me, or even that she desired me sexually, but she loved me.
That important adoring mist rising from between the lines of her letter, hidden between threats of withdrawal if we made records she didn’t like, and insistence that we didn’t try to hide our paramours from her, would have been almost invisible to me in 1967. My life would have been very different if I had been able to recognise genuine, loving adoration and concern when it was demonstrated.
Two months earlier, in November 1966, The Who played at the Winter Gardens, Malvern. Val from Worcester writes in January 1967 to thank me for taking her and her friend home afterwards. She hopes I can remember her – Val, the blonde one who sat next to me.
Val closes with twenty kisses – two less than Anne’s ‘ha ha’s.
I dedicate this book to the artist in all of us.
This is as much a note to myself as one to you. Play to the gods! In showbusiness the ‘gods’ are the seats right at the back of the theatre, the tough ones, where people got in cheaply and can’t see or hear properly, and chat between themselves and eat lots of popcorn.
For the artist ‘the gods’ is the universe, the big, abstract picture, the unknown, the open sky and sea. Focusing on the infinite universe might seem rather grandiose, or utterly aimless. In fact it’s as small or as large as we want it to be. Some of us believe there is nothing out there. Some of us believe we are surrounded by attentive angels. Whatever.
Play to the gods, or – if you prefer – to a small basket full of stuffed toys, or sing into the mouth of a hot-water bottle, or turn the knobs on a chest of drawers and pretend to be 20,000 leagues under the sea.
It’s all the same thing. If in doubt, just play.
Dad queuing at mess in the RAF in Germany, 1945.
Me, aged 2, August 1947.
My Aunt Trilby in 1947. Tril was the first to encourage me musically. (Pete Townshend/Don Townshend)
The Squadronaires, with Dad playing sax.
My grandmother Denny with her only son, my Uncle Maurice, and his wife Joyce in the early 1950s.
Me and my dog Bruce in the
Acton Gazette
.
My parents and paternal grandparents, 1954. Betty, Cliff, Horry and Dot. (Pete Townshend/Don Townshend)
Jimpy and me, snorkelling.
In my back garden in Acton.
Playing the banjo, c. 1958. I look like a little boy. John Entwistle, already nearly six foot tall, has his back to the camera and is wearing a trilby hat.
Dad, my brother Paul, Mum, me, 1959. Paul’s arrival had made us feel like a real family.
Playing Shadows songs with Mick Brown and Peter Wilson, 1961.
After supporting the Ron Cavendish Orchestra at Acton Town Hall on 1 September 1962, we were billed in the newspaper as The Detours Jazz Group.
