4/17/2023 0 Comments Pete of the who![]() I walk quite a bit, but my hobby of choice is sailing, and that’s not very physical. I’ve been making sure I’m in good shape health-wise. I had lenses put into my eyes when I started to get cataracts. A few years back, as you probably know, I got hearing aids, which revolutionized my life. I’m looking after some medical stuff that I’ve needed to do. What do you need to do to get ready to go back on tour? You say you’ve aged a bit in the past few years. In other words, I don’t lose myself the way I did when I used to jump around, have a big adrenaline rush, and then come off the stage and someone would say, “Great show,” or someone would say, “Terrible show,” and I wouldn’t really know what I had done, to be honest, since I was like someone running a marathon. What’s interesting about that is that it gives me a chance to make sure what I do play, what I do do, where I look, how I behave on the stage, is more connected with the people around me, with the audience, and with, I suppose, to get prosaic about it, an inner sense. It’s almost like I could stand there for a good 50 percent of the show and play nothing at all. With the orchestra, it’s a similar effect. I’ll never be a famous shredder, but I can play better than I could when we were in the Live at Leeds years, for example. I had to learn to practice the guitar, which I hadn’t done much of before. And so when he was gone, there was suddenly space for me … not so much to try and fill up the void he had left, but a space where I could have a different approach. That was because he was filling up so much of the musical spectrum with his bass sound, which was not a traditional bass sound. ![]() He was actually playing orchestrally, in a sense, as a drummer.Īnd then when John Entwistle died, there was another space left. One was dealing with Keith Moon’s death where everything suddenly changed and we needed to replace him not with just another drummer, but with a keyboard player and a brass section. Two things happened to me over the years. For me, having the orchestra, what was amazing about it was that it actually gave me space. They have a lot of orchestral harmonics in them already. If you take a couple of hits from that era like “Athena,” “You Better You Bet,” and “Eminence Front,” they’re all very rich. We kind of cruised through the 1980s, even though our recording career ended in 1982, but we cruised through that period with our music sounding really quite rich. On subsequent albums, I’ve always used a lot of synthesizers and keyboards. ![]() With an an album like Quadrophenia, for example, there was brass and there was violins. Tell me about working with the orchestra and what new elements they bring out of your songs.Ī lot of the Who’s music is already fairly heavily decorated and dense harmonically anyway, so we’re not like the Stones or the Kinks. I feel that working with the orchestra is a good way to work. And listen, two years of pandemic have kind of aged me, I think. And we hope we will reach new people with it. We were intending to do a U.K tour after our last tour in America with the orchestra. They were in the air and needed to be done at some point because they were contracted and they were part of a tour that, financially speaking, it was necessary for us to do since we didn’t get insurance payout for them. Those shows only amounted to five or six shows, including a postponed New Orleans Jazz Festival, and one at the Hard Rock. And also a visit back to Cincinnati to, at last, close the loop on the disaster that happened back in 1979. ![]() We had a bunch of shows that had been postponed, a couple because of illness with Roger, and also a Vegas stint that should have been tacked on to the end of the tour. ![]() Sounds like it’ll be similar to the one you did in 2019. Every talk with Townshend is a wild ride, so enjoy this one.Īre you looking forward to getting back out on the road? He also name-checked Wes Anderson, Dave Davies, Rod Stewart, Luke McCallin, Christopher Plummer, and many others. In typical Townshend fashion, the guitarist gave long, thoughtful answers to every one of our questions, often taking fascinating detours along the way and divulging minute behind-the-scenes details of the live music industry that few other artists discuss in public. Before we knew it, an hour had passed and we’d covered everything from the Neil Young–Joe Rogan spat to the inflation crisis, the unlikelihood of a new Who record or solo LP, the brilliant use of his music on Freaks and Geeks, and his hatred of NFTs. When we phoned up Pete Townshend last week at his new home in the English countryside, our only real goal was to talk about the Who’s upcoming American tour where the band will be paired with local symphonies. ![]()
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