Posterazzi Pete Townshend in Mid-Jump Photo Print (8 x 10)

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Pete Townshend of The Who has revealed Keir Starmer was the lawyer who challenged him in Townshend’s infamous child pornography case. To be relieved of that responsibility, in a sense … because Roger is of the opinion that he wants to sing until he drops. That’s not my philosophy of life. There are other things that I want to do, still want to do, and will do, I hope. I hope I’ll live long enough to do them.

If you take a couple of hits from that era like “Athena,”“You Better You Bet,” and “Eminence Front,” they’re all very rich. They have a lot of orchestral harmonics in them already. For me, having the orchestra, what was amazing about it was that it actually gave me space. The thing about Neil Young is that in 2003 or thereabouts, Elliot Mazer, who had done a lot of work with Neil Young, came to introduce me to ProTools. He’d done the album Harvest with Neil. He’d just done a 5:1 mix of it. I sat down and had these big speakers from JBL set up in a 5:1 setup in my studio. I sat and listened to it. I was already a huge Neil fan, huge fan. And I was just blown away by this record. You turn 80 in about three years. Do you still want to be onstage then, or do you view that as a time when you might step aside?

We were intending to do a U.K tour after our last tour in America with the orchestra. And we hope we will reach new people with it. And listen, two years of pandemic have kind of aged me, I think. I was getting old anyway. I feel that working with the orchestra is a good way to work. Being set in the future where everyone lives in different robotic suits, Townshend penned this song as an ode to the travelling lifestyle, painting the picture of a commune where he and his friends all drive around together in a mobile unit. In the context of the story, this would be some innocent fun to break up the story of Bobby as he tries to find some salvation through a single musical note. The idea was that I’d write the songs and record them in my home studio. Roger would put on vocals and we’d put it out. And we’d have a million dollars to share between us. [ Laughs.] I’ve been enjoying working with other musicians, and we’ve been doing that work in my studios. I’ve got two studios in the U.K. I’ve kept myself busy musically.

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. 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. I have somewhat of a random question, but I just re-watched Freaks and Geeks. They used a ton of your songs in really poignant and interesting ways. I’m wondering if you ever saw it. We live in a very polarized society. As musicians, we really sincerely hope that music brings the two sides together. If we can do that, that would be great. If we can’t, so be it. So we thought, well, we’re gonna get slaughtered if he goes on before us. Because that’s our whole show, done. So Pete and Jimi flipped a coin and Pete won and we chose to go on first. Atkins, John (1 February 2000), The Who on Record: A Critical History, 1963-1998, McFarland & Company, ISBN 9780786440979 , retrieved 18 June 2016

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A 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. With an an album like Quadrophenia, for example, there was brass and there was violins. There were lots of synthesizers on it. On subsequent albums, I’ve always used a lot of synthesizers and keyboards. 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. With respect for new music for the Who, one of the issues is that when we did … this is quite touchy stuff, so I don’t want to be unkind to anybody. But when I said to Roger, “I’m not going to go on tour with you until you get in bed with me and we make a new album,” we were given a million dollars by Universal/Polydor to make it.