so how was it pete how was it going through and just kind of i don't know reminiscing and reflecting through through your through your own work you know which is not something you often do you know i do do it quite a lot i've got you know i've got demos of everything who i've ever done since the very first recordings and for this i did the work on the demos for this back in 2017 so i finished in april because that
was the 50th anniversary year and i thought it was going to be an anniversary package i love it i love it today because i was working on old tape machines back then the tapes have lasted pretty well but some of them are stretched some of them you know were recorded very cheaply and with modern computers i can fix a lot of the problems but there's also a lot of those problems are what's so awesome about them and i
think if you're an audiophile if you love sound beyond just melody and music and racket and rock and all the things that come from being a musician if you love diving into the sound of things there's something so magic about the fact that age actually plays a part in the way things end up back then now age is not going to make any difference those digital files will remain the same but you go back to those tapes and you
haven't touched them and things have changed right that's exactly right zayn you know i think music has changed a lot even since the birth of digital sound i was the first musician that i knew in pop that had my home studio i had my first studio in like 1963 something like that and i persuaded people like paul mccartney and a few djs like kenny everett in the uk to build their own studios to work at
home and now of course we have laptops that's what i dreamed of was having a small box that i could take on the road plug a mic into and make a record and now you can do that but what's actually happened is the quality of the music hasn't really changed that much in fact a lot of people that use laptops want plug-ins they want devices built into their laptops that make it sound like it did in the 60s you know so
you've been making music through all of this and you are a futurist you're not afraid of progress you never have been i say that as an observer but a fan so i feel confident making that statement so in a weird way i'm sure people like me assume that you are in love with these old demos and the way they sound but you do love the way technology pushes things forward don't you you always were pushing things forward
yeah i do i really love it i'm lucky because i can use both you know i still have all that old stuff so i can mix and match and i do really like soft synths i do because i think one of the things about them is that you can put open a laptop play something with a little mini keyboard and be inspired and i think when i go back to the old analog synths what i'm looking for is not a particular sound or a particular grunge
or any i'm looking always for inspiration i'm always looking for a song you know i feel if i went out tomorrow and bought a soft synth that cost you know 100 bucks it would be a hundred bucks well spent if i got a song out of it equally equally if i went out and bought you know spent a hundred thousand dollars on an old moog and i got a song out of it it would be worth it that's all i care about do you ever become a fan
in order to be inspired rather than just go to the instrument and go to the source do you ever go to the records that inspired you as a kid or things that you love and the hope that it's going to spark or is that kind of almost sacrilegious does it feel almost plagiaristic no i i do do it and i've done it a lot a lot recently because i set this room up as a listening room i used to have a cinema
which was all surround sound and i thought i'm going to get dolby atmos and then i thought no screw it what i really want is a room with two speakers a deck and access to my vinyl and a little box which will feed from my laptop or my iphone you know so i listen to new music and old music i'm not quite so adept at listening to new music as elton john but i do listen to a lot of new music and i listen to anything that he recommends
for example uh because he's he's so on the ball he listens to everything there's more people who love music and want to be invested in music than i feel than ever before there's more music being made and being released this was not the case obviously back in you know the mid 60s when you formed the who and you came out you released two albums and immediately you were faced with a fair amount of attention in fact you were the first
in so many ways in so many areas rock and roll the idea of rock and roll actually breaking through pretty unheard of you are on the sweep of a change within culture mod culture bringing in a new rebellious but also kind of responsible young approach to living life or there was a certain in a weird way there was there was there was a credo to which the kind of mods tried to live their life to some degree
right there was there was some kind of righteousness invested in that space there was definitely but thinking back about those days the 60s i think it was in the 70s that i started to feel really honestly that the rock music the function of rock music and of pop music too remember i was the child of a guy who played saxophone in a post-war dance band he knew what his music was for it was for post-war it was for
dancing with a woman that you might end up marrying it was about romance dreams fantasy music even today is about much more than that it has a function which is to help us understand what's going on in the world to understand us what's going on inside us so that so the purpose and the duty of somebody that makes music is very different to the way it used to be and i think i may have been the first
not to know about that i think everybody that made music in rock and pop knew that but i was the first to articulate it and try to explain her and i think i still feel that really really strongly i won't sit down and just write a song well i will just sit down and write a song for fun but you'll probably never hear it how do you know when it gets into that magic space and it's something that resonates
deeper than just like you say fun the frivolity and it gets to a place where there's actual there's depth to its value how do you know what's the feeling you get can you articulate it after all these years are you better at articulating it you know when if we go back to the who sell out this there's a lot of stuff on that album then the whole story of the album was that we were on the road a lot in 67 we did monterey pop
festival we did a first series of shows in new york we went to fillmore in legendary fillmore in san francisco and did a bunch of shows we actually were supported by the great jazz sax player cannonball adelie it was just blew my mind that we would be on a show with somebody like that i mean that is crossing mad genres back there that's crazy you see that at a festival now but back then that must
have seemed so strange but the energy is the same yeah he was such a cool guy as well but i think it was busy and i was writing all the time and when we came to consider putting an album out around christmas 67 it was a real rag bag of stuff but quite a few of the songs were my first attempts to deal with the metaphysics which to deal with the abstract nature of music to deal with manic depression you know the song
melancholia was the working title was originally the virus you know it was about mental illness as a virus now we have a virus which is leading to mental illness you know it's the other way around so some other songs were very serious but most of them were really flippant you know light-hearted some of them were funny uh some of them were meant to be amusing meant to be distracting meant to be you know about advertising
and about about the commercial world of advertisers but you're right there was a trojan horse to that album there's a sense of being brought in and you're immediately drawn to the eccentricities of it but actually a song like tattoo which really is to me um a way in many respects of of making a strong statement about independence uh rebellion um what it's like to be on the front line of and i'm
going to make this term up so god knows what makes sense but it almost felt like it almost feels like you were on the verge of a meta-masculine revolution of like i'm not going to be the masculine you think i need to be that's a serious concept at that time i think that's right i think the song was meant to challenge that it wasn't meant to make because now we have tattoos and men that wear tattoos are actually using tattoos to defy
masculine stereotypes that's right so it's turned it on its head that's right the idea of me going and getting a tattoo back then was just like i'm not going to be a builder dad now it's like it's the complete opposites i gotta get into what weaves through the who sell out the idea of radio the idea of jingles the concept again very well traveled now um so many people have used radio to to weave through
their music uh dr dre you know incredible artists have choose that idea of radio being the voice behind the voice when you were doing it you really came from that place of pirate radio why why what was it about that particular aesthetic that you really wanted to lean into to help tell the story of the who set out i think it was a celebration 1967 was when pirate radio was banned in the uk by the government they were
always annoyed by it because the bbc the british broadcasting corporation was deepened its grip on broadcasting in the uk during the war it became the voice of the nation there's a thing called the bbc world service which is listened to all around the world in in i think it's 50 different languages so the idea that these guys could go out on a ship in the north sea or or off the coast of ireland
and broadcast to teenagers in the uk unlicensed was an anathema to the government at the time whether it was a left wing or a right wing government i can't remember but i do remember that without them i feel that without them you wouldn't have had the stones you wouldn't have had the beetles you wouldn't have had the kinks you wouldn't have had any of the really creative artists of that time you wouldn't have
had me my father was one of four pirates who launched a pirate radio station in new zealand in 1966 inspired by caroline oh wow and um went out into international waters and did everything step by step that caroline did except for one really important thing they actually won and they actually won a license from the new zealand government and launched the first ever new zealand rock and roll radio station
and they and they spent two or three years in international waters so the whole idea of pirate radio is so ingrained in my life the story of what it is to rebel against the controlling mechanism of media which is like more prevalent than ever before today right the idea of how do you control the media it's it's crazy it's so interesting i remember now that there was a pirate radio station in new zealand i remember that's my dad
we were in new zealand in 67 we did a tour there with the small faces wow when we gathered all this stuff together i said to our managers and our record producer i said let's sell commercials between the tracks let's make commercial songs let's make songs about products i'd done a song two songs for the american cancer society to discourage people from smoking which was a bit hypocritical because i smoked
but um they were good songs hang on hang on hold on hold on how does that work listen i didn't get paid for it so i didn't it's not an excuse all right check this out i do love it though like anyone who knows your your history your dedication to philanthropy and to trying to kind of raise money for an awareness for you know for disease prevention right through the common sense i would call that a comment i would call
that a bit of both um but how do you sort of factor in is it just is it just young man contradiction that you're able to sort of wake up that morning and know that you've just done something that's sort of against the idea of smoking and then you light one up and puff one i mean how does that work it just wouldn't have even come into my mind [Laughter] you know i was i was 22 just wouldn't have come into my mind i
i remember telling off telling my manager off because kit lambert used to smoke he's our manager and producer used to smoke senior service cigarettes no tips filter tips you know and he smoked three packs of these a day so 60 a day and chain smoked them and he said pete the thing is about the way i smoke cigarettes is that i only i only smoke the first inch so it's much healthier but i said to him you know we can't we
can't do an anti-smoking campaign when all of us smoke i knew the level of hypocrisy i was working in the weird thing about the song little billy yeah is that i made an even bigger gaffe when seen from you know 2021 which was that the song is about this kid called little billy and the reason that he lives longer than all of the kids who smoke is hey he's fat but he doesn't smoke so although he's
fat he lives longer than all of the kids who are not fat because he doesn't smoke folks one of the most important things about this album isn't just the the quality of songwriting and we're on a fast track to talk about that it's also the fact that you know it started you on this journey of of leaning into the idea of and this is another well trodden topic or term but concept concept albums
whatever that is the idea of it being more than just 12 songs in a row it's like it can have a theme it can have an intro it can have an outro it can have narrative characters protagonists it can be all of these things but this was the first of that kind for you wasn't it this was when you were like what what's behind the curtain you know it wasn't quite the first on the second album we did which was called a quick one
there was a track called a quick one while he's away which was a mini opera there was six short songs linked together after that album came out i met paul mccartney in a nightclub and he took me aside and he said pete that mini opera thing is so cool he didn't actually say would you mind if we did something like it but he uh the inference was that they were already considering doing something long form and uh
very very soon after early in i think it was in may of 67 we were on the road sergeant pepper came out before that at the end of 66 in america pet sounds came out by the beach boys and although neither of them were narrative concepts they were definitely poetic stories they were gatherings of images and ideas that added up to a new way of putting songs together and from that moment on i think the message was out there if that's what you
want to do do it you know and other people did it in strange ways if you look at a band like ac dc every album was a concept album and guess what the concept was it was ac dc that was the concept exactly you know and but they stuck to it they religiously stuck to it so everybody knew where they were and who they were and what they were doing and it was a faithful almost religious program of of dedication to a
story and the story was slight changes many many of the big heavy metal bands did the same thing and in fact in heavy metal there was a huge number of concept albums you know which most of us would probably not know about in the title itself let alone in the artwork and then the jingles and everything that rolls into it and to your point you were genuine about trying to sell out you were trying to sell space
on this record this isn't an irony thing you weren't being ironic and yet and then the idea and yet everyone's probably sort of figured that over over time that you know oh it's like oh yeah well we'll just call ourselves sellout for anyone else could call us to sell out you're like no no i'm i'm i'm all about this do you know what i mean and it's in a way this album kind of started this whole strange relationship
between the idea of credibility independent thought and and how far you can go as an artist in order to make a living or in order to collaborate or try new things and i can only imagine the amount of artists that didn't take the opportunity because of fear for being judged for that term selling out which you coined and so it must have been very interesting the idea of seeing this concept album become part of
culture and ultimately influence decision making over the years i think that's true i went to uh art college and studied graphic design and and advertising so it was in my head and one of the things that's so interesting about advertising is that a company that does ads for tv or for magazines or whatever they can sometimes have you know 100 million dollars in their bank account because they are the ones who buy the
advertising for their client so they've got all this huge amounts of money they get very very heady somewhere in all this i thought quite seriously that we would make quite a lot of money so i i got chris stamp our manager to call up coca-cola we had done a commercial for coca-cola which was in the cinemas ray charles did one diana ross did one and the only other person in the 60s to do one was the who and um i thought
you know they'll buy time so i was trying to sell you know the gaps in between the vinyl i thought well let's do those gaps if we widen them a little bit we can sell commercials anyway i said to chris so what happened when you spoke to the guys at coke he said oh you know they were sort of interested but they asked me how many albums were likely to sell so i exaggerated and i said well maybe a hundred thousand
and he said the guy put the phone down [Laughter] just put the phone down you're playing with madison avenue right now a hundred thousand what is that you know i'm fired the only company that responded even slightly positively was a company called rotor sound strings who uh gave john m whistle free strings for the rest of his life on premiere drums we're already giving keith moon free drums to smash up
nobody ever gave me free guitars i don't know why but they didn't no one ever gave you free guitars that's crazy not once you're kidding no one ever came to and said hey alongside i should say jimi hendrix and jimmy paid you the single most influential guitar player the history of modern music is a guitar no one ever did that you know a few people gave me guitars as presents and you know i still got them i
wouldn't i wouldn't smash them but no i don't think anybody wanted to trust me in case i decided i needed an artistic moment you know can you talk us to a couple of the guitars that that have been gifted to you because i i'm always fascinated by that the idea of actually sharing an instrument with somebody that you care about because holding onto an instrument's a precious experience so you really got to care about somebody
when you want to pass it on can you talk about a couple of the gifts that you've been given over the years and what they mean to you you know i was given a 11 guitar acoustic guitar by the very very brilliant acoustic guitar player gordon gil trap he saw me in a photo in 1962 roger was the lead guitar player and uh he later got me to play lead guitar but i was rhythm player at the time and i had
11 guitar and and um gordon tracked down a really beautiful one for me and uh gave it to me recently and um and it's really amazing because what's interesting about it is if i'd have had that guitar i probably would have given it away to charity i probably would have done you know when somebody said if you got anything for this charity i would have said well i've got the guitar that i used to use in 1962
and it probably would have sold for a thousand bucks and then i would have thought i would have paid 5 000 to keep it you know so and then the other one uh which which was really important was the guitar that roger happened to be playing at that time which was a court called an epiphone solid body epiphone called a coronet epiphone coronet the single the pickup is called a p90 little black pickup and
i used that guitar for a long time i was even still using it he he decided he was going to be the singer one day he sat the singer put the guitar down gave it to me it's yours i don't think i ever gave him any money for it and i've still got that one too that's a really good one i've also given guitars away you know i've i've given a a 12-string guitar to a an up-and-coming girl guitar player called ariel and uh
she's making her own guitar with brian may at the moment which comes out soon and um she's promised to let me have one of those you know i will cherish it you're right they are things to cherish and yet you found yourself more often than not in the middle of an artistic i think you call it an artistic moment something impulsive that occurs on stage that at the time seems so out of character for the normally kind
of studious musician who focuses on their craft doesn't smash the out of it yeah i don't know who that guy is on stage but that's you know he's a different part of my character right that's where i was gonna go with it i wanted to know what what happens yeah i don't like performing i don't i i don't have any connection but that's not what the guitar smashing thing was about you know and if i if i make too much of this i remember um
telling this story to a an english comedian a woman and uh she said so why did you smash your guitars and i told the story i said you know words because what was college there was this guy called gustav matzka who who could see the you know the the co2 holocaust coming he said that you know the art has to be more responsible we have to be very very careful about not falling into a bourgeois
place about the tools that we use either in music or an art we shouldn't travel to the venice biennale we should you know wait to see it in magazines you know every time you take a flight you all of this stuff and he showed some films and one of the films was of a guy smashing up a piano and uh i completely misunderstood his thesis i just thought that there was something to do with you know my rickenbacker guitar the
12th string that i smashed first partly by accident but i finished it off in in a gig in 63 it cost 350 pounds i think if you apply inflation to that i think it's about something like four or five or six thousand pounds you know i was an art student i had no money i was absolutely committed to the artistic act of destroying the tools that i had in my hand now a lot of people would say yeah but you were in a
band and surely you realize that if you smash your guitar you weren't going to have a job the following week i didn't think i'd have a job the following week anyway because my manifesto for the who was very punk it was this band is terrible you know this band is full of idiots this band is only going to last six months at the most and that is and that in essence is what i think because it is a divisive statement
and it's crazy to me it still remains a divisive statement you've seen what happened to phoebe bridges recently on saturday night live when she took her acoustic guitar to task and my gosh everyone is still up in arms about this right and it splits and it divides and i think there is a part of it on the side of those that get caught up in the moment with the artist i've seen great artists do it where it feels definitive that is
part of what makes it so artistically special is we know you're going to get up tomorrow and play on that guitar it'll get put back together or something of its nature and the show will go on but tonight it is the end of time it is the end of the world there are no more shows there is no more music and in a way that finality is the artistic statement i think if there's an artistic statement it was
probably just that there will be no encore that's a nice way of putting it but no i think it was it was more than that for me and i am still even you know in my mid 70s i'm still caught up in in the ideas that i learned at art college the people that taught me were the same people that taught brian eno you know we have this similar approach to music as our as ambience as as you know a part of a social debate all of these things
so it's more than pop music and it's more than performing it's more than it's an artistic act in the sense that it's it's an installation act it's not perhaps it's not appropriate to do it on tv but david letterman once handed me a gibson guitar that he'd got from gibson for nothing and he said will you smash it on the show and i said no i don't really want to do that though on the show and he said he said they've
given it to me to us for nothing and i said no i really don't think i should anyway because it's not you know it's not going to be about the art it's not going to be about the performance it's not going to be about the closing of a show it's not going to be about what's the significance of this instrument that somebody else some kid would save up you know doing a a driving job for six years to buy
and um he said oh well will you smash it when you learn that if you smash it i've got somebody that's going to buy it from us for charity for thirty thousand dollars oh he's good david letterman oh he's a good one oh he's the best i smashed it on his show and it was more valuable smashed than it was in one piece you know what is it one of the interesting things about listening to the demo uh of pictures of lily
and hearing your thought process is that i can hear you constructing it with your friends and mind with your players in mind and it's interesting because it took me two listens of that song to realize keith wasn't on it isn't that weird oh wow i suddenly realized on the third listen wait there's no there's no drums where's keith because i put the drums in there myself well roger always says that keith
followed everybody in the band he was he made a point once when when listening to some records you know the stems of the records he listened to the drums and the vocals on their own and he said to the interviewer he said listen keith moon is following the vocals he's following my vocals and i took him to task later and i said no keith was following everybody he followed me he followed john the one thing that he didn't do was keep time
but he reinvented his own and there's been and that and that's why he remains one of the single most influential not just drummers but musicians of all time because alongside john yourself and roger each of you to me feel like you're the leader of the band in a weird way you're soloists you're soloing you're doing your own thing and somehow it all comes together does that make sense it does yeah it does i think it just
speaks rather than about leadership it speaks about being able to be in a band you know it's quite tough to be in a band anybody will tell you this you know there's i've only met become familiar with the guys from metallica recently they came to hollywood bowl to see us when we did our orchestral show and i'd always thought of of metallica as being shredders you know about you know being and they are shredders
they're brilliant guitar players but what really impressed me was the fact that this contract they with the better word is compact it's a kind of way you shake hands with somebody and just say we're going to move forward and we don't know how we're going to develop we don't know where we're going to go but we're going to stick together and see what happens and they've done an incredible amount of developing
different ideas they uh they used an orchestra before we did they didn't have it for the whole show but that i think you know they and it was very successful so actually looking at a band like them i suddenly think wow you know this is the definitive bands like zz top for example you know in one year they didn't go home for you know 365 days i think their wives said listen it's thanksgiving you've got to come
home they went home and they were so screwed up with the idea of going back to their homes that they booked the families into a holiday inn hotel you know because and um you know people these guys were not just fellow musicians they were friends they saw their upsides and their downsides you know i keith moon was funny but i also saw him in a tragic state as well you know and and also
doing terrible things he was very kind and he did some wonderful things but he i was often really a bad guy i think i was probably the same we probably all were so you see the best and the worst that's why roger and i are still together despite the fact that we don't really have very much in common you know i'm a leftist he's a rightist you know i believe in god i don't think he does it's a whole load of differences you
know i'm creative he's a singer he doesn't write songs i think there's a whole load of of of stuff that's this like a void between us but when we come together we're still honoring that contract which we made when we were kids at school wow straight in there no mucking around i love it what's going on roger how are you frustrated talk to me i'm your therapist for the next hour free of charge why are you frustrated
the biggest problems we got with this thing there's two there's two or three problems one is the anti-vaxxers very misinformed when it comes to virus the amount of you know misinformation out there is unbelievable and getting the rest of the world vaccinated i'm astonished that the the one vaccine we've got which is the astrazeneca i mean no wonder they're trying to get that off the market because they're
they're giving out no profit how are they how they do it yeah how dare they do something epic ethical immoral i know the world out of this that's what happens how dare they we can't have them doing that we're now without one cost fifty dollars and there's cos how much seven well we gotta get we gotta get some bad news on that a bit quick spin it up let me let me ask you this right as someone who
has been so acutely aware of the spin for so long i feel like part of the who's mo or ammo was to combat the spin to recognize where all the mistruths were and to try to use music and rock and roll and subsequently all other things to push back on that you find yourself at this point in 2021 after one of the most significant challenges in human history and the spin still spins you never stop it spinning it's just getting harder to
disseminate the truth i mean it's almost like now we should turn the whole lot off go back to newsprint go nut go back to word of mouth and and re start to read books again and then we might we might get somewhere because it's becoming so absurd now with ai doing all the tricks it can do and the work generation it's terrifying the miserable world they're going to create for themselves i mean anyone who's lived a life and you
see what they're doing you just know that it's the route to nowhere especially when you've lived through the periods of of a life that we we've had the privilege to i mean we've had the golden era there's no doubt about that but we came out of a war we came out of a leveled society completely flattened bomb sites and everything and we built that we've been through socialist governments we've seen
the communist system fail in in the soviet union they've been in this i've been in those communist countries while they were communists i've seen how wonderful really it was you said something so poignant before having had the privilege of living through all of these things i want a wonderful observation but but when you started the who and then several years later found yourselves making this incredible
opus right the who sell out what were the significant challenges because i know that you're a very globally minded person a very intelligent person i know you could have moved into academia if you wanted to you obviously are very switched on and i say that with confidence based on music and what i've read about you and what i've heard about you so what were you observing back in 1967 that was that you were fighting against then what
was what was frustrating you then i don't know that frustrated it was from that period for me in particular individually and emotionally and and in my private life and everything and in the band was a very very difficult time for me i'd been thrown out of the band in 1965 and i'm brought back in and this this was my second year of probation i wasn't quite accepted as a whole band member yet and uh but i was it was starting to
gel again and we were starting to we were searching for for a way forward a way to be more than just a singles pop band like an upmarket home as hermits and uh fortunately we did have the intelligence or i had the intelligence certainly to recognize that within our the the abilities of pete townsend we had some someone really unique in his songwriting ability he had the ability to to voice
that inner voice that we all have into music in a way that it struck a chord which in itself is timeless that's what's so amazing when i listen listen back to these records and i listened back to so much of whose stuff and i don't particularly enjoy it because there's some painful memory in there but i am constantly amazed that it doesn't age i think that's to do with the fact that it's coming from a center which is deep
within us all which is our truth any moment that will be part of our truth somewhere in our life and it will resonate and that doesn't that resonance will carry it forward it astonishes me how modern most who music sounds today that was emotional for me i'm not gonna lie because um you know i've been interviewing people now for talking to musicians and trying to speak the artist language for 25 years
as i've continued to do this this work i've been searching for the for the most simple observations as to why it matters and you summed it up so beautifully pete speaks truth to us all because he was unafraid to acknowledge the fractures within him and try to find ways through with his art which is painful not just you're going through your own pain that's painful process and you're banned through all the joy
you gave the world was steeped in pain you were all in your own way fractured exactly that's where we just got lucky our chemistry john joined my band he brought pete in bringing the singer you you're always out front so you never see the band but what you do more importantly than they can ever do in a way because they're always looking at each other they look they can they're playing their instruments it's a
different focus when you're the front man everything is there through an audience everything they're doing behind you is channeling through you and if you're doing it doing the job properly especially with things like townsend songs which are about that practice in the core of us all um you gotta connect it so the energy is focused on like like that so all i ever did in the early days of putting that band together
was feel and it was the whole band was structured not what they looked like not what anything was probably probably the ugliest band you could ever what you talking about in whistle's a supermodel what are you talking about no we weren't in those days we were we were gawking lanky you know god he was the best but anyway what we were putting out in energy and what the vibe wasn't it was unique and i felt that
immediately and there's just something about about that that that we managed to just even with all our difficulties we we knew that between us all the sum of our parts was was so much much more i don't know how a band takes an eddie cochrane song which has been probably played at i don't know i have i'm just going to throw a number out there for the sake of conversation 3 million parties and weddings by cover
bands over the history of time maybe more and how you take this song is just unbelievable the racket you make and the fact that somehow you all find a way to gel together and yet none of you seem to be playing the same thing and it's unbelievable when used and i i'm going to give you the ultimate complimentary observation roger that is a horse that cannot be rode you cannot ride that horse that horse is like wild
it is a stallion keith john p forget it and yet somehow you were able to get in front of it and ride it and control it yeah doing the summertime blues is my idea and i i just kind of felt it like that i thought that'd be a great band that would be a great song for this band and if it's because moon was always one to put in the rather than doing the the standard rock and roll beat which is you know it's
music you know it's it's being out rock and roll don't dance to it our music was fight to it you know it was all about putting it on the one and that came from really came from keith he just had that way he had that way of using his drum kit to almost like the guitar the bass and the singer were bull balls of wool and he would be the knitting needles the drumsticks with the knitting needles knitting it and putting it out as this
energy that would land he had that ability to do that and when when people say he's a sloppy drummer he's not what he just does not play standard drums he's playing with everybody in the band at the same time he could fire something up in the most extraordinary places but we all we all had the ability to believe and follow him and it worked it just works it was just lucky so roger when you're on stage and
that moment that you live for that all of the disagreements and the hard work and the blood sweat and tears are making records and you find yourself on stage and keith and pete and john are around you and it's just like something from another planet after being in the who for so long could you try to describe it how close can you get to describing what that feeling is like for you in the early days it for me it was it
was like going to war it was like going into battle it really was i i for a very long time there it was like it was us against our audience and we were going to draw our music through them to the back of the hall you know and as the horse got bigger of course that became more and more extravagant and the volume went up and up and up so that was a kind of mental attitude it was almost like a battle and that this little thing used to wind
me up terrible into a lot of anger and inner anger which again can't come out within within the performances can you give me an example of of the kind of thing that would have set you off roger oh lots of things stupid you know that's the time when you know paranoia and and everything was rampant you know that those those terrible years between the ages of 15 to 25. you're just a misplaced human right you
just don't know you're like okay i don't fit at home anymore and i don't know what the world wants from me right that's exactly right you've been put on this stage in front of all these people which like i say the numbers grew so rapidly between 1967 and 1971 we went from 1967 we were playing high school gyms if we played to a thousand people that was a big crowd now we did monterrey which was i don't know how many was
there but it wasn't that big monterey it's a very big festival but it wasn't actually i don't think there was that many people anyway we're not going to remember and then of course we did woodstock and it was the famous half a million people but then after that our individual crowd not being at a festival went from that one two thousand people to sixty seventy eighty hundred hundred and twenty 000 people
within the space of sort of a year so there you are stuck in on this stage in front of this these these 120 000 people full of expectations and it's terrifying because you don't want to let them down so you think well the only way to do this is to play it well your involvement in woodstock always fascinated me as a child discovering what the woodstock concept meant to society humanity to the times but
also to the artists involved there was a very clear selection of artists that that seemed like a no-brainer the more you dived into it then there were a couple of outliers that that the idea of peace and love and and and that that kind of revolution seemed a little bit of odds with the music that was being made hendrix was sort of on the line he was a little bit going to war but he was also a little bit discovering the holistic
side of life the who to me at to your point was straight up fighters you were street fighters what was it like when you showed up at a place like woodstock where everyone's just looking to you know roll a daisy chain and hang out there and and meditate through the future and you show up and you're like where's the fight you know again it's that thing of youth you know is like what you see out there all these
protesters on the street now you know who protesting for peace while they're battling everything everyone else is not agreeing with them you know so nothing's changed you know nothing's changed at all it's just but woodstock was a funny experience it could tell us it was just another geek it was just another show you know they kept us waiting a long time that was all and it didn't mean much to us until the following year
when the film came out and the film of course blew us into the stratosphere hyper focusing on this album right the who sellout you know the concept and how pivotal it was throughout the who's time what were your feelings when you started to see the idea taken shape were you all in were you like hang on i don't understand what this is i have to figure this out later was you know how much how invested were you
in the whole concept of it oh 100 we were always i i was in always in particular 100 percent behind whatever people trying to do didn't always understand it but always 100 behind the concept this was not a concept album at the time we made it it was a lot of bits of songs that pete had ideas like uh rael for instance which is uh it's a precursor to tommy in a lot of ways you can a lot of the bits from from
amazing journey in rail we that was being pieced together in the studio as you know just scraps of paper that he had written down with this kind of synopsis of a story and we were in the harmonies up as we went along it was i can't remember where it was done it was a tiny tiny little studio not much bigger than my office here you know the whole idea of making it that that radio show didn't happen
right you're right until the end because all we had was a completely mismatch of a mixture of songs that didn't really make an album it was i always thought that it was our manager chris stamp who came up with the idea of making it like a radio show because it was at the time in england where they were our um our music we the young people that that time and indeed most of the british public uh were getting most of their music from
these pirate radio radio stations i was off the coast beaming us all this rock music and pop music and it was it was fantastic time but the government decided this wasn't good enough we can't have all that freedom and decided they were going to pull the plug and give it to to the bbc because that was a proper radio station yeah all the incredible music one of the most important things i think that you've
dedicated your life to and really really immersed yourself in is your work with your cancer trust and the work that you've been doing for you know for teenagers with cancer and philanthropy is is one of those things that that people talk about often you get credited for the selfless expression and the selfless work but everyone i've ever spoken to is deeply in it actually says it's sort of the opposite
it feeds you it actually gives you so much um in a way what is what has your experience been like once you started to focus on things outside of yourself and you're in your band well i'm completely driven by this completely it feels like to me the most important thing in my life secondary to the who now because uh what started as just a little idea from my doctor when they started this very small charity called the teenage cancer trust
i immediately i got what they were trying to achieve but as i further dug into it and met teenagers going through that system and i stopped and then thought about my teenage years which were very painful those 13 to 25 26 maybe even to 30 and i thought what would those years have been like if i had been one of these teenagers with cancer had been diagnosed with cancer so it's kind of like you put yourself in
that position and you think cracking you know i've got to do something more than is being done for this group at the moment because when we started this 30 years ago actually they were completely ignored this age group that adolescents and young adults this did totally miss served by cancer research all the kept most of the cancer research and i can't get numbers it's very difficult quite the majority of cancer research
money is charitably given but i've got to tell you most of that money is being spent on researching cancers in old people now that doesn't make sense to me because that doesn't make sense why save the old and ignore the young it's not right and it needs to change because some of the treatments that the teenagers get for cancers that are they are rare i agree and it's not easy they are rare cancers they're incredibly
aggressive but some of the treatments that they're on haven't changed since the 70s now this is not good enough it's not good enough when that money is given charitably yet all the cancer researchers are looking for that that patent at the end where the drug company can make a lot of money that's not on and just maybe it's been always my theory and a lot of serious researchers agree
that they might find answers in those rare aggressive cancers in this age group that i speak for adolescents and young adults they might find answers including them that help curing all the cancers all the way through but they're not looking and because they're not looking they're never going to find them i'm completely immersed in in what you're saying because you are one of the few people who haven't just contributed
an element or some of your time or as much as you can afford i know because i've spoken to artists you've called and said i need you on this night and you are unafraid to make that call because because of the passion because of what you're trying to just not just about the night or about getting someone to play a show it's it's all just a step in the direction you're talking about like i just gotta just keep chipping away
everyone in the music business they own their career to disagree we wouldn't have a music business we would have after bloody things on youtube if we didn't have this age group if you you've got to be there for them and this if the governments won't change it and the system and the big pharma and all that other stuff won't change it let's change it ourselves we can do it we built our industry look it's a
multi-billion pound industry goodness sake we can do this we've just got the public to understand what we're trying to do it speaks to the core of what motivates the who all the way through which is this youthful rebellion this idea that you might discount us and think that we're stupid and unable to manage our emotions but we just channel them in a different way right that's ultimately really is what is what is at
the core of the who's entire philosophy right is the fight for for truth within the youth that's right we're talking to roger daltrey it's a beautiful moment today uh for me to be able to um really come face to face well i wish i was but as close to face to face in a pandemic as i can with a with a real hero someone whose music has raised me like millions of others you know and given me a voice when i when i haven't had it uh the who
sell out uh this super deluxe edition about as super as it gets uh over a hundred outtakes and things like that did you sort of i know pete's obsessed about this because i spoke to him he's like oh i listened to it all and i i dissect and da da and it just sounds like it's entirely his bag were you right there beside him going through it all or you like just you know send me the ones you like i have to say that these new editions
it's really good for the fans but i've got no interest in them whatsoever to be honest with you to me when i record a song and i do the song and put it down that's like a painting it's finished i walk away from it and these things just like i don't i sometimes feel a bit like a used car salesman these things come out but there again is important that they are important i'm not not unappreciative of
what pete does and the amount of work he puts into them they are important it's just my particular bit in the group that was done 50 years ago and i like to leave it there pete mentioned that he was very he spoke very fondly of his relationship with you um whilst also highlighting that you're fundamentally very different human beings how important have some of those really sort of not divisive but
fundamental differences been to the longevity of the band and how you know how different would it have been if you both had seen eye to eye on religion on politics on creative decisions all these things i think i'm religion with pretty eye to eye i mean he's very spiritual i'm very spiritual i'm i'm an atheist but he's not um on politics i don't think he quite understands my politics i'm not left i'm not right i'm
trying to find a way in the middle uh because all i see is the rest of it being divisive and uh when i work in the game work going back to the teenage cancer trust working in in an area that is not music i see the way political people use for instance our health service for instance they use it as a political football a health service should never be that it should be there for us equally you know and but
we're in a ridiculous situation where we've got with all these people making promises they're never going to keep a friend of mine said to me the other day who's a musician he said if you're picking a side you missed the point and i was like i had to really think about that for a second and what he was saying was i don't know if you can trust any of them the trouble is with human beings there are other there are those that
will we'll we'll take take take take take take and and and then and there are those that will give give give give but there has to be a balance when the wheels start turning again and we and there's no more looking back and no more retrospective time to focus on putting things out and what is your hope for you and p like what's the first thing you want to get get back up and running again with
the who what do you want to do i want to get back on stage during the show that we were right in the middle of a tour that got cancelled to honor our commitment to our fans we had a charity show booked in cincinnati that we were doing for a uh philly town high school um to provide scholarships into the future way after our death so that's our their commitments that we will do even if it's in two years time and i'll make
80 years old i'll hobble on that stage somehow and we will honor that and we will raise that that will be a sellout crowd it might you know it might be the who's laughs when we when we get our word to do something we we end up doing it but i just want to go on as long as we can doing music of the quality we we make and doing it justice i mean who i've never ever cheated i mean i don't know whether you saw our last tour
with an orchestra it is phenomenal and it's not the usual rock band and an orchestra where the the strings and all the orchestra could be done on a keyboard this is serious this is like whoa it's because the who is as ballsy and as loud as ever and the orchestra sits in between this just makes it it takes your face off it is huge and i was so proud of that show pete and i were enjoying it so much
because in our heads when you're when you're singing you know you i always try and sing the songs as i am singing them for the first time and then when you hear an orchestra kick in with all the harmonics that an all real live orchestra brings with the arrangements we've got it just takes your spirit to a whole new level it's just wonderful do that i want to do that i'd like to see if we couldn't write an album
together i'd love to have a go at that just scan the studio even if it's a blues album you know lock down blues i don't know i've enjoyed our conversation so much you know i knew i would um i respect your your approach to your art i i have huge amounts of respect for what you do for society and the way that you move and i really admire your honesty man you're a no human thank you brother all right be lucky bro you