The Who’s Pete Townshend talks about his first novel The Age of Anxiety
The Who’s Pete Townshend, who has shaped the world of rock music for decades, has turned his hand to fiction.
Pete Townshend defined “my generation” and rewrote the rules of rock ’n’ roll with The Who.
Now he’s attempting to rewrite the rules of fiction with The Age of Anxiety, a project that comprises a novel, a future opera, and an art installation.
But in a life blighted by drugs, abuse, and his arrest for accessing child pornography, Townshend has written The Age of Anxiety not just as a novel but as a chance to be free of the past.
The book, out this month, is set to be followed by an art installation next year and an opera planned for 2021. Add a new album from The Who coming out next month, and it’s a wonder Townshend is still standing.
It is the kind of frantic, prolific schedule you would expect from a man who has written more than 100 songs for 11 Who studio albums, as well as the two rock operas, Tommy and Quadrophenia.
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But Townshend’s life is one marred by childhood abuse, and in more recent years dogged by the child pornography accusations he faced in 2003.
Townshend never faced court — he was put on a sex offenders register for five years — and has recently said he went to the illegal material as part of a plot to prove British banks were complicit in channelling profits from pedophile rings.
He had been abused himself as a child.
Townshend tells The Australian in London that while he was able to let go of most of the pain of his arrest in his 2012 autobiography Who I Am, the stain of being associated with something as depraved as child pornography affected his latest work.
“The autobiography didn’t so much free me as it let me put it all aside, so I didn’t creep into it,” he says. “Because I was arrested and accused of being a paedophile, there were a lot of subjects in this book that I just couldn’t touch on.
“I couldn’t even describe a child (in the book) because I thought it would trigger me. That thing we call the elephant in the room.
“This happened to me and it was wrongful. I just have to work through it.”
The Age of Anxiety is Townshend’s first fully furnished novel.
He’s previously put out a collection of short stories, there is an unfinished book, and he worked for a time as an editor at T.S. Eliot’s legendary publishing house Faber & Faber.
But those who know Townshend for My Generation or his life of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll will find plenty to relate to in The Age of Anxiety. There’s an old rock star who disappears into the Moors, a young composer who has hallucinations, an art dealer taking hard drugs, and a beautiful, killer, Irish girl.
All the while there are visions of angels and the apocalypse and all other kinds of hallucinogenic nightmares you would more likely expect in Tommy, with the Acid Queen and Pinball Wizard.
But Townshend says any drugs in his book are just a gateway to understanding the artistic experience. “The only person who takes drugs in the story is the narrator. He’s a recovering heroin addict,” he says.
“I wanted my narrator to be someone who had an experience of euphoria but also euphoric drug-induced visions.
“Why? Because he’s an art dealer … he can see that people who have visions, who see things differently to us, can still produce great art.
“I wanted him to integrate with that. That’s why I wanted him to have drugs.
“Some quarters describe the book as about sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. But that’s because of me — what would you expect?”
Speaking in London, the guitarist and chief songwriter for one of the world’s biggest bands says he has always looked to great writers, rather than to rock stars, for his inspiration.
He was a great mate of Ted Hughes, the British poet and husband of Sylvia Plath, with whom he wrote an opera of Hughes’s The Iron Man. William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, was one of his mentors.
“Golding didn’t like rock music at all, but he liked me. He was a great sailor; we went sailing,” Townshend says. “His big tip for writing was ‘Blank wall, no lights, blank paper, short sentences’.”
Despite those literary connections, Townshend’s first novel has come about because of what he does best, writing music.
“I started with the soundscapes, the (hallucinatory sounds) the young artist in the novel hears,” he says. “My real skill is not fiction writing, it’s writing songs and lyrics. I wrote the novel just so I could write the libretto … the libretto’s in my back pocket.”
Townshend, The Who and frontman Roger Daltrey are still going with music. They release a new album, Who, on November 22 and it is their first record in 13 years. They are set to tour Britain and Europe early next year but Townshend, 74, admits he’s not that big a fan of the band that made him famous. “I wouldn’t have gone to see The Who, ever,” he says.
“They’re not my kind of band. I’m not being smart, they’re not … It is corny, macho bollocks. Not arty enough for me.
“I would want to go see music that’s new, that’s challenging. Who fans defined us in our first couple of years, so it was difficult for us to evolve.
“We were ugly. I used to say to the other boys in the band, ‘Let’s not have any women in the audience because they’re fickle, they move onto other bands … most of our fans are men.’
“I would have much preferred to be in a smarter, artier band.”
So why join a band that didn’t appeal to women?
“I joined Roger Daltrey’s band because I was a boy who couldn’t fight, who was very, very nervous, who didn’t grow up. I was a very late developer, I didn’t have sex till I was 18,” he says.
“(The Who’s notorious late drummer) Keith Moon wasn’t even funny … he was a pain in the neck. I needed to join a gang and Roger was the school bully. So I felt safe.”
Not that Townshend wishes he had been in a band with that other icon of art pop, David Bowie. “David Bowie was my f..king invention. He based everything he did on five or six conversations I had with him when he was a child,” he says.
He says that, when he was young, he would rather have seen the Rolling Stones, or a band like Primal Scream.
Which of today’s musical artists does he enjoy? “I don’t have any particular favourites … I really love Billie Eilish. She refuses to be pigeonholed, she refuses to be sexualised. Taylor Swift is someone I occasionally listen to. She was on television recently singing a song by my best friend, Billy Nicholls.”
The man who represented 1960s teenage counterculture says he’s a fan of a current teenage rebel, climate activist Greta Thunberg.
The Age of Anxiety seems an apt title for a book set in Britain at this point in time. What does Townshend make of Boris, Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn?
“I voted to remain in the European Union … I don’t think we should have another referendum so what should I vote? I would usually be a socialist voter. But if I vote Jeremy Corbyn and he comes after me, I’m back in 1973 with no f..king money at all.”
The Age of Anxiety by Pete Townshend (Hachette Australia, $45).
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