Pete Townshend: ‘The Who were a very difficult band to create music for’

The Who’s guitarist and creative leader sits scrunching a crumpled-up paper napkin in his hand as though it were a massage ball. The long fingers of Pete Townshend’s other hand fiddle with a pile of books on the table in front of him, minutely straightening them. His blue eyes are alert. He looks at me as he speaks, then away, then back again. His manner is thoughtful, engaged, ungrand.

I meet him in a room at the Sloane Club, a private members’ bolt-hole in Chelsea, a once swinging and now sleekly moneyed district of London. Townshend, 78, has come to town from the Oxfordshire country house where he lives with his wife, musician Rachel Fuller. The reason for his trip is The Who’s biggest failure, Lifehouse — the abandoned follow-up to their hit 1969 rock opera Tommy — which has now been resurrected as a graphic novel.

Titled Life House, the book is a handsome hardback affair whose illustrations and text are based on the album that Townshend hoped to make in 1970. Set in a future totalitarian Britain where music has been banned, it expands on the script that he prepared for his bandmates and their management more than 50 years ago.

“I circulated it to everybody, and nobody understood,” he says. “But when you see the graphic novel you think, ‘This is a simple story’.” He gives a resigned chuckle. The crumpled paper napkin receives another couple of scrunches.

The sci-fi fable takes place in the year 2177. Britain is an ecologically ruined country whose cowed populace is kept sedated by being plugged into an internet-style network called The Grid. A charismatic rebel leader plans to overthrow the techno-dictatorship by unleashing the banned power of rock and roll. Among the cast of characters is a singer who can destroy everything by hitting a note.

“Funnily enough that was Roger Daltrey’s idea,” Townshend says. But The Who’s vocalist was as puzzled as the rest by Townshend’s immensely ambitious multimedia project. It included an interactive staging where personal information from each gig-goer would be processed by a computer in order to personalise the music for them as though connected to The Grid. (“Nah, won’t work,” Daltrey supposedly remarked. “You’ll never get enough wire.”)

“I was obsessed with the idea of music being precisely reflective,” Townshend says. “In other words, I could talk to you and find out things about you, and I could write something that you would then be very pleased with; or that you would be unhappy with, because you’d say, ‘This brings out stuff about me that I’d prefer nobody knew’.”

“Complicated” is a word that often gets used about Townshend. The son of divorced musician parents, he was raised by a grandmother whom he has characterised as mentally ill and violently unstable. He said he was researching a campaign against child sexual abuse when he received a caution in 2003 during a police investigation into online child pornography. In his 2012 memoir Who Am I, he wrote about suffering sexual abuse as a boy.

He was drinking a lot while trying to make Lifehouse. Its failure precipitated a psychological crisis linked to his fraying relationship with the band’s manager Kit Lambert, an upper-class gay man with a glamorously raffish Chelsea lifestyle. “I loved Kit,” he says. “I wasn’t homosexual, I didn’t have any homoerotic feelings and I wasn’t sexually attracted to him, but I really wanted him to be sexually attracted to me — and he wasn’t.”

Lambert wanted to make a film of Tommy, not work on Lifehouse. Townshend’s refusal led to a showdown in a New York hotel during which the upset guitarist had to be restrained as he made to throw himself from a window. “It wasn’t a suicidal thought, it was an impulse,” he says. “I was seeing red, I was seeing lights, I was just lost.”

For all the group’s success, their internal dynamics were fraught. “The Who were a very difficult band to create music for,” Townshend says. “I don’t remember us ever going into a studio and having discussions about what we were going to play. I expected the demos to be honoured as though they were written on manuscript paper. This is the definitive version of this song” — he taps the pile of books on the table, some of his favourite graphic novels, as if it were a stack of scores — “and I want it to sound like that.”

Such talk resembles the diktat of a tyrannical composer. “Very much so, yes. It had to be so because as a studio guitar player, I had a style that was unique: rhythm-based, aggressive, very loud, so whatever I wrote had to accommodate that.”

The other members of The Who were no less distinctive. “Keith Moon’s style was very anarchic, unmusical, decorative,” Townshend says of the band’s drummer. “More like the section of a symphony orchestra with gongs and tam-tams and very many drums and very little rhythm. John Entwistle was inventing and reinventing the bass guitar all the time until he turned it into a lead guitar. And Roger’s evolution as a singer too, with that incredible growl” — Townshend unleashes a sotto voce roar — “which he developed into a craft of his own that other people emulated.”

Songs meant for Lifehouse were used in 1971’s Who’s Next, including the band’s signature anthem “Baba O’Riley”. It was named after Indian spiritual guru Meher Baba, whose holistic teachings Townshend followed, and US minimalist composer Terry Riley, who inspired the electronically treated organ motif that ripples through the track. “He did actually complain that I made more money out of his sound than he did,” Townshend says.

As charted in the recent Who’s Next/Life House box-set, the scuttled album was written with newly acquired synthesisers. Townshend turned to the visionary figure of Karlheinz Stockhausen for advice. “He wasn’t much help,” he says drily of the avant-garde electronic composer. “He said you have to learn to decompose, not compose.”

A cryogenically frozen incarnation of The Who makes an explosive cameo appearance in the Life House graphic novel. Now reduced to Townshend and Daltrey after the deaths of Moon and Entwistle, they’re still going. “Apparently Mick [Jagger] has said, ‘Yeah, The Rolling Stones will definitely do an Abba,’” he says, referring to Abba’s recent virtual concerts.

He pulls a face at the idea of The Who doing an avatar show: “Oh fuck, no, no, no.” Townshend seems set on following Stockhausen’s advice after all. One day The Who will decompose, not enter a digital foreverland of scissor kicks and demolished instruments.

‘Life House: The Graphic Novel’, written by James Harvey and David Hine, art by Harvey and Max Prentis, is published on December 19

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @FTWeekend on X and Instagram, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen