Pete Townshend Talks Lifehouse, The Who, And Modern Technology

A remarkable audience with the rock legend...

The Who’s Lifehouse is the subject of more rock mythology than the average library could handle. A work of astonishing ambition, the song cycle foresaw the birth of the internet, and spoke of a tech-enabled dystopia that arguably glimpse the crises that have beset 2023. It also drove its creator – Pete Townshend – and virtually anyone associated with it completely mad.

Thus shelved, Lifehouse would form the crux of the mega-selling ‘Who’s Next’, with further songs and ideas from this era peppering the band and Pete Townshend’s solo career for a decade. Indeed, its creator never quite gave up on Lifehouse – earlier this year, as a matter of fact, a lavish ‘Who’s Next’ box set brought further original material to light.

At one point a proposed studio album, at another point a proposed science fiction cinematic venture, Lifehouse has never quite reached a point of completion. Until now, that is. Teaming up with Peter Hogan – who ran Pete’s Magic Bus bookshop – a new graphic novel finally presents this daring saga in full. Except it’s not a rock album any more – it’s a comic book.

Clash travels to West London to take part in a special roundtable discussion with Pete ‘n’ Peter, and are met by two beaming faces. Pete Townshend is seated in the centre, and he’s brought a small library of graphic novels, the sort of texts that have been inspiring him through this process. MAUS is there, a highly personal tale from the Holocaust, alongside the work of Eisner, and countless other comic book auteurs. This is clearly something close to his heart.

The new graphic novel cuts to the heart of their friendship. The two met in the late 70s – Pete Townshend had been encouraged to open the Magic Bus bookshop, primarily to spread the work of Meher Baba, the spiritual teacher whose lessons had impacted so potently on his own life. Peter Hogan came on board to help run the shop, and through his influence it began stocking comic books and graphic novels.

“We had all kinds of books,” recalls The Who guitarist. “Spiritual books, feminist writing, politics… and this bit in the middle, which was all comics. And because it was my bookshop, I felt that it was okay for me to… well, to not to steal things, but to borrow things.”

It sparked a love of comic books that extends to the present day, but actually began in childhood. The finished Lifehouse graphic novel, for instance, contains a nod to Dan Dare. “I was a fan, yeah,” he says. “Dan Dare appeared in the Eagle… and those things really fucked with the young mind. This idea that there are creatures in space. It affects what you dream, as a young kid. I continued to read it into my early teens – playing the guitar, reading Dan Dare.”

Lifehouse has proved to be enduringly malleable. First mooted as a rock album, then pitched as a science fiction film, it’s now become a graphic novel. “It’s the richness of the idea,” reflects Pete Townshend.

Looking back on its origins, he comments: “The Who were running out of ideas pre-‘Tommy’, the rock opera. And that album started off as a mythic tale. It’s loosely inspired by Hermann Hesse’s Siddharta. But I was also reading lots of Sufi tales, and mystical writings by Hazrat Inayat Khan. He wrote a book called the Mysticism Of Sound. A musician, but also a spiritual teacher. All of that was flooding through my head.”

Amongst all these esoteric explorations sat the burgeoning 60s psychedelic culture. “I had this experience, post-Monterey, where I took some acid – supplied by a chemist involved with the Grateful Dead – and I had this terrifying trip where I left my body. I spoke about it with this guy Mike MacKinnon, who recommended the writings of Meher Baba. I went and got a biography of him, and instantly got all the answers I needed to all these questions buzzing around my head.”

Suddenly, the songwriter reached a moment of clarity. “The Who had run out of hit singles and we needed something bigger and I had always wanted to write an opera,” he recalls. “My manager Kit Lambert was a terrific mentor and encouraged me to write this song cycle.”

“Nick Cohn – who wrote for the Observer – said, isn’t it corny? Rock star into a guru? So we changed it to a pinball player, wrote a few extra songs… and it was in the can! Piece of nonsense, and also the biggest fucking thing that ever happened to anybody in their entire life. I mean, just beyond beyond beyond huge.”

Emboldened, Pete Townshend decided to grapple with his interests in their totality. Entering art school in the early 60s under the tutelage of Roy Ascot, he had long been fascinated by technology, and the impact it could have. The two remain associated to this day – and recently launched a joint project together, exploring the possibilities opened up by AI. “One of his first lessons was: get ready art students because the pencil, the brush, clay… it’s all history.”

First, though, we need to discuss Lifehouse, and its prescient tale of youth culture, rock music, and cybernetics. “I decided to write this story about a spiritual journey but one that was rooted in technology, and – in a sense – a sci-fi story as I saw it at the time. Now what’s interesting about Lifehouse is that it feels less of a sci-fi story than a slightly mythic, slightly cartoon view of what’s going on in the world today. So it looks like it’s immensely prescient, but it wasn’t prescient… it was really just me grabbing an imaginary ideas.”

The sheer scale of what he was trying to communicate pushed him to the limit. Nodding to Peter Hogan, the two grin at the density of ideas in this finished graphic novel. “I was looking for something poetic, rather than something technological,” he says.

“Kit Lambert just didn’t get Lifehouse. He had been the producer of ‘Tommy’ and everything that I’d written as a young man… he was my mentor, I adored him, I was sort of in love with him in a way, and he just abandoned me in the middle of Lifehouse. He just didn’t get it.”

“I think it was probably because of the Meyer Baba connection, that I’d lost that sense of being allied to the street. I felt later with ‘Quadrophenia’ that I had to reconnect myself and the band The Who which had become a prog rock thing… y’know, playing mainly arenas and sometimes stadiums. We had to re-connect with that London audience.”

The two are glassy-eyed when discussing music’s prior role in youth culture – it’s faded somewhat, from its previous role as a life force, a revolution generator. Peter Hogan picks up on this: “I think it’s regarded more as just entertainment now. And that’s been the way for a long time. Back in the 60s, there was a kind of social dimension to it, you felt a part of something bigger as well. But life changes.”

Indeed, in the finished graphic novel an authoritarian government attempts to ban rock music, fearing its power to unite, and to subvert the status quo. “I think it’s probably not possible now to ban any kind of music,” notes Pete Townshend, “but I think there is a sense that with the current government of the UK, that they seek to control things that, really, are totally out-with their control.”

The exhilarating power of rock delirium is continuing motif in Lifehouse – it’s what propels the underground movement, and leads to a sense of rapture at the book’s finale. “I think rapture is the right word,” says Pete Townshend, “which comes across so much better in graphics, as it does in my script.”

“60s audiences wanted congregation, they wanted the heightened mode of being somewhere with something that happened to everybody, not just them… so, my idea was that ultimately at this final Lifehouse event all of the music would play, everybody would be drawn together, and they would go somewhere else. I don’t try to guess where they go. But they transcend, I think.”

The multi-faceted themes of Lifehouse stretch the graphic novel format to the limit – it’s a flood of colour and information, inspiring at every turn. It’s meta, too – The Who make a guest appearance, alongside a band who essentially resemble The Who. Wormholes within wormholes, it dares to mirror the cybernetic maze we’ve found ourselves lodged inside. “One of the things that that was happening in 71, where I first started to work on the story, is that I saw a digital revolution coming,” says the guitarist. “I’m so excited by it.”

His colleague Peter Hogan notes: “One of the things about comics is that it’s an incredibly powerful medium. And we probably haven’t even scratched the surface of it yet.”

Indeed, the stress of completing this current project gave the songwriter “what amounted to a mini nervous breakdown… as so many people who have dabbled with Lifehouse have had!”

Pete Townshend seems to constantly seek input. Across this wide-ranging two-and-a-half hour chat he holds sway over everything from Pop Art to modern hip-hop production, via the faults in the 60s counter-culture and his continuing thirst for spiritual nourishment. “I’m a person of imagination. I’m a storyteller. That’s to do with my childhood and incidents that happened to me as a child. I went into fantasy thinking at the age of seven, and stayed there.”

Touching on his passion for comics, Pete Townshend recalls a childhood seeking out the Beach and the Dandy. “I started to read them as soon as I possibly could, and I read them for as long as I possibly could. And I could never quite work out what gripped me about some of their chief, most famous characters,” he notes.

“It was about the gang,” he says. “For me, it was about the idea that as a four and a half year old, in a post war world, I could be in a gang of other four and a half year old boys, and we used to run rampage. Rampage. That’s what it was all about. The Post War Syndrome.”

“I remember when the band first started. The beat was emphasised for the guys in the audience. ‘Quadrophenia’ is the definitive piece in that it has a girl in it… but it’s mainly for boys very much the Bash Street Kids set to music.”

Pete Townshend is part of a generation of post war musicians who changed the face of the country. He remains close to many of his peers – take Elton John, for example. “He appears on Facetime every other morning… often when I’m in bed! ‘Hello it’s Elton!’” he laughs. “He’s great company. And he’s very smart. But he’s also a wonderful musicologist, you really keep some with what’s new. See, when he attaches onto somebody, he’s sincere about it, I still find myself pretending to like people that I’m not sure that I like because they appear to be unbelievably cool.”

“Elton is so fraught with loss at not knowing what to do next. He’s just gone over to LA to make an album with Brandi Carlile. They made an album together in two weeks. He says it’s one of the best things they’ve ever done”.

For his part, Pete Townshend remains ferociously busy. Constantly open to new ideas, he’s focussed on visual arts and music – recently teaching himself percussive tricks on an MPC. “Originally, it was about precision – if you if you put in a bass drum and a snare drum, it would line it up so that it was accurate. But because most drummers – like Keith Moon, who never ever hit a drum on a beat in his entire life, you know, it was all around the beat. And then J Dilla comes along and shows how to use the MPC in a way that makes it feel human. And then suddenly it’s a whole new revolution.”

Embracing a state of flux, Pete Townshend is off once more – closing down possibilities, and seeing what can be created. “What I’ve realised is that often the most interesting things are what’s happening today, or what appears to be happening today. Y’know, when you suddenly wake up and you realise that hip-hop is having its 50th fucking anniversary and The Who’s first gig in Shepherds Bush was 60 years ago. Life has just flashed by.”

‘Who’s Next’ 50th anniversary box set is out now. Lifehouse can be ordered as a graphic novel online.

Words: Robin Murray