Time can play strange tricks on even the most rebellious rock’n’roller. Fifty years ago, Pete Townshend was the voice of a generation of angry young men: popularising the power chord, smashing guitars onstage and articulating the essence of youth in the era after an entire generation of young men had been lost to war. Now, having just turned 70 – and having headlined last weekend’s Glastonbury festival – he has released a “symphonised” version of one of the Who’s classic albums, Quadrophenia, performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, which is to be staged on Sunday at the Royal Albert Hall.
It’s tempting to infer that the angry young man, who hoped he’d die before he got old, has, in his dotage, become an upstanding member of the establishment. Townshend dismisses that suggestion as “archaic, insulting and extraordinary dumb”, but there’s a smile on his face.
“I think that music has always suffered from being tied to any kind of political or social or even spiritual or religious connection,” he says, addressing the subject more seriously. “As a musician, I have always really wrestled with that idea. My dad was in a swing band in the war, and my wife’s father, Ted Astley, was an orchestral composer who did film and TV scores, and both of them always said to me: ‘Snobbery in music, whether it’s up or down, is bad.’ I suppose the Who were rebellious, and I suppose for a while we were – or seemed to be – anti-establishment. But that wasn’t us really. I think we were just reflecting what was going on around us.”
Townshend was born just days after the end of the second world war, part of a generation – including what became the mods – who seemed to him “to have no function” in postwar society. “We felt we could never be as good as our fathers and our grandfathers, who had fought in these magnificent and absurd wars and had both validation and valediction, and so we somehow had prove ourselves at street level,” he says. “And I happened to be in a band doing that. I suppose I could have ended up playing the clarinet like my father and, if I had, I probably would have ended up playing in an orchestra. But I went to an art school, so my journey was slightly different.”
Townshend was entranced by music long before the birth of rock’n’roll. He remembers going to the Royal Festival Hall at the age of eight, to hear an orchestra for the first time. “I got a seat at the back of the orchestra, where I could see the conductor, and they were playing Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony, which is beautiful, lovely, poetic music. It seemed like magic.” After starting the Who, he often sought advice from his father-in-law – who “displayed no snobbery about the fact that his son-in-law was in a snotty pop group” – about arranging and orchestrating.
Sixty years after that childhood trip to the South Bank, Townshend felt the same thrill when he arrived at Air Studios in north London last winter to oversee the recording of a new version of Quadrophenia. “I was taken back to that feeling of being exposed to the wonder of an orchestra,” he says. “I imagined myself as an old man in my country mansion: you know, I’ve got a couple of dogs and I go into my study and I’ve got this collection of folios of all my story-based work. And somebody would ask me the daft question: ‘Why would you bother to do this?’ And I would say: ‘Because I think this is fabulous work and when I die, perhaps an orchestra like the London Philharmonic will perform it.’ So that’s how it came about. That’s really something that I wanted and I started to want it quite early in my career.”
The new album’s slick three-day recording was a contrast to the original album’s six-month recording in 1972, a period when the Who, by Townshend’s own admission, “had lost contact with our audience”. He spent the equivalent of £4m building a quadrophonic studio and the band, riven by internal conflicts, took a further three months to complete recordings. “Roger and I were not getting on at all well at the time,” he says, “and Quadrophenia became necessary to remind us that was what we were supposed to be doing was not Keith Moon dressing up as Adolf Hitler and getting on the front page of the Daily Mirror, but Keith Moon playing the drums in such a way that the people in the audience felt elevated and lifted and freed from the drudgery of their day, but also filled with a sense of possibility. Being a young man in the 60s and the early 70s, just pre-punk, the possibilities were good and there was cause for optimism. We wanted to reconnect the Who with their audience.”
The new Quadrophenia is performed by the 90-piece Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, with an 80-piece choir supporting tenor Alfie Boe as the principal singer. Townshend’s involvement is limited to some subdued guitar playing on a couple of tracks and the vocal part of a subsidiary character, the Godfather, though he will be playing as part of the orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall, with the album’s stars – Boe, Billy Idol and Phil Daniels – also appearing. His limited involvement, he says, is because “I saw myself doing a Beethoven at the premiere: deaf, listening to my Ninth Symphony and not hearing a bloody note, in a box with Coca-Cola and some nuts.” Townshend admits he has doubts about where the appeal of the new version will lie. He thinks the current generation of classical fans, drawn into orchestral music by film scores, will like it. But what of the Who’s fans? “I hope the Who fans will enjoy it,” he says cautiously. “I doubt they will – but they might.” Does he think Roger Daltrey will enjoy it? “I hope so,” he says. “But he probably won’t. We’re all taking a risk. We might find that some sniffy journalists shoot us down. I’m quite used to that and I don’t mind, but I would hate to see this shot down simply because someone thought that I was being pretentious again.”
- Pete Townshend’s Classic Quadrophenia is at the Royal Albert Hall, London, on Sunday 5 July. Details: royalalberthall.com. The album of the same name is out now on Decca Classics.
• The headline of this article was amended on 2 July 2015 because an earlier version misspelt Pete Townshend’s surname as Townsend.
