A biography for Pete Townshendhasn’t been written yet.
“Keith Moon is not interested in jazz and won't ever be a jazz drummer because he's more interested in looking good and being screamed at.”
“A lot of my audience are in their 50s. But they want me to pretend to continue to be pretending.”
“I felt that The Who had ended because we'd lost touch with our original Shepherd's Bush audience.”
“Everything that I had done creatively related to two or three incidents that happened to me when I was a child that I'd forgotten. Everything, absolutely everything.”
“I didn't start to collect records and listen to guitar players properly until I went to art school, when I'd already been playing for five years. So my style was already formed, and that's why I think it's so unique.”
“I want to age with some dignity.”
“Although I dig my guitar playing, I think it's kind of an obvious situation; I play what I want to play within my own restrictions.”
“What I took back, because of my exposure to the Jewish music of the 30s and the 40s in my upbringing with my father, was that kind of theatrical songwriting. It was always a part of my character. This desire to make people laugh.”
“Even modern English people are imperious, superior, ridden by class. All of the hypocrisy and the difficulties that are endemic in being British also make it an incredibly fertile place culturally. A brilliant place to live. Sad but true.”
“In a sense, the god we trust politically is a slightly different god than the one we bring into the fray when we enter a rock concert. One of the things I can say with absolute conviction is that I worship that god.”
“But what was interesting about what the Who did is that we took things which were happening in the pop genre and represent them to people so that they see them in a new way. I think the best example is Andy Warhol's work, the image of Marilyn Monroe or the Campbell's soup can.”
“I bought a Dutch barge and turned it into a recording studio. My plan was to go to Paris and record rolling down the Seine.”
“I don't view the fans in the way that most performers do. As a mass of people who have paid money, I know what they want. It's a very, very, very, very, very low common denominator.”
“The Who got paid 4000 pounds during those days, but we always smashed our equipment that cost more than 5000 pounds.”
“My father was in a dance band, and I wanted to do what he did, play the saxophone, but I couldn't blow a note, so he suggested the guitar. Chromatic harmonica was actually my first instrument, and I got very good at it - not quite Stevie Wonder, but very good.”
“Do you realize why is it I'm so driven to operate within the Establishment? It's vengeance. 'Hope I die before I get old' is something I still have to live with, but not for the reason many people think. I have to be very, very vigilant not to become one of those people I despised.”
“As a young man, every bone in my body wanted to pick up a machine gun and kill Germans. And yet I had absolutely no reason to do so. Certainly nobody invited me to do the job. But that's what I felt that I was trained to do. Now no part of my upbringing was militaristic.”
“I have to say that anger is the blanket that comes around me, and that blunts and blurs my sense of proportion.”