Book Club: The Who's Pete Townshend on his new novel

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 27 November 2019

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam's guest in this week’s Book Club is the rock musician, writer and sometime Faber editor Pete Townshend. Pete has just published his first novel The Age of Anxiety, an ambitious work jointly conceived as an opera. They talk about madness and creativity, Who lyrics popping up in the fiction, how he settled on an Aristotelian plot, and the unusual way his psychic second wife sends him off to sleep.

The Spectator Book Club, what used to be known as Spectator Books, is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, The Spectator's Literary Editor. Hear past episodes here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just before you start listening to this podcast, a reminder that we have a special subscription offer.
0:04.8	You can get 12 issues of The Spectator for £12, as well as a £20,000 Amazon voucher.
0:10.3	Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher if you'd like to get this offer.
0:20.5	Hello and welcome to Spectator's Books podcast.
0:23.5	I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator, and this week I'm joined by Pete Townsend.
0:28.7	A man will be familiar to many spectator readers and fans, myself among them, as the lead guitarist and songwriter for the band The Who.
0:35.8	But here he's wearing a different hat.
0:38.3	He's just published his first novel, The Age of Anxiety.
0:42.5	Pete, welcome.
0:43.3	Thank you for having me.
0:44.4	Nice to be here.
0:45.3	It's taken a while for you to get around to writing a first novel.
0:48.1	What was it that, I mean, obviously you've had other things going on, but what was it
0:51.9	that made you centering on this now and think?
1:01.0	Partly, I think it's about having time to do it. And the Who have been touring, but not incessantly. And by the Who, I just mean me and Roger Daltrey, really. We've been doing
1:04.9	odd things here and there. And it takes up about three months of the year maximum. So I kept looking ahead at what kind of project I would
1:13.8	want to do if I started on a clean sheet project, something brand new. So not a revival of
1:20.4	quadrufini or a theatre show based on Tommy or whatever, something completely new. And I realized
1:26.2	that what I would have to do with this time was to
1:28.8	make sure that I had a really rock solid story to work on because I don't think I can take the
1:35.8	usual license of the rock star, which is that, you know, at the end of Tommy, he walks up the
1:40.6	mountain and you don't know where he goes. And at the end of Quadrophenia, he goes out on a rock and it rains.
	...

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