Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing
Speaker 1: Crazy Tommy six, California. In nineteen sixty seven, the Beatles
Speaker 1: released Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which, although not
Speaker 1: the first concept album ever made, is certainly the most popular.
Speaker 1: Over the years, bands like Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull
Speaker 1: and artists like David Bowie would expand and deepen the genre.
Speaker 1: But in nineteen sixty nine, Pete Townsend labeled his album
Speaker 1: Tommy a rock Opera to remind her obvious she knew,
Speaker 1: but is to be what you Opera is not just
Speaker 1: a label that One clip from Tommy has plot, exposition
Speaker 1: and a line worthy of verity. She carries a scar
Speaker 1: on her cheek to remind her of his smile. The
Speaker 1: Who spent decades as one of the Big Four of
Speaker 1: the British invasion of American radio in the sixties. Big
Speaker 1: Four as in Beatles, Stones Who, Zeppelin. Their arena shows
Speaker 1: earned them a reputation as the greatest live act in
Speaker 1: rock and roll. The brilliant Townsend wrote most of the
Speaker 1: songs and played lead guitar. Keith Moon and John entwhistle
Speaker 1: Worthy rhythm section. The band's front man is my guest today,
Speaker 1: the legendary Roger Daltrey. Daltrey's talent speaks through nuanced vocal
Speaker 1: styles over many years and his raw energy, that looping
Speaker 1: swing of a microphone started with him electrified the vinyl,
Speaker 1: then eight tracks, then cassettes that anyone my age remembers.
Speaker 1: Roger Daltrey is the rock star prototype. Well we needed
Speaker 1: to be was a blokes band. The Beatles were writing
Speaker 1: songs for the girls. They had the Moose screaming the
Speaker 1: Stones that we're a guy and we're a girls band.
Speaker 1: He wrote songs for fellas and I I could say this,
Speaker 1: maybe it's gonna sound like a joke, but it's not
Speaker 1: a joke. And that is you have no idea what
Speaker 1: you and your music has meant to me in my lifetime.
Speaker 1: It's it's if you can't even measure it. You are
Speaker 1: it for me in terms of the range and the
Speaker 1: beauty and no offense to other people, but you have
Speaker 1: the range could do it had the writer, I mean
Speaker 1: townsends of music, what a vehicle to to see Could
Speaker 1: you imagine what it felt like to be presented with
Speaker 1: those songs for the first time. Here roses demo, see
Speaker 1: what you can do with this. We'll describe. We'll describe
Speaker 1: what that was like, meaning how was that process? Someone
Speaker 1: came to you with a tape and you start with
Speaker 1: him and listen to a tape where you bring them
Speaker 1: into the studio. I mean when I can't explain. We
Speaker 1: just played a rehearsal that was easy. It was kind
Speaker 1: of a Kinker like song. You know, it's kind of
Speaker 1: all day and all of the night again, you know,
Speaker 1: you really got me and it was a tribute to
Speaker 1: the Kinks and it was a kind of easy song
Speaker 1: for me as well as anyway anyhow anywhere, which he
Speaker 1: we finished writing on the stage at the Marquee in London.
Speaker 1: He had he had the verses, but he didn't have
Speaker 1: the middle eight, which I helped him with. That's why
Speaker 1: it's a copu co writing thing on that. And then
Speaker 1: we did my generation and substitute of They were really
Speaker 1: easy for me because we come from the Blues and
Speaker 1: James Brown and all that heavy stuff, so that was
Speaker 1: easy to get my teeth into and he just presented them,
Speaker 1: you know, and I just we just slammed away. We
Speaker 1: used to go into the studio and we used to
Speaker 1: have to make those records in probably two hours. Max.
Speaker 1: You know you made the whole album in four hours.
Speaker 1: McCartney told me when I sat was in privately, he
Speaker 1: said to me, you know, we do two songs in
Speaker 1: the morning. We go have a cigarette and have a
Speaker 1: paint and go have a sandwich and come back and
Speaker 1: do two in the afternoon. Well a week they had
Speaker 1: a week, but that's how it was. And then it
Speaker 1: was only um uh. Once I got presented with Happy Jack,
Speaker 1: I had to think totally different about how I as
Speaker 1: a singer. I was going to sing townsend songs and
Speaker 1: present them in any kind of way that I could
Speaker 1: hold my head up in the streets, because I mean
Speaker 1: Happy Jack. I mean, if you listen, Happy Jack wasn't old,
Speaker 1: but he was a man, very tramanic tone to him,
Speaker 1: very it's like unpassed song. I'm thinking, you know, this
Speaker 1: is embarrassing, but he but Peter had written it and
Speaker 1: it became a huge hit. I don't know why, but
Speaker 1: it did. And then of course the next song he
Speaker 1: presents is I'm a Boy about a woman who wanted
Speaker 1: who was having quads and she wanted them all to
Speaker 1: be goals. And one of them turns up as a boy,
Speaker 1: but she treats it like a like a girl. So
Speaker 1: it's this little boy screaming to be heard. I'm a boy,
Speaker 1: but my mom won't submit it. And then I thought, well,
Speaker 1: the only way I'm going to get round this at
Speaker 1: all is to kind of climb into Pete's head and
Speaker 1: into his psyche. Was it a difficult thing to do?
Speaker 1: It was tricky, especially those early songs, and I listened
Speaker 1: back to them now. When I listened to them at
Speaker 1: the time, I used to be kind of embarrassed about
Speaker 1: my voice. I was never happy with the sound of it.
Speaker 1: I've never done a good job on it. That a
Speaker 1: kind of paranoia about it, because it wasn't the kind
Speaker 1: of range I was used to singing in, wasn't the
Speaker 1: emotion I was used to singing about. So I always
Speaker 1: felt that I failed. And it's only now and perhaps
Speaker 1: for the last ten years, that I listened back to them,
Speaker 1: and they have a haunted quality about them, which is
Speaker 1: exactly right, because he writes in a very unusual way,
Speaker 1: as you know, I mean, as you see peak very
Speaker 1: early on got very shrewd and realized that later on
Speaker 1: it became much easier. Tommy became the vehicle that that
Speaker 1: really developed me as a singer because there was an
Speaker 1: ongoing process being slowly put together in the studio to
Speaker 1: develop this rock opera, which was going to be a
Speaker 1: single album, carried on into being this double album. And
Speaker 1: of course when you're in the studio that long working
Speaker 1: on a project, it just gives you more time to
Speaker 1: artistic experiment. So so just with that point, there is
Speaker 1: that where you begin, like most commercially successful groups early on,
Speaker 1: you're recording an album in two days. Is Tommy the
Speaker 1: first time you get to luxuriate in the studio and
Speaker 1: spend months making a single album? Yeah, I mean it
Speaker 1: was ridiculously long time, but in those days and the
Speaker 1: label didn't care that way. In those days, the labels
Speaker 1: kind of did what they were told by the bands
Speaker 1: and that was successful. Yeah, you know, they we were invented,
Speaker 1: inventing this industry that it became, and they were happy
Speaker 1: to let us get on with it. You know, they
Speaker 1: come in and have a listen. Obviously, I'm pretty sure
Speaker 1: they must have done. But this is obviously and Kit Lambert,
Speaker 1: our manager at the time, it was always convinced that
Speaker 1: the pop song could be much much more. And he
Speaker 1: always had this idea that if Mozart had written not
Speaker 1: for us, why can't we have a rock opera? And
Speaker 1: how student was he? Because it told me it was
Speaker 1: the first rock opera. In my opinion, it's one of
Speaker 1: the best operas ever written. Certainly got the most lyrics,
Speaker 1: so the most copious yes, and it's probably had had
Speaker 1: as bigger audiences. That process of making Tommy and the
Speaker 1: studio got me to a certain level, but it was
Speaker 1: only after we then brought into rehearsals of doing it
Speaker 1: live on stage it just took off like a rocket.
Speaker 1: In the studio, you've got the comfort of being able
Speaker 1: to hear everything you've seen and so you can concentrate on,
Speaker 1: you know, all the little details that you think are important.
Speaker 1: Once you get on stage, it's all about giving it
Speaker 1: the wallet that you need to give it to get
Speaker 1: it out, because you've got no Monetly says you have
Speaker 1: to be a belter. But why were you and the
Speaker 1: other three so great on stage? Meaning I mean you're
Speaker 1: again I don't want to lay it on too thick here,
Speaker 1: but you're going to be the unfortunate repository of all
Speaker 1: my fandom here and that is you guys are smart
Speaker 1: and right in the studio and your balls out on stage.
Speaker 1: It's a combination. It's a really simple thing. When I
Speaker 1: put that group together, as each one of them joined
Speaker 1: me in my band, John, it mustle First, I knew
Speaker 1: that I had an ingredient that worked. Our bio rhythms
Speaker 1: were similar. You know, everyone has a bio rhythm that
Speaker 1: is a certain thing. I knew that John and I
Speaker 1: had something that was special. Same when Pete joined people.
Speaker 1: Obviously an enormous talent, immediately obvious just by the guitar
Speaker 1: shapes he was playing. We've never seen anything like it.
Speaker 1: And his right hand movement, you know, because he'd been
Speaker 1: a banjo player, he had this kind of rhythm action
Speaker 1: to was ductor die for you anyway. Then Keith Moon
Speaker 1: came along and all of a sudden, all these individual
Speaker 1: bio rhythms came together and made the algorithm that then
Speaker 1: became the Who. Because who is a unique rhythmic pattern,
Speaker 1: doesn't it. It's this like any other music out there.
Speaker 1: The next rock music it's on the one, you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's a slam rock and roll was music to
Speaker 1: screw too, and whose music was definitely music to fight too,
Speaker 1: and that's what it was about. So once that algorithm
Speaker 1: that we had came together, it's like laying bricks. It's
Speaker 1: really weird. It's musical bricks. I just want to say that,
Speaker 1: you know what you mentioned about that music being for
Speaker 1: young men, there's music. When we knew there was a
Speaker 1: group of guys we had to go beat the ship
Speaker 1: out of across town that night, and that's when your
Speaker 1: music that came up. Your music was your Your music
Speaker 1: with him is we played in the locker room, so
Speaker 1: I was getting it ready for the big game. That's right.
Speaker 1: Who got you on your feet? Yeah, there was. That's
Speaker 1: what we always tried to do. We always tried to
Speaker 1: play our music to you to move you. But I
Speaker 1: want to know you say it moved you to go
Speaker 1: out fighting, but but it moved me to tears as well,
Speaker 1: so of its beauty. And that's what I want to
Speaker 1: get to, which is you grew up very poor, Yeah,
Speaker 1: very little money, but post war England had a lot
Speaker 1: going on for it that that made it incredibly wealthy.
Speaker 1: We had incredible community. Uh you know, I was born
Speaker 1: in a v one raiding in World War two. And
Speaker 1: so everything around us when we grew up been leveled
Speaker 1: by bombs and the war. To get through the war.
Speaker 1: All our aunties and uncles and our mothers and our
Speaker 1: dads are away fighting the war, but they were in
Speaker 1: the bomb shelters every night, and of course drown out
Speaker 1: the bombs. I used to sing, so seeing became a
Speaker 1: really big part of the community. In those days. Every
Speaker 1: pub would have a piano and they would sing all
Speaker 1: these old, these old musical songs and things, and we'd
Speaker 1: all seen them too, And everywhere you went there would
Speaker 1: be people seeing on the streets. How old were you
Speaker 1: when you joined the Boy's Brigade? That would have been
Speaker 1: about eleven? Your boy, yeah, young boy? Yeah? What was
Speaker 1: singing to you? Like? Them were your stuff coaches about?
Speaker 1: So from the beginning you enjoyed it. Yeah. I sang
Speaker 1: in a US choir when I was six or seven
Speaker 1: because I like dressing up. I knew I had a voice,
Speaker 1: and the skiffle of music came along. They were that
Speaker 1: earlier lead belly songs, Chain gang songs. Nnie Donegan, who
Speaker 1: was this guy in Britain who inspired me and people
Speaker 1: like Robert Plant to do what we did because he
Speaker 1: was just so free with his voice. We could play
Speaker 1: that music because it's always three chords, so you've only
Speaker 1: got to learn three chords and you can play all
Speaker 1: those songs. And every street had a group, a skiffle group,
Speaker 1: which consisted of someone who's got a guitar from somewhere.
Speaker 1: I made my first guitar. For a bass, you'd have
Speaker 1: an old t chest, which was a two ft six
Speaker 1: square box open one end string through the middle of
Speaker 1: the top. With a broomstick, a good player could make
Speaker 1: that sound like a double bass. And of course for rhythm,
Speaker 1: you could take something from mom's kitchen and the washboard
Speaker 1: and you had a band um. And that's where it
Speaker 1: all started. And the first time you played in front
Speaker 1: of an audience was when how old were There was
Speaker 1: a Churchill youth club on a on a Saturday night
Speaker 1: in Sheep's Bush and it's my mate said we gotta
Speaker 1: get up and sing a song. So I went up
Speaker 1: and I think I did hound Dog for five minutes
Speaker 1: there with my hair soaped back. We couldn't afford any
Speaker 1: grease like the Elvis, but the soap work wonders and
Speaker 1: we all thought we could look like Elvis with the soap.
Speaker 1: I did my version of Elvis doing hound Dog and
Speaker 1: it was probably awful because that's right at the point
Speaker 1: when your voice is breaking. So but I didn't have
Speaker 1: any worries about it. And what I did notice immediately
Speaker 1: there was other people kind of looking up, and I thought,
Speaker 1: this is quite a nice position to occupy. Some of
Speaker 1: them girls, most of them some of them girls, most
Speaker 1: of them giving you that look. There's something about a voice,
Speaker 1: isn't it. I don't know why. Boy. We had Mark
Speaker 1: Farner from Grand Funk Railroad on this show and he
Speaker 1: tells the story about he said, you know you're on stage, man.
Speaker 1: He talks like this. He says, you're on stage and
Speaker 1: the producer said, you know you're really small down there.
Speaker 1: The people are weigh in the back. Because you gotta
Speaker 1: do something big, you gotta make it. Bigg got to
Speaker 1: give him a show. He goes, I want you to
Speaker 1: rip your shirt off in the middle of the show,
Speaker 1: and he looks at he goes what. He goes, I
Speaker 1: want you to because Foreigner was really fit, like you're
Speaker 1: very ripped kind of fit guy. He goes, I want
Speaker 1: you to rip your shirt off in the show, and
Speaker 1: Fier goes okay in the middleitary rip, the girls go insane.
Speaker 1: They come to work the next thing that the concert hall.
Speaker 1: There's a box of shirts in his dressing room. It's
Speaker 1: like you're gonna rip your shirt off every night. And
Speaker 1: now actually exactly how it was. You can find something
Speaker 1: making it up as we went along, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, and that that were wanders familiar with that
Speaker 1: Tommy outfit that I made, you know, all made out
Speaker 1: of shammy leather um. And but it was so wonderful
Speaker 1: to work in a skin, in another skin because it's
Speaker 1: so free. You know, it sweats with you, it breathes,
Speaker 1: and you don't get so hot because when you wear
Speaker 1: ordinary clothes. It was it was wonderful to wear that.
Speaker 1: But when you when you have the four of you
Speaker 1: together for the first time, it's the detours, that's that's
Speaker 1: the who it was the detours with the four and
Speaker 1: then there was five of us we had. We were
Speaker 1: a kind of Cliff Richard and the shadows are like,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of doing the movements and everything very coolly.
Speaker 1: And then he was going on the fifth one, yes
Speaker 1: he was. I mean we had a singer called Colin
Speaker 1: Dawson who thought it was Cliff Richard, but he wasn't,
Speaker 1: of course, and he decided to become a bacon salesman.
Speaker 1: But we by this time, I've seen a band called
Speaker 1: Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, which you should look up
Speaker 1: because they made some great records. And that was the
Speaker 1: first three piece band we've seen as a rock band
Speaker 1: where that had a lead come rhythm guitarist, a bass player,
Speaker 1: and a great drama and a least singer in black
Speaker 1: letter trousers and a black patch over his eye. And
Speaker 1: it was Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. They even had
Speaker 1: a backdrop hand painted of a galleon that this is
Speaker 1: the bar looking crazy. But they did great songs. They
Speaker 1: did Shaking all Over, the original Shaking all Over, you
Speaker 1: know that song, and they need a shot of rhythm
Speaker 1: and blues, which the Beatles covered. That was Johnny Kidd
Speaker 1: and the Pirates. And the guitarists of that band was
Speaker 1: a guy called Mickey Green, and he played in a
Speaker 1: way where not only was he doing the rhythm, he'd
Speaker 1: do the leads as well, so there was particular sound
Speaker 1: and Pete got it immediately. So by that time I
Speaker 1: was the lead guitarist when we had Peter's rhythm, but
Speaker 1: I was a sheep metal worker and sheet metalwork and
Speaker 1: guitar playing don't really go together because my hands were shredded.
Speaker 1: Most nights we get caught in the cuts and all
Speaker 1: kinds of stuff. So I was very happy to give
Speaker 1: up the guitar. And all the time we've been doing
Speaker 1: these Cliff Richard songs. We used to play for g
Speaker 1: I's in some of the clubs in London, and they
Speaker 1: used to request things like Chuck Berry and you know,
Speaker 1: some John any Cash and weird stuff and I Royal Orbison.
Speaker 1: Now Colin couldn't sing that, but I could, so I
Speaker 1: used to do some of the singing. And uh so
Speaker 1: it became obvious that Pete should now become the lead
Speaker 1: rhythm guitarist and I would be very happy just to
Speaker 1: become the singer. And that's when it changed their sheet
Speaker 1: metal career, media the lead vocalist of the Who. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But it also made us our first electric guitars. We
Speaker 1: couldn't afford to buy them in those days, but we
Speaker 1: could make them what I could make them, very rudimentary things,
Speaker 1: but they worked. So the four of you, did you
Speaker 1: get a record deal when you were the Detours. No,
Speaker 1: we were the Detour Us and for quite a long
Speaker 1: while then we became the Who. And by then we
Speaker 1: were playing Chicago blues mostly, starting to feed in a
Speaker 1: bit of James Brown, a bit of Tamla Motown and uh,
Speaker 1: we've got a new manager, so now we've got to
Speaker 1: find an image. And he recognized that it was this
Speaker 1: group of fashion easters coming up called the MUDs, who
Speaker 1: were very sharp dressers. Uh, fashion changing very quickly, very
Speaker 1: tight suits, short haircuts, smart. And he said they need
Speaker 1: a band for them, and you can be that band.
Speaker 1: And we kind of looked at him and said, yeah,
Speaker 1: what were it involved? He said, well, first of all,
Speaker 1: the barbers shop. And we went in to the barber's
Speaker 1: shop as the stones are like, and we came out
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of MUDs with short haircuts. Uh. Immediately
Speaker 1: took around the corner to buy some mud clothes. So
Speaker 1: there we were really wolves in sheep's clothing. And he said,
Speaker 1: you can't keep the name the Who. That's not mud enough,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna call you the higher Numbers. So we said,
Speaker 1: what does that mean? Where does that come from? There
Speaker 1: said what the this week fashion Bowling shoes that you
Speaker 1: have to steal from the bowling alley because he's got
Speaker 1: numbers on the back, you know the side. Of course,
Speaker 1: the legend goes the bigger defeat, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: the MUDs really got behind us as our fan base.
Speaker 1: We were their band, and then they would come and
Speaker 1: request their kind of music that they and they were
Speaker 1: changing their music regularly. It was. It went from kind
Speaker 1: of early reggae what was then called blue beat, Prince
Speaker 1: Buster and all people like that. But by now the
Speaker 1: blues for us have become a little bit tedious to
Speaker 1: twelve bar. But with the aid of Keith Moon and
Speaker 1: his very short attention span and double bassed dru feat,
Speaker 1: we could turn that into the feedback cycle and start
Speaker 1: inventing and be free form, which will then bring the
Speaker 1: jazz influences that we we had round about. Yeah, when
Speaker 1: the high numbers go back to becoming the Who wegan,
Speaker 1: we're still the higher numbers. But then we get an
Speaker 1: another manager, which was Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, fabulous
Speaker 1: creative managers, and they said, well, we don't like to
Speaker 1: name the higher numbers, um, and we've heard you with
Speaker 1: the Who before that we think the who is in
Speaker 1: the right name, so they changed it back to the
Speaker 1: Who that fans were very confused for a while. They
Speaker 1: were It's funny when you talk about the mad period
Speaker 1: and everything, you just start to see those images. You
Speaker 1: can even hear the lyrics in your head. You know,
Speaker 1: zoot suit by jacket with sivince five inches are quite
Speaker 1: dfinia and it makes you think, did Quae Drofinia come
Speaker 1: in his mind before Tommy but he put it on
Speaker 1: the shelf. I think Quadrapa came at the time he
Speaker 1: wrote it in seventy three. But musically you're right about
Speaker 1: the lyrics Quadrophenia. It every generation that comes around picks
Speaker 1: up that album and goes somebody understands me. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: really weird. And we were recently last year. We've never
Speaker 1: been South America before. We've never been you know, who
Speaker 1: are crazy? We're nuts? All those years obsuring never been
Speaker 1: out in the Brazil or do you know Argentina or
Speaker 1: Chill any of those places. Only went to Mexico. It's
Speaker 1: to Mexico five years ago. What you guys down there, well,
Speaker 1: we just we just I don't know why we didn't
Speaker 1: get there, don't ask were mostly on the tour in
Speaker 1: the side of his peet that called the Scots, and
Speaker 1: he just didn't want to go there. He said, we
Speaker 1: have enough trouble fulfilling, you know, our crowd in the States,
Speaker 1: in the UK. So we never went down there. But anyway,
Speaker 1: we went down there last year. They knew every word
Speaker 1: of every song and they were singing louder, immensely, I
Speaker 1: mean Mexico City. They it was extraordinary and they were
Speaker 1: all young people. They knew every word of every song.
Speaker 1: But they need this. I mean, it's good music. You know.
Speaker 1: People want it's good. They don't care how you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: as good as long as you can deliver it properly.
Speaker 1: And if we ever can't do that, then we'll stop.
Speaker 1: I don't ever want to go through the emotions. And
Speaker 1: I never who have never ever done a show where
Speaker 1: we've dialed it in and I can How is your
Speaker 1: voice now? It's great. You had you had some trouble
Speaker 1: with your throat, Well, yeah, that was about that was
Speaker 1: about nine years ago. I had I've got it. I
Speaker 1: had a pre cancerous condition. But I found a doctor, Stevens,
Speaker 1: I tells. I put the Voice Institute in Massachusetts in Boston,
Speaker 1: and he sorted me out. My voice is fabulous now,
Speaker 1: it's it's a joy to sing and all the time
Speaker 1: I can give it the grit and the balls that
Speaker 1: it needs. I'll do it now. When you when you
Speaker 1: do a show, let's pick up the difference between studio recording.
Speaker 1: What was your preparation before you went into the studio
Speaker 1: or you went on tour? Well, you have you have
Speaker 1: to be like an athlete. You owe it to your audience.
Speaker 1: You train your voice trained the voice that you can't
Speaker 1: train a voice, you train all life out of it.
Speaker 1: Some of the trained voices. It's what ruins good voices. Obviously,
Speaker 1: if you had to sing eight shows a week on Broadway,
Speaker 1: you probably need to go to that area where you
Speaker 1: get the sound of the trained voice. Personally, I don't
Speaker 1: particularly like it, but my voices, I'm very careful about
Speaker 1: resting it. And these days I'm not allowed to do
Speaker 1: two shows back to back. I have to have a
Speaker 1: day in between. There's just out of respect for my voice.
Speaker 1: But then I can give it all the pedal that
Speaker 1: I need to give it. Why it is pedal, it's
Speaker 1: about this is you know, this is singing from your
Speaker 1: ass um but that's how it happens down there. Well,
Speaker 1: that's how it has to be to get those songs
Speaker 1: into the vein of getting the who as it needs
Speaker 1: to be in my head anyway. And touch Woods my
Speaker 1: voice is is kind of looking after me at the moment,
Speaker 1: Damn Me Sweet music side a seminal moment in the counterculture.
Speaker 1: Dultry at Woodstock sings see Me Feel Me from Tommy.
Speaker 1: There's earnestness and anger in Dualtry's voice. The band and
Speaker 1: the crowd took Tommy's rebellious message seriously. Another artist with
Speaker 1: a revolutionary sound is Tom York of Radiohead. York finds
Speaker 1: an almost giddy joy in hearing how his innovations spread
Speaker 1: into different music, sometimes very different. One of the best
Speaker 1: buzzes really is that thing where someone comes up you know,
Speaker 1: I'm really into what they're doing. It's really fascinating and
Speaker 1: it's really totally new to me. But yet the occasions
Speaker 1: when fed off of you, yeah, and You're like, how
Speaker 1: could you? How could you feed off me? I don't
Speaker 1: see any of my stuff, yeah, but they see it
Speaker 1: and I'm like, wow, that's so cool. You know, people
Speaker 1: within hip hop who who are into Radiohead I'm like,
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously, I'm massively into hip hop, and we've
Speaker 1: we use hip hop as a reference point in the
Speaker 1: way we build tracks and stuff. But really, wow, that's bonkers.
Speaker 1: The rest of my conversation with radioheads Tom York and
Speaker 1: here's the thing, dot'll work. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're
Speaker 1: listening to hear is the thing? Shaking All Live at
Speaker 1: leads the greatest live rock album of all time according
Speaker 1: to the New York Times and the BBC. Only halfway
Speaker 1: through the show and already Daltrey's voice is ragged where
Speaker 1: you can hear him pushing, literally shaking through the song's
Speaker 1: last stanzas Roger Daltrey's intense physicality extends to his fists.
Speaker 1: He told me he had a bit of a short fuse.
Speaker 1: But you know, I think that came from being bullied
Speaker 1: at school. I'm a little guy. I'm a very small guy,
Speaker 1: and the little ones always used to get bullied. As
Speaker 1: you know. It went on at school for quite a while.
Speaker 1: And she day I picked up a chair and when
Speaker 1: they were starting on me, and I just went in
Speaker 1: first with the chair and they left me alone. They
Speaker 1: all backed off, and I thought, what this works. What
Speaker 1: it did to me, it kind of made my fight
Speaker 1: or flight mode, but it tripped it into I would
Speaker 1: always fight and if ever I felt that the threat
Speaker 1: was going to get out of hand, there's one thing
Speaker 1: a little guy I can do against a bigger guy
Speaker 1: and has to get the first punch or the first
Speaker 1: kick or whatever the region handshake, you know, and then
Speaker 1: you might have a chance of surviving. But that's what
Speaker 1: it did for me, So I yeah, I kind of
Speaker 1: had a red mist and I I used to have
Speaker 1: to rule a band with a bit of an iron
Speaker 1: fisted the beginning because they were a lippy lot. Is
Speaker 1: it safe to say? Because you're a person who sings
Speaker 1: such you know, long live rock and these blistering anthems
Speaker 1: you the band would sing and then you blow some
Speaker 1: of the most beautiful notes and music history, singing sea
Speaker 1: and Sand and see Me Feel Me and all these
Speaker 1: are the songs. Does Pete bring that out on you?
Speaker 1: His writing brings it out. It's it's in the lyrics,
Speaker 1: it's in the melody. You know, a lot of his
Speaker 1: demos when he writes them are very, very different than
Speaker 1: the finished product that I often give him, especially towards
Speaker 1: a lot of years of our career. I try and
Speaker 1: make each song have a starting point and take you
Speaker 1: on the journey through it. Rather a lot of songs
Speaker 1: kind of start and they get to a level and
Speaker 1: they stay there all the way through to the end.
Speaker 1: I've always tried to make whose songs climb a ladder
Speaker 1: rather than being flatlining, you know what I mean. I
Speaker 1: mean brown Sugar comes out, they come out guns blazing,
Speaker 1: and a lot of those songs, the students, they start here,
Speaker 1: you know where as you say you want to kind
Speaker 1: of move around and said the song. I did the
Speaker 1: whole of telling me this summer with it with an
Speaker 1: orchestra uh and a rock band, and it's phenomenal. That's exciting.
Speaker 1: That's that. That's like a new claud Secle music when
Speaker 1: you hear that. I've had these orchestrations done by a
Speaker 1: guy called David Campbell who's the father of Beck. But
Speaker 1: it's elevated Tommy to where I believe it should be now,
Speaker 1: so exciting to play. It's wonderful. Cameron Crowe, when I
Speaker 1: did a movie with them, got me the vinyl copy
Speaker 1: that I worshiped of the ls So with the gleaming
Speaker 1: ball on top of that's just an orchestra. This is
Speaker 1: an orchestra, and I've got to tell you there's not
Speaker 1: one piece of this orchestration where the orchestras playing anything
Speaker 1: like a keyboard pad, you know, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: It's all melodic, interesting, percussive instrumentation. It's in recorded. I'm
Speaker 1: going to release possibly the Bethel Concert which is the
Speaker 1: Woodstock site, as you know, because it's the fifty years
Speaker 1: of Tommy in March, and of course next years fifty
Speaker 1: years of Woodstock, which is me made, us made, really made.
Speaker 1: So I'm yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna release it as
Speaker 1: a solo album. I just you know, as a performance.
Speaker 1: Then I'm gonna ask if he'd like to overdub some
Speaker 1: guitar on it, and then it can be the who
Speaker 1: I want it out there for the record, because it's
Speaker 1: an incredible piece of work. It really is. People always
Speaker 1: talk about Moon and the legend of Moon and Moon
Speaker 1: being a very ill saying as politely as possible, being
Speaker 1: a very colorful character. You would have loved him, You
Speaker 1: would have adored everyone adorned Moon. You also would have
Speaker 1: hated him. You also would have exactly but Whistle, who
Speaker 1: also died young. He was not that old and when
Speaker 1: when he died from a drug overdose as well, correct, uh, well,
Speaker 1: it was a heart attack. You know. John was unconditional
Speaker 1: with the way he lived. He wanted to live the
Speaker 1: life of a rock and roll star. You know. The
Speaker 1: sad thing about John's death was the fact that the
Speaker 1: hard rock casino in Las Vegas, where he died in
Speaker 1: bed after a line of coke and whatever else she
Speaker 1: had taken that night, didn't put a glass case around
Speaker 1: him and open it as an exhibit, because John would
Speaker 1: have loved that. Then John, that to John, I've made it,
Speaker 1: but he was the first one. But he's the first
Speaker 1: one you recruited in the band. He was kind of
Speaker 1: a real maid of yours. And I remember seeing to
Speaker 1: McCartney one time. He said to me, they were always
Speaker 1: telling them, you know, here's the best drummer in London
Speaker 1: that you should have, and you're gonna replace this guy.
Speaker 1: And he said, no, no, no, no, no, it's got
Speaker 1: to be these four people. It's these four. This is
Speaker 1: my band, these four. But we all felt like if
Speaker 1: if Ringo leaves and you get another guy in there,
Speaker 1: we ain't doing it. And how you felt. Definitely, twenty
Speaker 1: Element is not going to be as good. No, And
Speaker 1: it took a long time to find the missing missing
Speaker 1: link that when Keith died, we put Kenny Jones in
Speaker 1: in the band was a fabulous drama Kenny Jones, but
Speaker 1: he was a drummer from Small Faces. But can you
Speaker 1: imagine putting Keith Moon in the Faces? It would have
Speaker 1: been you know, but equally it was a disastrous putting
Speaker 1: Kenny Jones in there. Who the algorithm didn't work anymore.
Speaker 1: It was like like having a square wheel on a car.
Speaker 1: I love Kenny as a mate, and it was incredibly
Speaker 1: difficult to have to say I can't work with you, Kenny,
Speaker 1: it just doesn't work. How long did you work with them?
Speaker 1: We went on for about four years. How many albums
Speaker 1: did you record with them? We did? We did too. Um,
Speaker 1: we did face dances. And it's hard to Petee the
Speaker 1: same way. No. Well, initially he said he didn't, but
Speaker 1: my intuition told me that Pete knew Um I would
Speaker 1: stock obviously for many many people. You know, there are
Speaker 1: people who are musical sophistic kids and they know even
Speaker 1: before Rolling Stones shows up and things like that, they
Speaker 1: find what is music and clubs and they're much more,
Speaker 1: you know, kind of savvy. For me, I was a
Speaker 1: bit younger. The as time I become aware of you
Speaker 1: is because of Woodstock wood Stuck is what introduces me
Speaker 1: to the who. I don't know where you're at in
Speaker 1: your career in terms of success are you? Helicoptering in
Speaker 1: the Baffle described that experience. I was in Connecticut with
Speaker 1: my soon to be wife, Heather, and a mother and father,
Speaker 1: and we were watching the news and it had about
Speaker 1: this festival that we were due to play the following
Speaker 1: day with this was the Friday, And how the governor
Speaker 1: of New York declared the area a disaster zone because
Speaker 1: of all the mud and the rain and lack of
Speaker 1: food and lack of this, and the lack of medicine
Speaker 1: behavior and the kind of medicine that was the wrong
Speaker 1: kind of medicine getting in, and how all the roads
Speaker 1: have been blocked and the state police had blocked everything off,
Speaker 1: and how everybody was having flying in a helicopter to
Speaker 1: even get to the site. Well, how are we going
Speaker 1: to get there? And that was father. He just said, well, well,
Speaker 1: well I'll drive you there in the Volkswagen and they
Speaker 1: had a Volkswagen Beetle, and so her we went to Woodstock.
Speaker 1: We we jumped in the volks Wagon Beetle on the
Speaker 1: morning of the of the that Saturday morning, and we
Speaker 1: drove all the way to Bethel, and every time we
Speaker 1: came to any kind of roadblock which we drove through
Speaker 1: we got there. It was chaos. Yes, it was all
Speaker 1: those things, but it wasn't like they were presenting it
Speaker 1: on the news at all. Um, it wasn't as bad now.
Speaker 1: And we drove into the site in the obligatory hurt
Speaker 1: station wagon which every group used to have in those days. Um,
Speaker 1: So that was myth made up by the fake news
Speaker 1: on the television. You went on what time, Well, we
Speaker 1: were due to go on at nine o'clock at night.
Speaker 1: You gear yourself up psychologically and you get your energy
Speaker 1: to be peeking at the time you hit the stage,
Speaker 1: so that you're ready to deliver to your audience everything
Speaker 1: that they deserve to be given. And we were already
Speaker 1: by nine o'clock, five o'clock in the morning or we
Speaker 1: go and there was hardly anything to eat. We had
Speaker 1: hard they anything to eat, hardly anything to drink that
Speaker 1: wasn't laced with some something already an herb. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: and by the time we got on stage, so much
Speaker 1: of the equipment of broken down. It was. It was
Speaker 1: all a bit hit and miss, But for some reason
Speaker 1: or the other, it seemed to it seemed to capture
Speaker 1: a moment of the period, the struggle that that that age.
Speaker 1: You know, we we tend to forget now that that
Speaker 1: was the whole generation they were living with the Vietnam War,
Speaker 1: the horror of it, and you know, so many of
Speaker 1: them being drafted. I remember Pete kicking Abbie Hoffman off
Speaker 1: the stage making his political speech. Just is not that
Speaker 1: we don't need any more politics? Did you get up
Speaker 1: here again? I'll kill you peace? Lava rock and roll
Speaker 1: now when you Because we had Peter Frampton on this show,
Speaker 1: and Frampton talked about, Um, they go out now and
Speaker 1: do this uh legacy album thing where they play the
Speaker 1: album and it's entirety from start to finish the way
Speaker 1: the album is performed. Are you guys doing Quadrophenia started?
Speaker 1: We did it. We did it not too long ago,
Speaker 1: and we did in a two townsand thirteen. How did
Speaker 1: it go? Fantastic? Yeah, we did the whole the whole
Speaker 1: piece as it studies piece and it's it's a good place.
Speaker 1: We might revisit it sometime. I'll invite you along. Did
Speaker 1: you did you record that? Yes, there is a there's
Speaker 1: a DVD of it. Get it. It's really good. Have
Speaker 1: you perform? Where? Did you perform? Everywhere? Matter? Squigden? Why
Speaker 1: didn't you come? You did obviously on the film? Obviously?
Speaker 1: I got four kids? Yeah, I got four kids five
Speaker 1: and under and I'm sixty. I got five months. You
Speaker 1: got a hundred kids? Took you get about a hundred
Speaker 1: kids on. That's what it brings me to my other question.
Speaker 1: I got two more questions for you. I got a
Speaker 1: thousand questions. You've been married for a long time, and
Speaker 1: you speak very lovingly about your wife in the book,
Speaker 1: and uh, what's your secret? I found the right woman,
Speaker 1: and I found a woman who very early on, um,
Speaker 1: she understood the industry we were in, which, as you know,
Speaker 1: is very difficult to have any kind of relationship in
Speaker 1: long term unless you're have incredible goodwill and understanding and
Speaker 1: truly love each other. She wanted to get married because
Speaker 1: we wanted to have children, and I said, well, I'll
Speaker 1: marry you, but you know, you know what band I'm in,
Speaker 1: and you know what I'm like, I'm never going to
Speaker 1: be that faithful husband that much like right, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: you have to yeah, and you have, but you have
Speaker 1: to do it up front. You can't do it after
Speaker 1: the occasion. And I did it up front and Heather
Speaker 1: accepted it. Um. You know, it wasn't as bad as
Speaker 1: I could have been because of that. Um. And you know,
Speaker 1: here we are fifty one years later and we're true partners,
Speaker 1: true partners. She and your kids when their kids were school.
Speaker 1: Are you and she have three kids together? We got
Speaker 1: three kids when you when they were school? It would
Speaker 1: they go with you on the road? Did you always
Speaker 1: leave to They all came out and that was wonderful.
Speaker 1: But it was really quite kind of funny when my
Speaker 1: kids first saw me on stage and kind of kind
Speaker 1: of thought, you know, and I couldn't hear them talking.
Speaker 1: They were kind of like six or seven years old,
Speaker 1: and my little girls and their friends were talking, and
Speaker 1: I could hear my daughter say, my dad's a rock star,
Speaker 1: and the other little girl said, yeah, but my dad
Speaker 1: takes the train to London every day, you know, which
Speaker 1: is so wonderful when you go Oh, this is this
Speaker 1: is real life. It isn't amazing. How you you you're
Speaker 1: trying to tell that to people's kids. I've met famous,
Speaker 1: especially famous musicians, you know, acting as so ephemeral like
Speaker 1: who's good and who's great and what works and what
Speaker 1: doesn't work. As live music is much more pure, I
Speaker 1: agree with you. And there's there's also something about music.
Speaker 1: I don't know whether it's the same today, but it
Speaker 1: used to be so you could always remember exactly what
Speaker 1: you were doing when you first heard that track. There's
Speaker 1: something about Buddy Holly singing that will the other day.
Speaker 1: Wow did that turn our heads? When you heard first
Speaker 1: heard Obvious singing? You know Heartbreak Hotel Whoa, you know,
Speaker 1: Little Richard singing, you know lou Seal. When I was
Speaker 1: gonna do lip sync battle on Jimmy Fallon, I didn't
Speaker 1: do it, but I was gonna do it, and they said,
Speaker 1: what do you want to do? I said, I want
Speaker 1: to do Barbara O'Reilly and they said, you can't do that.
Speaker 1: I go way to go because you can't spin the mic.
Speaker 1: You're gonna smash the lights up in the TV studio.
Speaker 1: I couldn't. Who taught you how to do that. Where
Speaker 1: did you get that idea to take that mic and
Speaker 1: throw that mic? I didn't know. One told me. I
Speaker 1: just got yourself once they went into the free form
Speaker 1: in the early days, the late sixties. It just came
Speaker 1: out of boredom I was. I couldn't stand there and
Speaker 1: be like Robert Plant. I wasn't cool enough. I just
Speaker 1: needed to dance, but I didn't want to dance like
Speaker 1: a an ordinary dancer. So I just started to play
Speaker 1: with it and it just got bigger and bigger. Energy
Speaker 1: and channel the energy, and then Pete started jumping and
Speaker 1: that legendary jump of here he's like a kangaroo. And uh,
Speaker 1: but the whole thing was kind of in with the music.
Speaker 1: It became like a ballet, didn't it. It was kind
Speaker 1: of extraordinary. And by when I think back and I
Speaker 1: look at some of those there's one piece of film
Speaker 1: that I've seen recently. Somebody showed me the Freddie Mercury
Speaker 1: Tribute concert at Wembley Stadium. I had the rotten job
Speaker 1: of being the first act out on the stage. But
Speaker 1: take a look at it. It's on YouTube. You can
Speaker 1: you can watch it. What an entrance I'm reading that, Mike,
Speaker 1: It's wonderful to see the fear on Brian May's face.
Speaker 1: Things flying everywhere and it misses you every time. I've
Speaker 1: never hit anyone but myself with it. Fortunately aren't only
Speaker 1: one person um, but that that was deliberate and I
Speaker 1: was quite pleased with that. We we we could possibly
Speaker 1: make an effort. I'm sure we would make an effort,
Speaker 1: although we think we tracked when Townsend was in New
Speaker 1: York to promote his book All a couple of years
Speaker 1: ago and we made a stabber trying to last sue
Speaker 1: him in here to do the show. How does he
Speaker 1: look back on all that worked at you guys? Did
Speaker 1: Is he proud? I think he is. He's got to be.
Speaker 1: We're having a great time on stage now for the
Speaker 1: first time in our career, the last well since two
Speaker 1: thousand and third, Team has been an absolute joy. Now
Speaker 1: the band is very different. We've still got Zack Starkey,
Speaker 1: Pete Townsend and meet Uh. We've got the band I
Speaker 1: go out touring solo with. We've got Lauren Gold on keyboards.
Speaker 1: Frank Simes is our music director. Simon Townshend Peace brother
Speaker 1: of course, who's a fabulous rhythm player. We've got John
Speaker 1: a guy called John Button on bass and a guy
Speaker 1: called John Corey on keyboards. That's the lineup. We need
Speaker 1: to do Quadrophenia because it's there's so much music and
Speaker 1: instrumentation in it. You know you need that. We've been
Speaker 1: getting reviews as good as anything we ever got in
Speaker 1: the seventies, which I'm so proud of to be this
Speaker 1: age and know that you're still delivering it in the
Speaker 1: right way. I'm gonna name three songs out of countless
Speaker 1: songs you sang, and you tell me was it easy
Speaker 1: or hard for you to sing this song? And I'm
Speaker 1: curious about something that's a really ripping kind of a
Speaker 1: lot of notes, so to sing see me filming a
Speaker 1: piece of cake. Easy. It just came, yeah, yeah, absolutely
Speaker 1: easy as anything, easy, easy, easy. I went back to
Speaker 1: be the choir boy. Um Love Rain Army. That was
Speaker 1: really really easy, incredibly uh painful to hear Pete's remark
Speaker 1: when he first heard it, I don't like it. Well,
Speaker 1: he didn't like it. He didn't hear it the same
Speaker 1: way I see it again. Like I was talking to earlier,
Speaker 1: how I would interpret his songs very differently sometimes and
Speaker 1: then he kind of wrote them and he he wrote
Speaker 1: it as this gentle love song, love Rain Army and
Speaker 1: I I thought, this is the last song on the album.
Speaker 1: Uh and you know, you know the songs you rip
Speaker 1: it in the end just needed to be primal. It was,
Speaker 1: you know, it needed to be out into space, you know.
Speaker 1: Uh So I did that ending that I do. And
Speaker 1: he hates it, he can like it at all, And
Speaker 1: it was it was kind of that that hurt at
Speaker 1: the time, and it hurt because he said it quite
Speaker 1: a bit in the press at the time, so that
Speaker 1: was kind of weird. But equally, I still carried on
Speaker 1: singing it that way. Didn't have any effect on your choice? No, no, no,
Speaker 1: what's the song you sang that you got the talked
Speaker 1: into or you even talked yourself into sing in a
Speaker 1: certain way, and you didn't like it And it turned
Speaker 1: out to be a great hit, Happy Jack Jake, But
Speaker 1: it was it was. It was a hit record. I
Speaker 1: couldn't could not believe it. I just could not believe
Speaker 1: this records hit record. I just never ever heard it.
Speaker 1: And it's one of the few ones today I kind
Speaker 1: of when we start to revisit the hits, forget that one,
Speaker 1: and and and over the years, you did or did
Speaker 1: not do much songwriting with him, and he did he do, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: you know. I've written a few songs, but I'm no
Speaker 1: songwriter in the caliber of Pete Townshend. I co wrote
Speaker 1: anyway and how manywhere with him? But that was it.
Speaker 1: And I've written songs of my own, you know. But
Speaker 1: who you left it him well when you were I'm
Speaker 1: like you, I'm such a big fan of his. I
Speaker 1: am such a fan of his, And the more I
Speaker 1: let him have his reign in his head, that the
Speaker 1: better the stuff. Because if you try and inter fear,
Speaker 1: you know, you probably screw it up. But I'll never
Speaker 1: think you guys went on tour in the U s
Speaker 1: and they put you in I think it was on
Speaker 1: the for of Newsweek, and I do believe. Sometimes I
Speaker 1: don't trust my memory anymore, but I do believe I'm
Speaker 1: precise in this one, which you had one of my
Speaker 1: favorite lines of all time. You and they quoted you
Speaker 1: as saying, you said, nobody writes songs like Pete, and
Speaker 1: no one sings Pete songs like I do. That's the
Speaker 1: definition of the help me. When I was a kid,
Speaker 1: I thought to myself, I was like a little like
Speaker 1: I was young. I forget how old I was, and
Speaker 1: I thought any band that puts an album that was
Speaker 1: a song on it called a quick one while he's away,
Speaker 1: I thought, I gotta meet this band had had a
Speaker 1: song code a quick one while he's a wire, and
Speaker 1: would play young people for me already levered twelve. Thus
Speaker 1: the name of the book is Thanks a Lot, Mr
Speaker 1: kibble White, with the name of your teacher who bounced
Speaker 1: you out of school. I made you the star that
Speaker 1: you are today thanks to let Mr. And I want
Speaker 1: to say, truly, you are, for my money, the greatest
Speaker 1: rock and will singer of all time. Thank you for
Speaker 1: doing this with us, absolute pleasure. I'll do it any time,
Speaker 1: and I'll tell Pete hete you got to it for you. Pete,
Speaker 1: You've got to do it for me. Thank God. A
Speaker 1: track from Quadrafenia to Go Out On from three Daughtry
Speaker 1: captures the melancholy of Pete Townsend's lyric. His character a
Speaker 1: disillusioned who fan sits looking from meaning on a cold
Speaker 1: beach in Brighton. There's all of the lost promise of
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties in that voice that was the incomparable
Speaker 1: Roger Daltrey. This is Alec Baldwin, and you were listening
Speaker 1: to here's the Thing