Pete Townshend has spoken to NME about next year’s production of Quadrophenia, A Mod Ballet – as well as the turbulent past and uncertain future of The Who.
The dance adaptation of the band’s seminal 1973 album, currently in development and set to tour the UK in the summer of 2025, is Townshend’s first foray in ballet following projects in the media of opera and literature.
“What inspires me is trying to do something that has a slightly more ambitious thread,” he told NME. “It’s not me being pompous. It’s just something that seemed to fit more into the dis-conjunction that I felt when I left art school and ended up in the band. It felt like there was unfinished business for me, which was the art.”
A long-term ballet fan, Townshend envisioned the project after hearing early demos of his wife Rachel Fuller’s orchestral score of the album, which was first performed at the Royal Albert Hall in 2015 and recorded by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. “I heard her score and I remember saying to her, ‘I can just see dancers dancing’,” he said. “It had tones of Prokofiev about it.”
Alongside Fuller’s arranger Martin Batchelar, the pair began a collaboration with Sadlers Wells which saw Harry Styles choreographer Paul Roberts and director Rob Ashford pull together a group of young dancers from contemporary troupes such as BalletBoyz to bring ‘Quadrophenia’’s story of troubled mod Jimmy to balletic life.
“There was a poetic sensibility to what I was seeing,” Townshend said of early workshops. “I was just shocked and surprised. I thought, ‘Hey, there’s new shadow here, there are new shades, there’s new optimism’. I was never happy with the film. I felt the film was lazy. It was not based on my story and it didn’t include much of my music. So I thought here was an opportunity to do something that honours the music, but also possibly takes it into a new era, a new place.”
Townshend also spoke about speculation that The Who’s shows at the Royal Albert Hall as part of Daltrey’s annual Teenage Cancer Trust concerts in March might have been their last ever, the chances of new material from the band emerging, and his thoughts on a hologram shows from the rock legends…
NME: Hi Pete. Is ballet a form you’ve wanted to dabble in for a while?
Pete Townshend: “I’ve been a fan of ballet. Kit Lambert, was The Who’s manager, who was the son of Constant Lambert, who was one of the founders of the Royal Opera House. He had a box in the Royal Opera House and I used to pop in there quite a lot or go with him. I used to go with Lord Goodman as well, the Labour peer – we’d hang out together and watch ballet. I won’t say I was a disciple of it, but I loved good ballet certainly. It was part of my education process. Kit Lambert was really keen that I tackled the issue of snobbery and inverse snobbery in rock, that I just battled it head on.
“I’m working on an opera at the moment, I’ve been working on one for a long time, The Age Of Anxiety, and I’m very fearless now about calling it an opera. It’s a fucking opera. Sorry. My friend Rufus Wainwright writes operas, I can write operas.”
Do you feel that the universal themes of ‘Quadrophenia’ suit all art forms?
“The young boy falling in love with a girl across the way and having a hero who lets him down? I’m sure there’s a Greek myth that inspired it for Shakespeare. Romeo And Juliet has a bit about it and even [three-act opera] Peter Grimes by Benjamin Britten has a bit of it. Those epic stories of young men struggling to find their way in an uncomfortable world.
“My obsession of the day is young women having a struggle to find their way in the modern world because of social media, its effects on them. I think young men tend to spend more time with pornography and video games than working out whether or not they look OK. I’m not looking for parallels for how ‘Quadrophenia’ should work in the modern day, I’m working to try to use it as a mythic tale which triggers something in the audience.”
You seem to have spent your entire career striving for something beyond rock…
“Funnily enough, in The Age Of Anxiety, I mix rock and electronica and orchestral soundscapes together, and I’m not afraid of doing that. The only area I’d be wary of getting involved in would be complex jazz. I don’t have the musical literacy to do it, or the virtuosity to do it, but if I did I certainly would. I’ve got friends who did that from the rock world. Punk came along and called them prog rock but now we go back and what we look at with them is that a lot of their work was genuinely very interesting.
“What we forget, I think, is that punk was really necessary. In ‘Quadrophenia’, one of my remits for writing it was to wake the band up to the fact that we’d really lost connection with our core audience. We’d become bloated rock stars. Laser shows and frilly jackets and flying fingers and Keith Moon dressed as Adolf Hitler – it was all very, very strange. Whether in the middle of all that my arty-farty ideas were an equal, embarrassing self-indulgence had to be weighed out. There was something wrong with The Who and it had to be fixed. I felt that ‘Quadrophenia’ would help fix it.
“As performers we lost our connection with an audience and it was a real lesson in a time when bands like U2, The Clash and Bruce Springsteen came along and their connection with the audience was much more actual, much more human, much more physical. That was a wake-up call as well for me. I don’t know that The Who ever managed to get back on track, but that was the function of ‘Quadrophenia’.”
Did you enjoy the recent Albert Hall Who shows?
“Not much. We did rehearse for it and I’m not gonna blame Roger for fucking up the rehearsal but the rehearsals were somewhat fucked up. We had rehearsal time, but we didn’t rehearse, we just talked. So when it came to the show, I realised there were quite a few chords that I’d forgotten.”
Might they be the last ever Who shows?
“No. I’m pretty sure there will [be more]. I can’t really see the point of making a big deal of [last Who shows], apart from the fact that it might help sell a few tickets. When we started the last US tour the year before last, some of the seats were not filled. An easy way to fill seats is to say ‘We’re not coming back’ or ‘This could be the last set of shows’. What I would prefer was that the band adjusted itself to the audience that wants to see it, rather than just saying ‘We need to fill arenas in order to go home with enough money to make the whole thing worthwhile’. The story of the end of The Who is gonna be when either Roger or I drop dead or can’t function anymore on the stage.
“A lot of the time when we’re on the stage together, it’s not all that comfortable and you can see that. And it’s sad to say that a lot of dedicated Who fans come to every show in order to see Roger hit me in the face again, for me to smash him over the head with a guitar or for one of us to drop dead.”
Roger has said that he’s happy to feel that that part of his life is over. Do you feel the same?
“I think it’s been over for a long time. The Who machine died when [bassist] John Entwistle died, because we were hanging on by a thread in a sense. John had already left the building in the way that Keith had already left the building. John had gone so deaf that he couldn’t hear himself play. So although he was still very virtuosic, a lot of the time he would be making mistakes and he couldn’t hear it. There was this sense that he was on his way out. Roger and I had a decision to make as to whether or not we would try to keep the flame burning, the brand going, when he died, and we were about to do a tour so we decided to do it. And that tour worked out to be quite successful.”
Have you ever given up all ideas of going out with a big bang?
“I don’t think we’ve ever had that kind of idea. I must admit, I’m interested in the [Las Vegas] Sphere – just as a crazy, narcissistic art school thing. It’s interesting as a venue because it challenges you to beat the fabric of the theatre.”
Might hologram shows be something in The Who’s future?
“If somebody wants to do it I don’t know that I would stop them, but they’re not gonna get me in one of those grids.”
‘Who’ [2019] was a fitting addition to the band’s album canon – what are the chances of there being more?
“I don’t think there is. If there was a need or a place for a Who album, could I write the songs for it within six weeks? Of course I fucking could, it’s a piece of cake. The problem is I don’t think Roger wants to do it again. For me it would be a joy because I love writing songs, I love writing to a brief, I love having a commission, I love having a deadline and I love the feedback.
“I was so pleased that the critical response to the last Who album was so positive, I wasn’t expecting that and I was grateful for it and inspired by it. So where I am at the moment is I’m thinking ‘well, I might write the songs and then say to Roger, either you sing on them or I’m gonna put them out as a solo album and Who fans will love me for it.”
Does it make financial sense anymore for major established acts to make new albums?
“Haha! It’s never been about the money. The Who never made any money from fucking records anyway. Our managers were criminals. I’d never seen a Who royalty statement prior to our first audit, which we did while we were making ‘Quadrophenia’. It emerged that Kit Lambert had stolen all of my Italian publishing royalties to buy himself a palace in Venice. There are black swans in our business, and they’re the ones that always mop up all the money.
“Look at the legendary Jimi Hendrix, I saw him in LA in the last two weeks of his life. He was happy, he was really nice to me, and he hadn’t been always in the past. I said, ‘How you doing?’ and he said, ‘Pete, I’m broke’. He was huge, and he was broke. [But] we didn’t give a fuck about the money. I lived in a little house in Twickenham by the Thames, I was happy to be by the water. I had one car. I had a tiny little studio, I was really happy. I had a beautiful wife, lovely kids, great friends and never wanted for anything really, except some time to myself and some time to have with my family. So today I’ve got a sense that I’m lucky to be here and be fit enough to walk around the block and to work with younger musicians, to do some producing and mentoring.
“I’ve been thinking about whether or not I should try to come in sideways to Kier Starmer and say, ‘Listen, I’m a long-term Labour supporter, and I want to know who the fuck you are’. But,‘No Pete, no Pete, don’t do it, you’ll get used’. Because they use you for whatever it is that they want to use you for. Politicians often use you so that they can blame you for something that really should be blamed on them. So I’m enjoying my life at the moment.”
Roger said recently how annoyed he is about people wanting to know the setlist before shows. Is that a concern you share?
“No, no. [But] I’m just not really crazy about performing. I don’t mind it, I’m good at it but I don’t get the buzz that I see other performers get. Watching Robert Plant at the Kennedy Awards crying when somebody murdered one of his songs. I just think, ‘Fuck, this guy loves what he does, he loves what he’s done.’”
The full dates for Quadrophenia, a Mod Ballet are below. Visit here for tickets and more information.
Plymouth, Theatre Royal: 28 May – 1 June 2025
Edinburgh, Festival Theatre: 10 June – 14 June 2025
Southampton, Mayflower Theatre: 18 June – 21 June 2025
London, Sadler’s Wells Theatre: 24 June – 13 July 2025
Salford, Lowry: 15 July – 19 July 2025