Pete Townshend claims “people thought I’d gone mad” when he made ‘Life House’
The Who’s guitarist Pete Townshend has claimed that “people thought I’d gone mad” when he wrote the rock opera Life House, which never saw the light of day.
Townshend began work on Lifehouse following the success of Tommy, however, he failed to get the project to the stage of completion. Much to his disappointment, it never became a film, but it did provide him with a number of beloved songs such as ‘Baba O’Riley’, ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ and ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ which The Who used on Who’s Next. Life House is now to finally be released as part of an expansive Who’s Next box set.
Issues first arose while they attempted to workshop Life House at the Young Vic in London, and few turned up. “Nobody came. The Who were selling out arenas, headlining Isle of Wight, and nobody came apart from a few 13-year-old boys skiving off school,” Townshend said in a new interview with The Times.
“The idea was to make both the audience and band members an important part of the songwriting process by using myself as a computer into which their personal information would be fed, in a similar way to how algorithms work today. But nothing happened. We ended up playing a few songs,” he added.
Elsewhere in the interview, he said: “People thought I’d gone mad. There were plans for a new type of movie, funded by Universal, in which fiction and real life would intertwine, and nobody understood what I was saying. Meanwhile, the band wanted to get back on the road, make some money and shag some girls, and then I heard that Kit wasn’t coming back from New York.”
Townshend continued: “Finally we found out that Universal were dropping the deal [for the film]. By this point I had spent a lot of my own money, so I was exhausted, broke and spent a week walking around, thinking, ‘This is the best work I have ever done and it has all gone to shit.’ ”
Meanwhile, earlier this year, The Who frontman Roger Daltrey ruled out the possibility of new music from the group. “What’s the point? What’s the point of records? We released an album four years ago, and it did nothing. It’s a great album too, but there isn’t the interest out there for new music these days. People want to hear the old music. I don’t know why, but that’s the fact,” he told NME.
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