“So neglected”: Pete Townshend on the band people should know more of
Half of The Who’s career has always been about looking out for the man on the street. Every other band could write fanciful tales and make up stories to get a reaction out of someone, but even when Pete Townshend was making some of the band’s greatest works, he never forgot about his roots when it came to people slogging it out in clubs looking to make it. And while he has grown a lot since his days as a young Mod trying to figure out his place in the world, he never lost that empathy for his fellow musicians.
After all, Townshend already had his foot in the door talking the music from his generation, so the next generations were bound to be at least as hungry as he was. Despite being one of the few resident geniuses in rock and roll history, his ambition seemed to be the only one that was accepted by the punk mainstream, with many members of the mohawk crowd giving him a pass for helping invent the idea of bigger volume every time he played.
But listening back to his music, Townshend wasn’t about making brash music for the hell of it. Like all good punks, his music had to mean something beyond writing stories, and even though Tommy might be one of the most lavish concept albums with a Broadway adaptation attached to it, it never stopped being a depressing tale about a deaf, dumb and blind boy who’s trying to find his place in a world that seems to be nothing but cruel to him.
When making some of his later records, though, Townshend turned into the perfect contradiction of prog rock and punk. He knew that the importance was on telling a story and taking the listener on a journey the same way that Yes and Genesis were doing, but he couldn’t let go of that rebellious spirit that was telling him to think outside the box and kick out the jams like he did on ‘The Real Me’.
Although many prog bands would eventually take things too far and start layering different inessential pieces on top of each other, Townshend could tell when he was listening to true auteurs of the genre. Countless artists are still trying to make the most bonkers concepts work, but for the thousands of bands that fall into the same cheesy territory that Styx fall into, Steven Wilson had a unique vision for what he wanted Porcupine Tree to be during the 1990s.
“I love what Steven Wilson does. I love his enthusiasm. I met him at a party recently, and we didn’t have much time together, but he’s a very special guy. And of course, the Porcupine Tree stuff is so neglected, so inventive.”
pete townshend
And while Wilson has moved on to a solo career in his later years, Townshend didn’t fully appreciate what he could do until he began working on the remixes of Quadrophenia, saying, “I love what Steven Wilson does. I love his enthusiasm. I met him at a party recently, and we didn’t have much time together, but he’s a very special guy. And of course, the Porcupine Tree stuff is so neglected, so inventive. He’s a big fan of mine. And I’m so privileged to have him working on these remixes.”
But listening to Porcupine Tree’s approach to progressive music, there are more than a few similarities to how Townshend would have approached the medium had he been born 20 years later. The attention to detail is still there, but Wilson is looking to set up a scene like Townshend did rather than going down the same route many prog bands did by shoehorning in time signatures that had no major impact on the song.
While it’s up to the public whether Porcupine Tree will live on as one of the finest prog-rock acts of the 1990s, Townshend’s outlook on the band had more to do with their importance to rock as a whole. Anyone can try to push themselves forward, but if they took the same lessons that Wilson did from Townshend, perhaps there would be something more rock had to offer than simple blues pastiches. That genre has its place, but Wilson will always be there to remember what other sonic spaces we haven’t tapped into yet.
