The 1982 movie Pete Townshend turned down: “No, take it away”
Any project that Pete Townshend ever worked on had to be about something more than a catchy tune.
He did have the kind of rock and roll chops to turn The Who into a decent power-pop outfit, but even if they had plenty of pop juggernauts in their catalogue, that didn’t matter to him nearly as much as getting the right kind of story together when working on a project like Tommy. Everything needed to sound just right, but when he saw the work that went into making the movie version of his masterpiece, he didn’t really process what he was getting himself into.
Even though the band were able to crank out theatrical releases of both Tommy and Quadrophenia, it was a miracle that they were able to wrangle in as many stars as they did. Tina Turner and Elton John were absolutely brilliant as both the Acid Queen and the Pinball Wizard, respectively, and even though Jack Nicholson wasn’t exactly a singer with the best range, his delivery of ‘Go To the Mirror’ was at least serviceable coming from a non-professional singing actor at the time.
But Townshend wasn’t shy about having to rely on some of his session friends to help him flesh out the arrangements. He wasn’t the kind that read music properly, and while ‘Christmas’ was already one of the foundational pieces of the concept album, the reason why the tune ends up sounding so much like a holiday classic comes more from what Nicky Hopkins brought to the table than anything that Townshend did.
In fact, by the time the band finished working on the movie, Townshend seemed content to never work on another movie script again. His medium was much better suited to the stage and the vinyl record, but chances are he may have thought twice about working on a little script called Blade Runner when he was first presented with it during its production stages.
Ridley Scott’s massive sci-fi opus was meant to be one of the most daring films of its time, but even after Debbie Harry passed on starring it in, Townshend remembered having a negative reaction to it as well when he was first presented with the idea, saying, “[After Tommy], I swore I’d never make another film again as a composer, and I haven’t. In fact, [music director] Terry Rawlings arranged for me to read an early script of Blade Runner, and I turned it down. I kinda read through it and said, ‘No, take it away.’”
Which begs the question: what the hell would a Townshend-helmed version of Blade Runner have sounded like? He was certainly no stranger to making more outlandish concepts, and considering what he had done when bringing together the first ideas for the concept album Lifehouse, the thought of a kid who lives in the future and has lost all sense of emotion from the outside world doesn’t seem that far off from the kind of work that was going on in the dystopian masterpiece.
But if you look at the kind of art direction that Scott eventually went in, Townshend’s angle probably wouldn’t have worked out as well. He was an absolute wizard with any instrument in his hand, but if they were going to get any rock and roll artist involved, it should have been someone who was more familiar with synthesisers half the time that they were making their tunes, or even getting an industrial rocker to contribute to the soundtrack later down the line.
But even if Townshend was a bit scared about taking on a project like this, it wasn’t about him trying to turn his nose up at whatever Blade Runner was intended to be. He knew that there was a way for him to find his footing in this kind of story, but this was one of the few times where Townshend seemed to turn down a potential masterpiece purely out of exhaustion.
