The two projects Pete Townshend regrets turning down: “It’s nonsense”
Not every rockstar can give as much as they can to every project that comes across their desk. You’re always going to get an artist’s reflection of everything whenever they are presented with any scenario, and it’s anyone’s guess whether they’re actually going to like or think that it’s just a good way to grab some quick cash on the side. Pete Townshend always needed a purpose, and when it came to two of the biggest cultural pieces of the previous century, he missed out on adding his own stamp to things.
Since Townshend was about music before anything else, he always saw anything on the small screen as tangential to what he did. The Who may have been a decent live act, but outside of the handful of performances they delivered on television, he was there to make music that made you electrified once you were done listening to the album.
When Townshend was first approached to lend his voice to The Simpsons, though, he thought that the whole thing was bound to be a complete waste of time, telling Gold Radio, “At that time, I wasn’t a fan. I’m such a fan now. I’m such a snob, aren’t I? I said, ‘I’m not doing it.’” The Who did appear in the episode, but Townshend’s voice is actually that of his brother, and it is as if he couldn’t be bothered to actually spend five minutes in a vocal booth.
Then again, it’s easy to forgive Townshend for something like that. After all, it would be hard for anyone to take one look at something like The Simpsons and think it’s going to be some cultural milestone for the next few decades of television. Townshend was always drawn to the big screen anyway with the movie versions of Tommy and Quadrophenia, but even when Ridley Scott came to his door with Blade Runner, he wasn’t all that impressed.
When discussing his first conversations with Scott, Townshend said that he couldn’t really make sense of what he was getting at with the sci-fi epic, saying, “I was offered the score of that. I’d read the script, and I said to Ridley Scott, ‘I can’t make head nor tail of it. It’s nonsense.’” Given how Townshend’s creative mind worked, it’s all the more confusing why this would be the one project he turned down.
Considering his own failed experiment about a dystopian world never saw the light of day with Lifehouse, this could have been his way of getting out those sorts of ideas. When you have something that’s that close to the chest, it also might be hard to get back into the creative mindset and attempt to start over from scratch when making a completely different score.
Then again, would Townshend’s version of a sci-fi score have actually worked? Certainly, those sweeping power chords weren’t going to do that much when soundtracking Harrison Ford’s harrowing journey through a dystopian cityscape, but all of the sounds on Who’s Next Townshend made on his synthesiser could have been a precursor to where he could have gone had he seen it through with Scott.
Still, maybe Townshend was not in the right mindset to take on either of those gigantic opportunities. We can mull over the idea of a Townshend-scored Blade Runner all we want, but we’ll have to settle for the futuristic sounds of ‘Eminence Front’ instead.
