Pete Townshend Quotes

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Pete Townshend

Profession : Musician

Birth : May 19, 1945

A lot of my audience are in their 50s. But they want me to pretend to continue to be pretending.

Pete Townshend

I think I probably would have enjoyed to keep my own private pain out of my work. But I was changed by my audience who said your private pain which you have unwittingly shown us in your early songs is also ours.

Pete Townshend

It wasn't just about flashing lights and pinball machines blowing up and things like that. It was about using encores, bringing back the good songs and using techniques that I knew about from rock performance.

Pete Townshend

Everything that I had done creatively related to two or three incidents that happened to me when I was a child that I'd forgotten. Everything, absolutely everything.

Pete Townshend

What I'm trying to do is find either existing properties or come up with properties or angles or stories which will create music drama. It's my obsession and most of all I would like to remain working in theatre. I think it's very much alive.

Pete Townshend

Entertainment came out of this thing called a television, and it was gray. Most of the films that we saw at the cinema were black and white. It was a gray world. And music somehow was in color.

Pete Townshend

I bought a Dutch barge and turned it into a recording studio. My plan was to go to Paris and record rolling down the Seine.

Pete Townshend

I don't really know any other musicians like me. I grew up backstage with my dad who played in a post-war dance band, so I always feel at home at a venue.

Pete Townshend

Backstage, I get sleepy, and want to curl up and snooze. I never get nervous, whatever the event. I feel quite detached until I walk on stage, and then some gear inside me clicks and off I go like a wind up doll.

Pete Townshend

I felt that The Who had ended because we'd lost touch with our original Shepherd's Bush audience.

Pete Townshend

I used to try and make up visually for what I couldn't play as a musician. I used to get into very incredible visual things where, in order just to make one chord more lethal, I'd make it a really lethal looking thing, whereas really it's just going to be picked normally.

Pete Townshend

My father had played the guitar when he was young, and my uncle Jack had worked for Kalamazoo, before the war, developing guitar pickups. So there was a kind of family thing about the guitar, although it was considered something of an anomaly then.

Pete Townshend

English banjo players really were a law unto themselves - you don't find that kind of brisk banjo playing on the original Louis Armstrong or Bix Beiderbecke records.

Pete Townshend

I saw the Internet as being something which would allow power mongers to control us, and that we would willingly go to that if it promised us salvation - if it promised to show us who we were and let us find ourselves as we had, uniquely in our generation, through rock music.

Pete Townshend

In order to have faith, or follow any other organized religion, I'd have to suspend a degree of disbelief.

Pete Townshend