As the guitarist and creative leader of The Who, Pete Townshend is nothing if not progressive in his outlook.
After his work on the groundbreaking 1969 rock opera Tommy, Townshend was hungry for more, hoping to further his rock opera concept in the audacious and ultimately abandoned multimedia project Lifehouse.
The Lifehouse project was only abandoned because it pushed the creative marvel to the brink of sanity, and he, of course, persevered to find the innovative pastures of ‘Baba O’Riley’ and the famously adapted rock opera Quadrophenia.
His open and progressive mindset has also been long applied to the dicey topic of politics. In a recent interview with The Independent, the rock star admitted to feeling the lure of the political right some years ago.
“I don’t know about Rishi Sunak,” he said, revealing his scepticism for the UK’s current leadership. “I don’t know about the Tory party, per se. They say when you get older, you drift from being on the left to on the right. I suppose there was a gentle drift with me.”
“I’m 78, and between 60 and 70, I think I was starting to drift slowly to the right, but… fuck! I would line them all up and shoot them,” he added candidly.
Elsewhere in the conversation, Townshend addressed the assertion that his convoluted Lifehouse project was prescient of the rise of the internet and the digital age. “If there’s any prescience there, it was certainly the tech stuff,” he said. “That, really, I have to hand over to the teachers I had at Ealing Art School.”
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