Pete Townshend: Updates Fans On Book, Demos & Tour

Pete Townshend caught up with fans for his first blog posting on TheWho.com since June. He talked about his upcoming memoir, Who I Am, it's accompanying audio book, his multimedia musical project, Floss, and the Who's recent show closing appearance at the London Olympics. Townshend posted: ". . . I completed the audio book recording only yesterday, August 18th 2012. The book was accepted by my publisher just two weeks ago, the day before I flew back from my studio in (girlfriend) Rachel (Fuller's) house in France, to rehearse and perform at the Olympics Closing Ceremony. It's been a squeeze. While in France for a few weeks during June and July I squeezed in seven new demos -- I've got a lot of music now for Floss. So much music is work-in-progress that I really need to stop composing and start pulling the various elements together."

He went on to talk about the Who's August 12th Olympics performance, joking: "The Olympics gig nearly didn't happen for us -- Roger (Daltrey) and I weren't certain that two old geezers should be there singing about our generation, but (I'm) so glad we did it. The day itself was immense fun. Really well organized. Backstage, it felt like being a part of a great circus, with ballet dancers, mime artists, street-party trucks and literally thousands of workers. The Spice Girls were in the dressing room next door and seemed so happy to be there, looking spectacular, practicing their vocals (and really singing by the way) and sharing make up bags. I got a few tips. Liam Gallagher and his mates in Beady Eye were mooching about, as were the guys from Kaiser Chiefs (who played 'Pinball Wizard' and were glad to hear I approved).

He touched upon the Who's upcoming Quadrophenia & More Tour and his schedule for the next few months: "Roger is now completely in charge of the new video presentation for the forthcoming Who Quadrophenia tour that begins in November in Florida. He has some really exciting ideas and we have a good team. I am not going to be much help. I've got two weeks of PR on my new book in October, with a lot of lead work to do prior to that time. I'm looking forward to the tour, mixing performing with PR interviews in which I hope to tell some of the more dodgy stories that my publisher's legal department have removed from the book. 1,000 pages cut to 500. There are a lot of dodgy stories left over."
Townshend recalled that the work that the Who put into the 1973 Quadrophenia sessions was undercut by having to immediately tour behind it: "The band worked very hard to produce this really, very credible record and I think we were being managed very badly at the time. So what happened was the schedule was really screwy and instead of having time to rehearse what we had done on the record and turn it into a cohesive show, our record company, which was run by our two mangers -- Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert, at the time -- rushed a Christmas release and put us out on tour to support that Christmas release before we'd actually rehearsed the show."

Pete Townshend's Who I Am will be published on October 8th.

The Who kicks off its Quadrophenia & More Tour on November 1st in Sunrise, Florida at BankAtlantic Center.