There are too many things demanding Pete Townshend's time right now. He's been awake since 6am today, busy working on the next stage of The Age Of Anxiety, a multi-mediaproject, based around his hallucinatory 2019 novel, that also involves an opera and art installation.
"I'm finishing off the music," he explains to RC over Zoom from his home studio in Oxfordshire. "It's taken a long time, but I've just been listening to it now and it sounds really good."
There's also the recent announcement of Quadrophenia: A Mod Ballet, an ambitious dance production of Townshend's classic study of teenage rebellion, set to an orchestral score co-written by his partner, Rachel Fuller. Due to tour the UK next year, it promises to place The Who's 1973 epic in a whole other context.
There's the unseen stuff, too, what Townshend calls creative play. "I make art all the time," he says. "Some of it's quite political or sociological. I make wooden installations, I do drawings. I'm a big fan of abstract art. I write poetry, I write fiction. I don't throw it all at the public, because when I do, I get sneered at. I think a lot of people think, 'You've got a great job. You should be happy with it.""
But we're here, ostensibly, to discuss Pete Townshend Live In Concert 1985-2001, a 14-disc boxset of in-concert recordings that reach deep into his solo career. Initially released separately and online through his Eel Pie label, these shows have been out of print for over 20 years. Highlights include two nights at Brixton Academy in 1985, fronting Deep End - a band featuring David Gilmour and others and a full rendition of 1993's multihanded conceptual piece, Psychoderelict, from New York.
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