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" 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. "

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" But what was interesting about what the Who did is that we took things which were happening in the pop genre and represent them to people so that they see them in a new way. I think the best example is Andy Warhol's work, the image of Marilyn Monroe or the Campbell's soup can. "

Pete Townshend

People

Think

Work

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I needed to give back, give back, give back. I felt guilty about my success. I felt uncomfortable about how easily I had been delivered this extraordinary life that I had. "

" Even modern English people are imperious, superior, ridden by class. All of the hypocrisy and the difficulties that are endemic in being British also make it an incredibly fertile place culturally. A brilliant place to live. Sad but true. "

" The bad part about growing older is I'm going bald. The good part is my nose seems to be getting shorter. "

" Early British pop was helped tremendously by the writing of Bob Dylan who had proved you could write about political and quite controversial subjects. Certainly what we did followed on from what was happening with the angry young men in the theatre. "

" I've learned a huge amount because I've been tested and, more importantly, I've been trusted. "

" 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. "

" 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

Going

Try

" What theatre started to look at much earlier than any other form was the internal operations of ordinary people, sometimes using mythic models in order to tell the story. "

" When I grew up, what was interesting for me was that music was color and life was gray. So music for me has always been more than entertainment. "

Pete Townshend

Color

Interesting

" I'm only interested in rites of passage stories. "

" Bob Dylan did the first really long record - Like A Rolling Stone - I think it was four minutes. "

" To be completely honest, I think if I hadn't been bullied into the band, I would have been happier as an art student. I would have been happier in a Brian Eno world. "

" A lot of writing I do on tour. I do a lot on airplanes. At home, I write a lot, obviously. When I write a song, what I usually do is work the lyric out first from some basic idea that I had, and then I get an acoustic guitar and I sit by the tape recorder and I try to bang it out as it comes. "

" It's sad when people break up. "

" 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. "

" Some of our early work was two minutes twenty when it actually came out on vinyl, very, very, very short. Sometimes if you made a three-minute record they would make you do an edited version for radio, particularly in America. "

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

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

" Although I dig my guitar playing, I think it's kind of an obvious situation; I play what I want to play within my own restrictions. "

" 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. "

" I didn't start to collect records and listen to guitar players properly until I went to art school, when I'd already been playing for five years. So my style was already formed, and that's why I think it's so unique. "

" I have terrible hearing trouble. I have unwittingly helped to invent and refine a type of music that makes its principal proponents deaf. "

" 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

Child

Everything

" When The Who first started, we were playing blues, and I dug the blues and I knew what I was supposed to be playing, but I couldn't play it. I couldn't get it out. I knew what I had to play; it was in my head. I could hear the notes in my head, but I couldn't get them out on the guitar. "

" As a young man, every bone in my body wanted to pick up a machine gun and kill Germans. And yet I had absolutely no reason to do so. Certainly nobody invited me to do the job. But that's what I felt that I was trained to do. Now no part of my upbringing was militaristic. "

" The problem for me, still today, is that I write purely with one dramatic structure and that is the rite of passage. I'm not really skilled in any other. Rock and roll itself can be described as music to accompany the rite of passage. "

" 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. "