Although there's rarely been a Who fan that's walked away from a concert anything short of elated — for Pete Townshend, it really is just another day at the office. The Who leader revealed to Record Collector, “When I come offstage afterwards and people come up to me and say how it must’ve been a lot of fun, I often kind of find myself going, 'Yeah, it was great,' with my fingers crossed. I’m thinking, 'What was fun about that? I’ve just done two-and-a-half hours of really, really hard work.' It’s like digging a hole and somebody saying, ‘That must’ve been such a good laugh, digging that hole!' So, I feel insulted by it.”
Townshend, who along with the Who, reinvented the concert experience for a generation, went on to say, “It doesn’t feel like a special place, it feels quite the opposite. When I walk onto a stage, I’m like a f***ing plumber. There’s no f***ing romance there at all.”
Pete Townshend shed light on how the guitar has changed both his life personally — and the later on the rock world, during a recent chat with Britain's BBC Radio. While chatting with veteran broadcaster Liz Kershaw, Townshend explained how playing the guitar as a teen allowed him to keep up with the crowd: “For me, it was when I was 11, 12, and 13, I was still in bad shape from my childhood. And I was telling a lot of stories, I was making things up, I was very insecure. Some of my more forward friends at school were getting together with girls. I felt very left behind. And I discovered, if I played the guitar — I suddenly fit in. The guitar was a new invention back in those days. And if you could play the guitar, you were accepted.”
The Who kicks off its European tour on June 14th in Barcelona, Spain.
