“For me that notion of ‘teenage wasteland’ is about waste, it’s not about getting wasted. It’s about waste. It’s about wasted life, wasted opportunity, wasted years and I take full responsibility for the fact that my generation complained about the state of the planet and did nothing to change it.”Pete Townshend (1153)

“The story as it unfolded was about a society who, because of the vagaries of the modern world, because of pollution being caused mainly by people’s need to travel, to be somewhere else, had been told, “you can’t do that anymore, you have to stay where you are.” And people had got this lust for life, adventure and colour and be told, “actually the best way to go to Bali is to just get into your suit and we’ll take you.””Pete Townshend (1153)

“When I sing it my way, it’s a song about a whole different kind of frustration. It’s not about the repression of anger, it’s about the repression of love. It’s about the perversion of love, about love becoming vengeful.”Pete Townshend (1153)

“‘Won’t get fooled again’ wasn’t a defiant statement, it was a plea: please don’t end this story, please don’t feel that because you’ve come to this concert, because you’ve come to this place that you’ve got an answer. Please don’t make me on the stage the boss because I’m just the same as the guy who was up here before. You’re in charge!”Pete Townshend (1153)

“Well, that really stemmed from the project we were involved in at the Lifehouse. The whole thing was based on a combination of fiction – a script that I wrote – called The Lifehouse which was the story – and a projection within that fiction of a possible reality. In other words it was a fiction which was fantasy, parts of which I very much hoped would come true. And the fiction was about a theatre and about a group and about music and about experiments and about concerts and about the day a concert emerges that is so incredible that the whole audience disappears. I started off writing a series of songs about music, about the power of music and the mysticism of music.”Pete Townshend (1155)

“Yeah, it’s a song about reflecting creation musically, i.e. there being one infinite consciousness – everything in infinity being the one note and lots of other consciousnesses being us and vaguer consciousnesses being gas and grass and space. I just wrote a lyric about all this – talking about it as music. That is really one of my favorite songs, it really should have been on Who’s Next – if nothing else as a culmination of the frustration of The Who trying to go somewhere.”Pete Townshend (1155)

“That song was about Allen Klein. Allen Klein tried to get hold of The Who as being the first of his purge on rock. I mean he shat all over the Beatles and the Stones. F**k knows how we managed to get out of it.”Pete Townshend (1155)

“It’s a very big social comment ‘My Generation’, it’s the only really successful social comment I’ve ever made. Some pilled-up mod dancing around trying to explain to you why he’s such a groovy guy, but he can’t because he’s so stoned he can hardly talk.”Pete Townshend (1156)

“One day I bought a car. It was the first car I ever bought and I borrowed 15 quid each from John [Entwistle – Ed] and Keith [Moon – Ed] and I went up to Swindon. I was 20 years old and I bought a Packard hearse. It was a superb vehicle. And I drove it back from Swindon and I parked it outside the flat and I went down next day and it had gone and I ran out to the police hysterical. Somebody has stolen my car, and the guy said, Ah, it’s been towed away. But I said, “There are no parking restrictions in that street, why was it towed away?” And he said, “Obviously you’ve caused some public offence. It turned out that the Queen Mother had had it removed. She drove past each day from Clarence House to go to Buckingham Palace and she’d seen the car and said, “Have that removed!” I was outraged. My first car and I couldn’t afford to get it back…And that was the world that I lived in, the world of imperious landlords – you do things their way, people like the Queen Mother who with a flick of her finger can have the first car that you’ve ever bought removed from the face of the earth. That was where ‘My Generation’ came from: I’d rather die than be like you people, I never want to become like you old people, that’s what I was saying.”Pete Townshend (1157)

“It is the idea that men need to dress up in order to represent God that appalls me. If I wanted to be as insane as to attempt to represent God, I’d just go ahead and do it; I wouldn’t dress up like a drag queen.”Pete Townshend (1159)