Do you realize why is it I'm so driven to operate within the Establishment? It's vengeance. 'Hope I die before I get old' is something I still have to live with, but not for the reason many people think. I have to be very, very vigilant not to become one of those people I despised.
music
The Who got paid 4000 pounds during those days, but we always smashed our equipment that cost more than 5000 pounds.
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.
examplepeoplework
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.
difficultiespeopleplaces
I just could not believe that 30 years later we're still looking at people who are supposed to write little 2-minute pop that when they actually try to do something that's a little bit more they regard it as pretentious.
people
What I took back, because of my exposure to the Jewish music of the 30s and the 40s in my upbringing with my father, was that kind of theatrical songwriting. It was always a part of my character. This desire to make people laugh.
charactermusicpeople
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.
orderpeople
We tried not to age, but time had its rage.
agethetimestime
If I told you what it takes to reach the highest high you'd laugh and say nothing that simple, but you've been told many times before messiah's point you to the door though no one's got the guts to leave the temple.
doorthetimestime
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.
man
I know how it feels to be a woman because I am a woman. And I won't be classified as just a man.
It wasn't just about flashing lights and pinball machines blowing up and things like that. It was about using encores, bringing back the good songs and using techniques that I knew about from rock performance.
light
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.
painwork
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.
work
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.
men