During the US tour, Pete was interviewed by Karen Bliss for Spinner. There are some good quotes as he talks about his autobiography, and answers questions about his life story. The full interview is posted on the spinner.com website.
Here are a few quick ones from the interview.
“I had grown up in a band. I had a slightly strange childhood. I'd seen both sides of the coin as it were -- the black and the white, the glamor and the terror. I'd had musical visions, if you could call them that. I had a real understanding of what popular music was for. And then I ended up at this amazing art school where my mind was kind of blown apart by these brilliant men who had put together this extraordinary course and at the same time rhythm & blues was breaking for the first time, right in the west London neighborhood where I was in art school, in Ealing, just down the street.”
“What's more amazing is that Roger and I are on tour together at the moment. I think it's astonishing. Bands are peculiar things. It could be magic in a way, two musicians performing together; it doesn't necessarily mean they will be friendly. ….. You can walk onstage with a bunch of people that you hate and produce fantastic music. There was a lot of hatred and uneasiness in the early Who that we tended to cover up with crazy behavior and just start losing ourselves in a kind of a running comedy act.”
“I think what I've done as an artist is try to allow life to roll over me and I find that really difficult. I loved writing about my early life, but I didn't enjoy writing about the Who's career. It felt to me like a revisit to the Groundhog Day, being on the road and in the studio and writing songs.”
“I am a person of extremes. My moods swing hugely. I either think life is fabulous or I think it's shit and I find it very difficult. I have to train myself to occupy the land in between, but there's no collateral for me in the land in between. There's no collateral in "Have a nice day." It doesn't earn me any fucking money and nobody wants to hear me say it.”
“I just think that the neighborhood is important to me. I'm lucky I still live in West London. I can see the building I was born in from the window of my house. I live on a hill, I look down at the River Thames; I look down at the place I grew up and where I spent time near the river as a child.”
“But right now, the main campaign I'm involved in its that the Who are doing a concert -- Roger's joining me in a special concert, right at the end of this tour in June-July, for Refuge, which is a series of refuges -- there are about 70 in the U.K. which are suffering from cutbacks for women, for families, who've been caught up in domestic violence.”
