Pete Townshend Now Says There Will Not Be a Who Farewell Tour: ‘I Was Being Sarcastic’
variety.comJem Aswad Executive Editor, Music It turns out that when Pete Townshend recently told the New York Times that he was planning on a final Who farewell tour, he was “being sarcastic,” he told the “Sound Up!” podcast in an interview released today (April 16). “It feels to me like there’s one thing the Who can do, and that’s a final tour where we play every territory in the world and then crawl off to die,” he told the Times in an interview published last month.
However, when asked about that comment during an interview with Sound Up!’s Mark Goodman and Alan Light, he replied, “I’m not doing a farewell tour,” adding, “I think I was being sarcastic about it.” He elaborated, “When I was 34, I wrote the song ‘Slit Skirts,’ and I think the line is ‘I’m 34 years old and I’m still wandering in a haze,’” he said of the closing song on his 1982 album “All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes.” “I felt old at 34.” When asked about that line in relation to his infamous boast — “I hope I die before I get old” — from the Who’s 1965 song “My Generation,” he continued, “That’s a twist, in a sense. ‘Slit Skirts’ was an honest confession of how I didn’t like what I’d become.
When I wrote [‘My Generation’], I was celebrating the fact that I was young — I was 18 and surrounded by old people. Now, everybody seems younger.
But in those days, everybody seemed older and they all seemed to be messed up, either miserable or poor or working too hard or complaining about something.
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