Pete Townshend vs Austin Powers

As Pete Townshend prepares for the British musical debut of the Who's Quadrophenia, he says that Mike Meyers' Austin Powers movies trivialized what was really going down in Britain in the '60s. Townshend spoke to timesonline.co.uk and explained how he hopes that the new production will reiterate what a hopeless time it was historically for British youth.

He said, "Austin Powers has done a lot of damage to the image of swinging London, parodying what had already been parodied by lazy American newsreels over the years. So in a sense my mission is to bring back some of the greyness, the bleakness of those years, and demonstrate to the cast that what happened simply had to happen, otherwise we would all have gone nuts. It wasn't an optional outing of boys playing on scooters; it was a vital rebellion."

Townshend explained that the "Mod" revolution, which blurred the lines of gender, commercial art, and popular music, was a hugely important era during the mid-'60s -- and was influential far beyond it's initial fashion-centric buzz: "Everything was turned on its head. Girls looked like boys, boys wore eyeliner and danced alone or in pairs like girls. Today we are facing something of the same kind of upheaval."

He went on to say, "In the financial mess we are in how will young people express their need to be different? Roger Daltrey often says that Mod wouldn't have happened if well-paid work hadn't been available. But what awful work it was, and what antiquated rules and authoritarian systems were still in place."

Townshend says that while performing predominantly for Mod audiences, he realized very early on that the Who's relationship with their fans differed greatly from the traditional showbiz precedents: [ Click to listen if you have a backstage pass] "What we suddenly realized is that we weren't speaking for our audience, our audience were telling us what to say. Now, that's a very, very, different process. And it's one that I discovered when I was very, very young, it's one that I continue to honor today. So what I'm trying to do is, when people say to me, 'Hey Pete, your songs are very personal. How do you think that Roger can feel about singing them?' Roger can sing them 'cause they're not personal at all. My songs are your songs."

The first full-blown officially sanctioned musical production of the Who's Quadrophenia kicks off it's regional UK theater tour on May 9th in Plymouth, England.
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