Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite by Roger Daltrey

Author:Roger Daltrey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

chapter eleven

Who’s Next

The idea Pete had was Lifehouse. An album and a film. Musically, it was an astonishing concept, but it was so out-there it was hard to grasp. In a world sometime in the not-too-distant future, pollution is so bad that the urban population has to live indoors wearing experience suits. Senses are stimulated artificially by these suits. People disconnect from their natural environment. He got that bit right, didn’t he?

Everyone else lives hand-to-mouth in the fields. The experience suits are linked to the Grid, which keeps them fed and entertained through test tubes. They can experience thousands of lifetimes in a day, which is great, but there’s no rock and roll, which is bad. Along comes a rebel called Bobby who hacks the Grid. He converts everyone’s personal data into musical notes, which he plays to them.

The music converges into one single note. With that note, they are free. They all vanish into Nirvana. The end.

It sounds pretentious now. Can you imagine what it sounded like in 1971? And it wasn’t half as clear. Pete’s always been sketchy on narrative, which is fine when you’re making rock music but not when you’re making a film. Lifehouse was an intellectual ever-decreasing circle. It was a mess.

I offered to try to write it into a proper script but this proved insurmountably difficult. I understood what he was trying to say. When we find the meaning of everything, when you find a higher being, it will be a musical note. I got that. But how do you make a film of that? How do you make a film of something that isn’t there?

Every time we talked about it, it was all about the film and we just went round and round in circles. We sat around various tables at Track, at my house, at his house. Kit and Chris were there, too, and it went on for hours and hours. Keith and John would start drinking, just to make the time pass faster. On one particularly long evening, Keith just started taking his clothes off. Then he stood on his head and rested his bollocks on the table.

I tried to be more constructive. I kept saying, “You’ve got these songs. Let’s do these songs.” But for him, it was the whole thing at once. A project. A film and an album. The full multimedia experience. And we were just too stupid to understand.

I’ve said it before, and I mean it in the nicest possible way, but talking to Pete could be like walking through a minefield wearing a pair of clown shoes. And a blindfold. When he’s fixated on something and other people don’t get it, he’s intellectually terrifying. His frustration sometimes manifests itself as spitefulness. He has a beautiful, kind side to him—and that’s the side you see most often—but there’s this other side, which can just come out of the blue. He’s like a scorpion with a warm heart. No matter how happily the conversation is ticking along, you’re constantly aware of the sting in its tail.

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