The 78-year-old member of The Who denies he's gay although he 'really wanted' his band's male manager to look at him in a different way during their heyday.
- Dec 4, 2023
AceShowbiz - Pete Townshend wished The Who's gay manager could be "sexually attracted" to him. The 78-year-old rocker - who shares three children with ex-wife Karen Astley and is now married to Rachel Fuller - had no sexual interest in Kit Lambert and had never been attracted to a man, but he longed to have the executive look at him in a different way during the making of the group's ill-fated "lost" rock opera "Life House".
"I loved Kit. I wasn't homosexual, I didn't have any homoerotic feelings and I wasn't sexually attracted to him, but I really wanted him to be sexually attracted to me - and he wasn't," he told the Financial Times newspaper.
While Pete was pushing to make "Life House", Kit wanted to make a movie of their previous work, "Tommy", and the musician's refusal led to a dramatic showdown in a New York hotel which saw the guitarist restrained after threatening to throw himself out of a window. He said, "It wasn't a suicidal thought, it was an impulse. I was seeing red, I was seeing lights, I was just lost."
Meanwhile, the "Baba O'Reilly" hitmaker insisted he and bandmate Roger Daltrey won't "do an ABBA" and have their likenesses replicated as digital avatars or holograms to continue performing virtually forever.
He said, "Apparently Mick [Jagger] has said, 'Yeah, The Rolling Stones will definitely do an ABBA.' " Asked if they'll do the same, he replied, "Oh f***, no, no, no."
Pete previously told of how Kit "sneered" at his lifestyle when he was making "Life House" and insisted he didn't blame his manager's drug addiction for the rift between them. He told The Times newspaper, "I've used heroin myself and it doesn't disable you."
"It mostly means you don't enjoy food or sex, but also that you don't give a f*** and that can allow you to do dangerous, radical things. Kit was in New York, forging a new career for himself. I was noodling about with The Who, trying to make a record to equal 'Tommy', and he just wasn't interested."
"He didn't like my interest in spirituality, which came after some serious LSD crashes, and he was strangely disdainful of my marriage. I was with this very pretty woman who wore flowery dresses, lived in a house by the river, we had two pretty little daughters . . . and he sneered at it."
