In honor of The Who’s performance at this year’s Super Bowl – we’re rooting for The Saints if you must know – we’ve dug into the archives to bring you an excerpt from a 2006 cover story we did with the mighty Pete Townshend. Below Townshend talks about The Who’s setlists, his relationship to the audience and The Rolling Stones.

How do you balance a setlist between the songs you and Roger want to play and those songs you know the Who audience always wants to hear? And how much responsibility does a top-price rock band have to give the people what they want vs. playing a set that’s challenging and satisfying for the band itself?

There may be what looks to be an obvious connection between top-price rock and greatest-hits roundups, but I think our situation is so eccentric. It isn’t just that we produced our hits so long ago, but that we stopped producing new music after only 17 years. We have been doing sporadic road work for 42 years. We didn’t produce that many records as the Who, but of the ones we did make, several really stand out – Who’s Next, Tommy and Quadrophenia are so much more than Who records. They are part of the foundation stones of rock method. Even to play a smattering of songs from these three records takes a couple of hours.

My hope for this forthcoming tour is that we will be able to do what we did in 1989, but without such a huge band. For that tour, we rehearsed 135 songs and got to play most of them at some point. But the Who isn’t the Grateful Dead. We are a parade of our own unique history – a celebration, an act. We are like wandering minstrels constantly doing the same story; our set piece may be the same, like Punch and Judy, but the world changes.

I hope we can play a lot of our new recording on tour. It has to at least compare to what we already play every day, which just happens to be some of the best rock music a band can enjoy playing. We’re spoiled. Roger is often quite fearful about approaching dangerous new material, whereas I am quite cavalier. But that doesn’t make me brave; it might make me stupid.

The Who’s audience used to be a prime inspiration for your writing. What do you have in common with the Who’s audience at this point?

When the Who’s audience – or a big part of it – could still be traced back to our neighborhood roots in West London, I used them as my inspiration. They were my patrons. They commissioned me to write what they could not express. Sometimes I pleased them, sometimes I didn’t. I was actively encouraged by them in the late ‘70s to explore myself, and quite a few of them identified with my darker solo work. But our American audience, the ones who kept the vast Who machine in action, with its studios, trucks, helicopters, lasers and enormous overhead, started to trouble me. The problem was that radio began to be controlled by advertising agencies, not program directors. Disk jockeys who were Who fans could play Who songs – but only those on a limited list written by those who paid ad revenue. The list included the songs we all now know as Who classics. This made it hard not just to get new songs aired, but also to get feedback on how we were doing. The irony is that those few classic songs have now embedded themselves so deeply in the American consumer’s consciousness that they are almost used as hymns by filmmakers and advertisers.

In 1982, we had to persuade people that our new music was as good as what we had done ten years before. It seemed mad, so I decided to stop trying. Today, we have to persuade people that our new music is as good as what we did between 1964 and 1982. It still seems mad.The Who’s only peers at this point are the Rolling Stones. As an avowed Stones fan, how do you feel about their new album, A Bigger Bang, and the band’s live shows – do they hearten you? Are there ways in which the Stones (or their material) are better equipped for the long haul than the Who – or vice versa?

I have interest only in the men and women who are part of the Stone’s brigade. They are now some of my dearest, most cherished friends, and I am always inspired by their ability to re-inject some new spunk into the world they occupy.

Hmm, do you have issues with the way the Stones deal with the march of time? Inducting the Stones into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, you said that “aging gracefully wouldn’t suit them.” Is what they’re doing what you meant or hoped?
You may have mistaken my envy of Mick for some kind of competitive resentment. I am a great friend of his and a huge admirer. He is a central figure in my social circle, as he is in the lives of so many people like me. He is good at affirming artists and is always quite amusing about his own predicament as Keith Richards’ opposite in the Stones. Keith is great, too, but he lives in the U.S., so I see much less of him. When I saw Mick and Keith running through their first song together on stage at the 9/11 concert, I nearly cried.

I have always been stunned by Mick’s ability to rise above the chaos he creates and that created by his bed-fellows. I don’t have his stamina. I haven’t listened to A Bigger Bang in its entirety yet. Roger loves the album, by the way. I have a copy Mick sent me (as he always very graciously does), but it arrived when I was in the middle of my own demos. I try not to listen to other people’s music when I’m writing and recording. As for the march of time, there is no competition between the Who and the Stones.

The Who broke up in early 1982 – we were already just three-quarters of our original lineup – did a farewell tour and that was that. Then Roger began urging me to work with him again, and we did occasional tours for myriad reasons – usually to keep the wolves from John Entwistle’s door. We have had no studio album at all, nor have we attempted one, in 24 years. The Stones never stopped. The difference must be clear – this new Who album must be regarded as a completely new piece of work. Not only is it wrong to compare what I am doing to what Mick is still doing so successfully with the Stones, but it is wrong to compare it with the first chunk of Who records from 1964-82.

Unlike the Stones and U2, the Who isn’t a “gang” any more. We are two old guys who have chosen to try to get along under a brand name. With a new record in the mix, this is not a re-run of the old circus act (though the tour we’ll do will probably have elements of that). Whereas Mick has made a record every year of his life – and his solo records are rudely ignored, I think – I have done other things: Broadway theater, fringe theater, books, bookshops, recording studios, experimental film, publishing, editing – everything but acting. When I’m dead and my creative executor wades through my stuff, we shall see whether I did good.