This interview by Kristine McKenna appeared in Spin magazine sometime in 1986. It is used without permission, but since my purposes are purely educational I hope that I may be forgiven this. Yes, I'm trying to educate you poor little gits! Read this interview and learn all you should know.

What's the biggest obstacle you've overcome in your life?
Believing myself to be unattractive.

But most people have been screaming exactly the opposite message in your ear for 20 years.
But I haven't listened to it or trusted it. And in overcoming that disbelief and realizing that I am attractive, I've also come to sympathize with people who are born physically beautiful and must struggle to achieve a sense of - to use an extremely hackneyed phrase - inner beauty. When I finally accepted that I had to work, entertain, be a goon, draw blood, and bare my soul to get people's attention, I suddenly became aware of an ability to judge other people's true worth. It was as if I'd been using the wrong terms of reference for myself and, thereby, everyone else as well. I am truly able to say with my hand on my heart that I am now able to look at beautiful women without being confused about their value. That really makes me happy because my wife happens to be beautiful, and I've finally realized that that's just a lucky break for her. What's lucky for me is that I'm now able to look past that and see the great person that she is. My illusion about physical beauty was a really big obstacle to me and one that was almost Freudian in character because it was very much locked in with the way I idealized my mother when I was a child. I've been able to overcome it with the help of therapy.

As far as the value of therapy, it seems that intellectually understanding one's problems doesn't change the fact that they remain deeply rooted inside.
Yes, of course the problems are still there, but therapy helps to draw back the veils that we use to obscure them from ourselves. Therapy, particularly the old-fashioned kind of analysis, takes a very long time and half the time you don't know what it is you're going to find. I remember missing four weeks of sessions once because I was working on something, so I decided to write down what I might have said to my therapist. I started writing this story about something that happened to me as a child and began to grow very frightened because I knew I was approaching something that was very painful. I finally came to a point that which was like a curtain and I knew I shouldn't go any further. By the time I realized how perverse my ideas about beauty had become I was ready to handle it. You must be prepared to accept what you learn about yourself.

Can you site any facts of life that you know to be true?
When I hear the phrase "facts of life" I think of sex. I had an amazing argument with someone the other day. I said I'd tried it every possible way, and one thing I knew for certain is that good sex is not short sex. My friend said, "Bullshit! Good sex is fast sex!" So it's hard to generalize because the facts of my life might not be the facts of your life.

OK, here's an example of what I'm getting at: Is it a fact of life that some people get away with murder?
Yes, you have to believe that. An innocent trust in the motives of your fellow man or the ability of nature to correct things in anything less than a million years is naive. Someone is currently chopping down the Pacific rain forest. We know that and can't do anything about it. Farmers and peasants need money to live. Somewhere someone trying to prevent people from growing cocaine in South America is being murdered. Somebody somewhere is helping a record become a hit by slipping cocaine to a disc jockey. This is not to say there's no justice in the universe, but it moves very slowly. Like the best sex.

How would you define sin?
Waiting for things to get better. Saying "Look to the future, things will get better." That's as much a sin as saying things will be awful in the future because the future doesn't count. What counts is now, and this moment does shape the future. If you look out at the city you live in and see that it's full of garbage you should whistle a happy tune like a character in a Disney cartoon and start collecting the garbage. To sit at your window and say that someday someone will come and clear up all the garbage is bullshit. And a sin.

Your book, your new album, and your video all come to a sort of peaceful conclusion. To what do you attribute your positive frame of mind?
Being released from the Who and having the freedom to embrace creative projects in different areas has been an important change for me. A lot of the years with the Who I didn't feel caged, bit I was definitely in another reality. I now feel that I have more control over my life, and it's a great thing to realize that short of being in a plane crash, I have some control over my own destiny.

What is the central idea behind the White City album and video?
It all springs from a situation that exists in Britain right now. A similar problem in America is not quite as crystallized. The central point I'm attempting to make is that men have been brainwashed into sacrificing themselves for causes which are said to be greater than themselves and which they don't understand. We as a society have all been complicit in encouraging them to sacrifice themselves. Now that the idea of great patriotic causes has been tarnished, we see a tragedy unfolding: the tragedy of young men in the past who willingly threw themselves into futile bloodbaths to amuse chessboard generals and the tragedy of emasculation in the present due to the fact that it's very difficult for Englishmen to find work. The intent with White City was to suggest that it doesn't have to be this way. Originally I was going to call it The Tragedy of the Boy. With the advance of feminism in western society and with women's capacity to have children and bring them up, women can shape the future. I don't object to feminism, but I think men should have a version of it for themselves.
It's unfortunate that sexuality is a component in the nature of freedom. Throughout history, men have satisfied the drive to create and control by leading, writing, and governing. Men gained power through traditionally rewarded acts of heroism, self-sacrifice, and at the most mundane level - and to this day the thing we find hardest to let go of - by doing a hard day's work and bringing home the money. There are so many men who are unable to do that now, and it's backlashing against society in a monumental way. I work with a refuge for battered women in England, and working there has led me to conclude that domestic violence is often the last resort of men who are lost and emasculated. The popular solution is to separate men from wives and children because society refuses to tolerate violence in the home. Yet for millions of years violence has been the way we've run our countries and protected our causes. We're presently at a fantastic watershed because we're living under a nuclear umbrella. Moreover, the Vietnam War came to a completely unsatisfactory conclusion, so even that old-fashioned kind of warfare doesn't work anymore.
An aspect of White City that I'm quite proud of is that for once in my life I'm talking about things I know as opposed to expressing opinions as an observer. These aren't opinions. White City is a statement of facts - and they're facts I'm already doing something about. When I wrote "Won't Get Fooled Again", which Roger sang with such venom while I accompanied him with great power chords and arm swings, each power chord was another promise. But all it really promised was that there would be another power chord very close behind it. And in the end everyone looks around and says, "Hold on a minute! When are we gonna get the goods?"

But in a sense you have delivered the goods. You've continued your self-examination and have never said, "Sorry folks, I was just kidding - it was only entertainment."
That's true, but I've had to get my head down very, very deep in order to be remotely true to that promise. Some people might ask what's the point of somebody who can entertain millions cleaning out the lavatories of a housing project. I think there's a value in it - though I can't say exactly what it is.

How do you explain the current trend of social conscience in rock? Three years ago benefits weren't being staged left and right.
Television has become a tremendously powerful purveyor of depressing news. Perhaps because of that, rock has increasing become a form of pure entertainment in the past few years. In the '60s musicians felt that their work should comment on the things going on in the world, whereas now musicians are expressing their sense of moral duty in a more direct and I think more effective way. Things have become compartmentalized. In a way these benefits are a sort of perverse democratic election. By buying their records the fans have given these artists power, and the artists are getting together and exercising that power in a way that the fans approve.

What's the primary responsibility of an artist?
Always to challenge, but first he must gain the public's ear and heart by making an attractive offering. Entertainment first, challenging and inviting debate later.

What do you feel to be your central strength as an artist?
It's evolved over a long period of time. Like other people my age, I'm not disenchanted with the medium of rock, but we realize that it no longer works the same way it used to. Yet we still want it to do the same things - at least I do. I want to please people, then possibly slip them something that I feel I've been able to make some kind of acute judgement about. A unique advantage that people such as myself enjoy is that entertaining large audiences we're granted the privilege of scrutinizing large groups of people when they're at their most abandoned. It's a tremendous contrast - a completely different reality in fact. People look very good when they feel free.

Are there specific issues that are best suited to particular art forms?
The limitations of rock are fairly obvious, and I found them perplexing. My notebooks were filled with notions that resisted conversion into song and that's one of the reasons I started writing prose. Rock is a celebratory medium that doesn't lend itself to subtleties and is sort of the musical equivalent of the epic movie. Both are good at dealing with high-powered imagery, science fiction, war, and dramatic love affairs. Conversely, the poetry of a film like Paris, Texas seems an almost novelistic application of cinema. The vast scope of rock carries with it certain limitations. You have to be able to drive and dance to rock music. For instance, I didn't consider "Imagine" a rock 'n' roll song because it didn't make me want to dance, and "Tutti Frutti" isn't a rock 'n' roll song because it doesn't say anything. There are those who dismiss my theory as bullshit, but it depends on how you quantify it.

You refer to your new album as a music movie and call your feature-length video a novel. Why are you attempting to blur the distinctions between creative disciplines?
Because I'm mischievous. I do think that long-form music video is the novel of the future and that all art will one day exist in a technological realm. That's my prediction of the week.

That doesn't bode well for the written word.
The written word will remain a part of life as we know it. It's pretty archaic already. There's a quaintness to the idea of people 20 years from now dusting off old vinyl gramophone records, lighting up marijuana cigarettes, and being able to visualize amazing images - while crowing that they don't need MTV!

We're currently seeing a proliferation of rock 'n' roll novels - the work of writers like Jay McInnery, Bret Easton Ellis, Frederick Barthelme. The common qualities that these books share are an ironic tone that verges on ennui and frequent references to name-brand products. Do you think these books will have any lasting power?
Yes, I do. The novel as a form has always evolved very slowly, and at the moment the novel is being fucked with. There's a form of writing employed by people like Borges and Kafka that leans heavily on irony, but employs symbolism and surrealism as well. You see it a lot in the French surrealists - Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and all those writers that supposedly had a big influence on Bob Dylan. Looking at literature over the centuries, you can see an ebb and flow of style. At the moment literature is connected with a certain strain of rock writing, which is something we're quite comfortable with now - this is assuming that one accepts rock writing as a legitimate form. In fact, it's more than a form. It's a complete environment, comparable to the Western, that enables you to relive formative experiences. There's a kind of mythic quality to much rock writing It alludes to this thin air bubble floating in the sky known as MTV. You can speak a language there where nothing you say needs to make sense, but everyone understands you anyway.

Who did you see as the potential audience for your book as you were writing it?
The audience I had in mind was people who had enjoyed my songwriting, and those are the people who bought the book. Considering the price of the book in hardback, I'm amazed at how many people did buy it. I'm sure there were a few new readers, but I wasn't looking for a new audience. If I wanted a new audience, I'd use a nom de plume - and then I'm sure I'd sell zero copies.
In England it was given a mixed reception, and I was pleased with that because I thought the book was mixed. Parts of it were good and parts of it were flat and confused. I reread it once after it was published and some bits of it embarrassed me. The reviews in America did surprise me. It's been quite encouraging, because I imagined that rock critics and literary critics alike might resent the fact that a guy who makes enough dough selling records was trying to infiltrate new territory.

In writing the book did you feel you were tapping into a new part of yourself or was it basically an extension of your songwriting?
It was different because I felt unfettered by the need to fit my thoughts into the context of a rock 'n' roll song. Except for two stories where I was going for what's known as a shaggy dog ending, "Fish Shop" and "The Plate", I didn't feel the need to entertain. Most of the book was written with the feeling that I was just laying it out there, and if you didn't like it, tough, because the things I was trying to share were very painfully observed by me and there was no way to sugarcoat them.
I was bitter during the last five years of the Who because I felt that I couldn't get out. It seems very strange in retrospect because I now realize that I could've gotten out at any time. Why didn't I do it earlier? Instead of getting out I became consumed by bitterness. I blamed record companies and even became quite angry at fans. There's a tract in my book written from the point of view of someone in that state of mind.
To a great extent, life is a lottery. The only thing you can do is throw the dice and hope it comes up the right way, and if it doesn't you've got to keep throwing. It seems that the essence of all wisdom is an acceptance of the nature of your own power over yourself and the circumstances that surround you. The most important thing for a human being to understand is that there are certain things they can, and therefor must, do, and there are certain things they can't change and must accept. People who are consumed by bitterness are trying to avoid the acceptance of their own frailty by blaming others and the circumstances around them.

What would you like to change about your life at this point?
Nothing. It's the old bending of the reed business, which is a concept that's central to Persian wisdom. In America you say, "go with the flow", and truly, it's a great philosophy. If you can't have it or beat it, just run with it for a while. Sometimes the idea that we must draw on some kind of inner strength seems too demanding. We tend to underrate ourselves. No aspect of nature seems to have the resilience of the human soul.

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