04 November 2019
Newsdesk
The 'Baba O' Riley' guitarist - who was notorious for smashing his instrument to pieces on stage - has admitted he could be "pretty snobby" when it came to his and his bandmates' wild ways, and he actually felt that when he and late drummer Keith Moon used to throw television out of hotel windows, it was a real "waste of time".
In an interview with The Big Issue magazine, the 74-year-old musician confessed: “I was always pretty snobby about rock and roll.
“As the television went through the window, I would look at Keith Moon and go, ‘what a f***** prat. What a waste of time’.
“Then, two or three times I did the same thing and I would think, ‘what a f****** prat’."
However, the former arts student - who is one of the two only surviving members of the iconic rock band, along with frontman Roger Daltrey - admitted that he wouldn't have changed their instrument-thrashing days, because it's how he made people "listen" to him.
He added: “I was in it for the art.
"I felt we should confine our antics to the stage.
"Getting into auto-destruction was straight out of art college.
“People still say that I should never have smashed instruments.
"F*** off. It is how I got you to listen to me.”
The 'My Generation' hitmaker also admitted that he feels like his “generation", of "the hippy era" in the 60s, could have used their "power" to achieve greater social changes, but instead they turned to psychedelic drugs to block out feeling like they "had nothing to live for".
He explained: “My generation felt disenfranchised.
"That is a complex word for feeling like we had nothing to live for.
“It made us not so much angry as loose.
"We were loose-living. And when psychedelic drugs and more importantly the pill came along, away we went.
“Then we took power. But I think we misused the power to a great extent. The hippy era could have turned into something much better than it did.”
