Who I Am: A Memoir

by Pete Townshend

The music computer had landed in two forms. There was the Fairlight CMI, a synthesiser/sampler workstation beloved of New Romantic bands; by the time I started work on White City I had bought my own. The other system was the Synclavier, a digital FM synthesiser with a microprocessor-controlled sequencer. I realised these developments meant I would soon be able to compose and orchestrate very seriously, without the expense of using real orchestras or the barrier of working with orchestrators like Raphael Rudd or Edwin Astley. I found this incredibly exciting, although I have to add that nothing I’ve ever heard has surpassed what I heard in my imagination as a boy. My brilliant Uncle Jack (Dad’s older brother) had always been a rather shy and quiet fellow, and for a period after the war was subject to the Official Secrets Act for his work in the USA on the development of radar and later big-screen television. Uncle Jack introduced me to a colleague of his who demonstrated how digital data could be stored on tape using streams of analogue audio ‘noise’. I could see that digitisation was also going to change the music industry. The CD was well established, of course, and digital audio recording had been demonstrated to me at EMI by Tony Lumkin back in 1975. The Mellotron, which used a form of analogue sampling, had been employed by The Beatles and Bee Gees back in the mid-Sixties. Digital sampling had been pioneered by Fairlight, and by Ray Kurzweil, who reserved his first inv...