Lifehouse

by Pete Townshend, Jeff Young (Adapter)

Book by Pete Townshend

Genres: Music, Graphic Novels, Comics, Fiction

160 pages, Paperback

First published December 6, 1999

About the author

Pete Townshend (born Peter Dennis Blandford Townshend), is an award-winning English rock guitarist, singer, songwriter, composer, and writer.

Townshend made his name as the guitarist and principal songwriter for rock band The Who. His career with them spans more than 40 years, during which time the band grew to be considered one of the greatest and most influential rock bands of all time, in addition to being "possibly the greatest live band ever." Townshend is the primary songwriter for the group, writing well over 100 songs for the band's eleven studio albums, including the rock operas Tommy and Quadrophenia, plus dozens more that appeared as non-album singles, bonus tracks on reissues, and tracks on rarities compilations such as Odds and Sods. He has also written over 100 songs for his solo albums and rarities compilations. Although known mainly for being a guitarist, he is also an accomplished singer and keyboard player, and has played many other instruments on his solo albums, and on some Who albums (such as banjo, accordian, synthesizer, piano, bass guitar, drums).

Townshend has also written newspaper and magazine articles, book reviews, essays, books, and scripts.

Reviews

[Alex Sarll]

It's only a month or two since I first became aware of Lifehouse*, the Who's even more crazily ambitious plan for a follow-up to Tommy, which inevitably fell apart on the grounds that enacting it fully would have been literally impossible. And that was in a book from a few years ago that I'd happened across, so not part of the launch publicity for this or anything, just coincidence - or else the secret harmony of the universe, man. And yes, I was intrigued to learn that Pete Townshend had anticipated The Matrix in the seventies, but really what convinced me to give this a go was that the adaptation had been co-written by David Hine, whose stuff I don't always love but who is an interesting writer and gets less attention than he merits. The art, meanwhile, is Max Prentis', and gives the impression of a trippier Jon Davis-Hunt, or, conversely, Hine's frequent co-conspirator Shaky Kane if he ever straightened out.

Or course, any attempt at realising Lifehouse faces certain issues, not least reality. As originally conceived, it wasn't just a story about a band whose music connected individually with members of the audience, incorporating their biographies and bringing about ecstatic transcendence - the Who were actually meant to be doing that live. And yes, they did end up with some of their best songs (including most of Who's Next) salvaged from the ruins, but...put it this way, I can maybe believe in the abstract that music could do that; I can't believe that the Who might. Add to that the difficulty that, rather than the multisensory overload of a happening, or even the Ken Russell adaptation of one, this comic is trying to do the same just with pages, in a medium which has a notoriously awkward relationship with music. Not that comics can't do transcendence, but it's a very different flavour from that achieved at a gig. On top of which, while the notion of a population distracted from the polluted wasteland outside by being near-permanently plugged into the Grid feels more prescient than ever, fifty years on it's much harder to believe in music as the necessarily radical and revolutionary force which might overcome that, and which the authorities fight to suppress. Why would they bother when most people opt for the soporific likes of Sheeran and Drake anyway?

Given all of which constraints, the graphic novel has little choice but to engage in a fairly free adaptation, even the excerpts from Townshend's notes at the end mostly showing marked divergence from the characters as realised here. Which is probably for the best, because what might have been forgivably of its time in something produced half a century ago likely isn't if you only finish it up now. But similarly, you don't get to be eerily prescient anymore if you've been retooled in the present. So while this certainly isn't a bad read - it has memorable moments, arresting visuals, some compelling characters, and at times even manages to sell the power of the Lifehouse music - there can't help but remain a certain hollowness at its heart. It's no longer a would-be revolutionary, albeit doomed, outpouring of a visionary riding the zeitgeist; it's an exercise in reworked nostalgia, a daydream of a past era's rebel songs, and as such inevitably more assimilated into the Grid's spectacle than anything able to foster a mystical anti-establishment connection.

*Nobody seems entirely confident whether it's one word or two, even within the text of the comic.
**Apart from being the first ARC Image had put on Edelweiss in ages, and wanting to encourage them.

[Warren Truitt · Rating 3 out of 5]

OK, this isn't a kids' book, but sometimes adults in the children's lit arena read adult books...

In the early '70s, Townshend came up with the idea for Lifehouse, a project that seemingly completely befuddled his bandmates and everyone in the music/entertainment business. He gave in and simply recorded the music connected to the storyline, resulting in Who's Next and several Who singles, up to and including "Who Are You", "Sister Disco", and "The Music Must Change".

Townshend finally got around to adapting the story to play form in the late 90s with Jeff Young, resulting in this version of Lifehouse. Three stars only because the music and lyrics speak for themselves: Listen to the recently released Lifehouse Chronicles CD set, read the intro to this playbook, listen again to the CDs, and you get a much clearer idea of what Townshend was shooting for. Plus, the music, man, the music...

[Mickey · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think I've read everything about Lifehouse. The box set from 2000, interviews, the few published scans of Pete's notebooks, and of course all the related materials: Psychoderelict, The Boy Who Heard Music (the unpublished novel), and the handful of Who and PT solo songs "set" in the world of Lifehouse. As a lifelong Who fan, I've been preoccupied with "Pete's unfinished masterpiece" since I first read about it in the liner notes to Who's Next on Christmas morning when I was twelve years old.

I don't really consider Lifehouse completed, even after the publication of this graphic novel and the mega CD set that came out in 2023. It will never be finished. And since stories like the Matrix, Hunger Games, and Mad Max have come along since Pete first sketched this thing out, Lifehouse could never have the impact he hoped it would have.

Taking all that into consideration (both my impossible expectations and the lateness of this project), I found this graphic novel to be an exhilarating ride.

The story told here was different, more expansive than the radio drama from the late 90s. The radio drama really only occupies a small B plot in the comic. The characters here were fantastic. The art was gorgeous and bold. The narrative was really inspiring.

I've imagined the 1971 feature film many times over the years. I'm pretty sure if it had been made, it would have stunk. There are so many oddball hippie movies from the period that are basically unwatchable now. I'm afraid that Lifehouse would have fallen into the same hole. Unless someone with an imagination beyond 1971 helmed it, like Kubrick, I can't imagine the thing would have been nearly as cool as the graphic novel.

So this is as complete a version of Lifehouse that we're likely to receive and I'm grateful for it.

The journey has been fantastic. I've enjoyed puzzling over this project for my whole life. I was twelve when I first heard about it and I'm nearly forty now. In a way, the mystery of "Pete's unfinished masterpiece" has been a companion to me for my entire life. Now that all the music and all the narrative elements have been published, most of my wondering about Lifehouse is over. I think the only remaining mystery to it is "what would have happened had he succeeded?" And thankfully, that can never be resolved.

[Stephen Hull · Rating 1 out of 5]

Aargh! I love Pete Townshend, or at least I love what he has given to my life. I used to react to music primarily on an intellectual level, but I still remember hearing Pete's fingers squeak on the strings at the beginning of I Can See For Miles and, though I didn't know what it was, I recognised that something was there that I had to listen to much more.

I also hate what he appears to have become: someone so convinced by generations of obsequious fans that he is a genius that he's spent much of the last half of his life being angry that more people don't realise it. Or that's how it seems to me.

Which is a very roundabout way of saying that this book was a mistake. It's a script for a radio play, so perhaps that is how it should be experienced, but I find it hard to imagine how this could be made into something that was worth losing 30 minutes of one's life listening to. It's hard to write about because there's so little to it. I can only say that I'm happy to have read it, but that has a good and a bad side. The good side is that I don't have to wonder anymore what it's like. The bad side is that I now know what it's like.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed it. As a Who fan , I have always enjoyed the music Pete creates. "Who's Next" being a particular favorite. Lifehouse was the story that Pete wanted to tell with the music. He struggled to explain his vision, and in the end The Who recorded the Lifehouse songs and released them as the album "Who's Next". The album was a huge success. Over the years Pete continued to wrestle with the ideas contained in Lifehouse. This is the play version.

[Noah · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've been in plays that futz with form before. Naomi Iizuka's Polaroid Stories does it with more panache.

As for novelizations which get off on the stream of conscious, pulsing, verbal gestalt, you'd be far better off reading Jeff Noon's Vurt.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

My thanks to both NetGalley and Image Comics for this graphic novel adaptation of a lost work by one of the most visionary and loudest musicians of the twentieth century.

Most artists have works that are unfinished, a half page of scribbled lines that just didn't seem to go anywhere. Sometimes these are used to build other works. Some are just sent out unfinished. The poem Kublai Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge was interrupted while Coleridge was writing it. Getting back to it later, Coleridge was at a loss to where he was going with it. Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys had the infamous Smile album, a work that broke him for years. Pete Townshend of the Who had Life House a multi-media planned follow-up to Tommy, that would work on film, stage, album and in the mind. Ideas keep being added, songs changed, plans made, but one day Townshend knew it was all for naught. Townshend just didn't have it in him. Many of the songs were adapted for the Who's Next album, with themes used later on solo albums. In celebration of this lost project Townshend has released a large music package and worked with new creators to make a graphic novel of the story. Pete Townshend's Life House is based on the screen plays by Pete Townshend adapted by writers James Harvey and David Hine, with artist Max Prentis inker Mick Grey and lettered by Micah Myers, and comes in a 12.25 x 12.25 just like a vinyl album size.

The story begins in a future, of maybe even a dream. Almost 200 years after the pollution and he climate begin to poison the Earth, and humans began to battle over the same things human battle over all the time England is under totalitarian rulership with no freedom, responsibilities and more importantly no music. Instruments and music have destroyed, and the only release that people get is spending their days on the Grid, a social system that uses dreams to power the nation state. Some people still roam free, and to this is added a young woman, who is older than she looks, with a gift for music and knowledge that all she knows is wrong. Following the sounds of the world the river, the polluted streams she finds a duo on the way to a show. A concert, held by a guru who walked away from the government, built a force field and with his followers is putting on an underground show, headlined by the recently defrosted Who, with the band getting some cybernetic additions to help them play. And then the story really gets weird.

A wild story with a strong European and Heavy Metal art feel, though done by an Australian that asks a lot of questions, with a lot of philosophical thought and well hippie ideas. Sort of if Rush's 2112 was influenced more by Michael Moorcock books and not Ayn Rand. There are a lot of questions on the role of music, the importance of art, and the power of playing in front of people, questions that Townshend seems to have struggled with most of his career. Actually much of what the band was going through is reflected in the story. Once one gets the feel the story is quite interesting, a little trippy and a bit again hippy, but good. The artwork is extraordinary, the larger format giving the pages a lot of room to fill, with huge trucks, a nice Rolls-Royce, creatures and lots of biomechanics and wires. Familiarity with the works of the Who will be helpful, knowing ideas, and when songs are being quoted will help readers understand the plot better. However the book does stand well on its own, and the pages are really gorgeous.

Recommended for fans of the Who, or fans of European comics, and 1970's science fiction. Townshend was right on many things when he wrote this, The Grid seems very much like social media, the Earth is dying and people seem comfortable having leaders tell them what to listen too, and how to act. Humans seem real easy to fool again.

[Doreen · Rating 3 out of 5]

1/16/2024 This is why I don't do drugs, lol. Full review tk at TheFrumiousConsortium.net.

1/18/2024 Ngl, reading this felt like what I imagine an acid trip would be like. I guess one good thing about it is that it made me want to listen to more of The Who's music? Good thing this graphic novel is being released with an accompanying vinyl LP! (Link at the bottom, tho you can also snag this book on its own.)

Life House is based on a rock opera originally conceived by Pete Townshend, lead guitarist and principal songwriter of The Who, as the follow-up to their massive multimedia hit, Tommy. Alas, Life House as a rock opera was shelved due to practical constraints, tho it did serve as the inspiration for their globally bestselling album Who's Next?. That album has now been remastered and the original script reshaped into the graphic novel format/package we have here.

I'll be blunt: this is some weird shit. And that's fine! I love weird shit. But it was also weird shit that was originally conceived in the 70s, and I think a lot of the cultural references just totally flew over my head. Anyway, in a dystopian future, an autocrat known as Jumbo Seven rules over England, the last nation left remaining after the rest annihilated themselves via nuclear warfare. The first Jumbo outlawed religion and music in her quest to save/control her people. The current Jumbo, seventh of her name, rules over a land where most of the citizens live in a sort of stasis called Grid Sleep (basically The Matrix, but without artificial intelligence using people as batteries.)

In the arms of Grid Sleep, citizens are kept safe from the deteriorating environment outside, and can work through lifetimes worth of karma via what's essentially lucid dreaming. Jumbo Seven is eagerly awaiting the moment that the Silver Child, a person whose karma is pure (or something -- the details are rather fuzzy) is created via Grid Sleep. Meanwhile, sleeper Mary Cotton has been having vivid nightmares of being a prisoner. Unwilling to keep suffering, she breaks out of the grid, to the dismay of her partner, and goes off in search of answers at the Tower, a symbol that kept recurring in her dreams. Will she find the answers she's been looking for, as she learns exactly what her role is in saving England and, perhaps, humanity?

I think that if you're a fan of The Who, and the whole psychedelic music scene of the 1970s (to which, pace, I know they don't necessarily belong,) that this will be right up your alley. If you love the whole mod/rock scene of the era, then you'll likely love this as well. But for everyone else, this story is kind of a mess. I feel like a large part of this comes down to the fact that writing a graphic novel about musical concepts of transcendency is a bit like the old saw of dancing about architecture. I get Mr Townshend's general point, and I applaud James Harvey and David Hine's valiant attempt to distill his vision into a comic that makes sense and entertains. Max Prentis has almost the easier job of it helming the art (shout out, too, to Shari Chankhamma for assisting on the bright, saturated colors throughout.) I did also appreciate the gender and racial diversity, much of which was likely changed from their original depictions in the 1970s.

For all that, this book lacks the sophistication that the last fifty years have escorted into and solidified in the realms of sci-fi writing. It reads well as an object of its time, with crucial modern updates, but this book feels more like a novelty for music and history fans than for the contemporary reader.

Life House by Pete Townshend, James Harvey, David Hine & Max Prentis was published January 9 2024 by Image Comics and is available from all good booksellers, including Bookshop!

[Theediscerning · Rating 3 out of 5]

A concept piece for The Who that never took off, this graphic novel has been pulled out of a mahoosive box set for the album that took over Pete Townsend's bandmates' attentions instead, and is being sold as a stand-alone in case the big names behind it are of interest. The fact it is so of-its-time, blandly sci-fi and genre-naive (if that's even a term) suggests it will struggle.

We are in some alternative England, where the first dictator to take us out of Europe and cahoots with the US banned music. We're now under the ninth, and under the guise of a Grid Sleep process many of us are kept as sheep – docilely maintained in special suits, we get fed a decade-long dream, of a different life, each and every night of our near-two hundred years, so at least we have variety while being caged and unable to be revolting. But when one of the sheeple breaks out, and finds two off-grid rebels who do remember what music might do, well, then, things start to kick off.

The threesome turn up at a gig under the old BT Tower, where some band daft enough to smash their guitars and set explosives in their drums, play "Join Together" – no, I have no idea who they might be. But more importantly the whole thing just reeks of deja vu, some indefinable preceding text, that mashes up mod-styled Union Flag use with sub-Ballardian mind-control ideas, where the Golden Child figure of yore is silver for a bit of variety but not a lot has changed from what is already recognisable.

And the whole thing has had such a long gestation, it's hard to say who is at fault for the way it circles around British sci-fi, at one time nudging it tentatively to see if it's alive, the next diving head-on in with a mind to make a splash like a car entering a swimming pool. By all accounts Townsend had this idea as a gesamtkunstwerk, then a movie, then a stage musical, then rebooted much of the musical content for this project and that, and for that attempt and that revisit. And despite people pretending this predicts the Internet, and this and that, and for all the "oh wow, the air is a bit crap two hundred years from now" elements, nothing actually feels fresh or revisited or revived since the heyday of The Who. The guru character here hasn't changed since, on this evidence, he was going to be given to Phil Lynott to perform.

But to be fair, the creators of this book – never mind what inspired it – have had a lot to do. They have to personify music, and try and portray the collective essence of it that could exceed a god in power. And that kind of stuff can't be easy – this doesn't look brilliant but it is so easy to see this as something much, much worse than it is. They have had to storyboard the unfilmable, minus the added medium of sound – and probably have had to make their characters very yacky and on the whole a bit too wordy as a result. But beyond the few people who knew this project was ever on the cards in the first place, the audience for this cannot be great. How many of The Who's contemporaries are graphic novel readers? And if this was that great, surely it would have happened before now – the cross-media clout Roger D and his gang had at many points in their career. And, of course, if music is the be-all-and-end-all, how can it be banned, without people being much more aware of it, programmed dreams be damned?

No, this is a porridge of classical sci-fi ideas, of dumped-on populations, of worlds made new by taking one thing from it (in this case, three – there's the music and sex and something else I forget). And it certainly potters along to a lame ending. I didn't hate my time reading this mediocre curio, but that is all it is ever going to be.

[Flyss Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Based on Pete Townsends idea for a follow up to Tommy, the concept was abandoned and the songs eventually made up most of the album Who’s Next. This graphic novel is based on that original concept, beautiful realised and a fascinating part of rock history.

[Peter Baran · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lifehouse was an abandoned Who concept album / film from the mid seventies, songs of which turned up on a Who's Next and a bunch of latter albums. Some of their best known CSI themes start with this project. This is a comic reimagination of the concept, and aspects of the abandoned screenplay (partially abandoned because Townshend got obsessed with Theresa Russell, his directors wife - see Athena on It's Hard). But partially abandoned because, well, its bobbins.

The comic tries to draw together its fundamental theme around music as a universal force, by creating a dystopian world where music has been banned for centuries and there's an underground resistance trying to bring it back to create the one note to save all humanity. Weird;y the visuals for much of this probably would have looked great in a film, though creating the ultimate music of the spheres will always hit the Bill & Ted problem of playing the ultimate song that clearly isn't. Lifehouse has already had a number of iterations - radio play version in a box set reissue - so all the narrative problems here are set in stone. And there are some decisions made here which feel very post-facto, in particular the line of despotic leaders Jumbo 1-7 have clearly been retooled to reflect Thatcher. Its good looking and interesting but if you tried to do an original comic with this plot you'd never get funding.

[Ira Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pete Townshend’s Life House is finally coming to light, more than 50 years after he first conceived the idea of a sci-fi rock opera as a follow up to Tommy. Ultimately abandoned, some of the songs were used in Who’s Next and also his first solo album. Who’s Next has now been reissued with a slew of demos from Life House Chronicles, and a graphic novel of Life House is to be published December 19, 2023.

The Who have always been in my musical pantheon. While Townshend’s music has, for me, withstood the test of time, the Life House concept, as portrayed in the forthcoming novel, has not. It’s yet another dystopian setting, this one in a Matrix type environment (I give him credit for that idea). Music has been banned, and of course there are underground revolutionaries seeking to bring it back and cause the downfall of the repressive regime. His belief that music holds a special power in our lives has always resonated with me, but the way this idea is expressed in the book just made me want to cringe. The writing was sophomoric and the artwork, while at times stunning, was pedestrian for the most part.

This was, for this fan of The Who and of Townshend’s, a huge disappointment.

My thanks to Netgalley and Image Comics for providing an advance copy of Life House.

[Dan Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Townshend's vision is intriguing even though it's premise is a bit silly. It's a piece that positions music and the "One Note" into the ultimate savior of mankind against itself - a sort of "This Machine Kills Fascists" sticker on a guitar amplified to 11 (as it were). There is a humor to it that nicely dilutes the heavy-handedness of the concept. It makes you wonder how a graphic novel interpretation of "Tommy" or "Quadrophenia" would have worked - a music-less medium for a parable about the power of music rings a bit dry, but it is still thought-provoking. There is a prescient foreseeing of the Internet as a mind-control force which is particularly compelling. There is also some "woke" aspect with the illustrations, as the central characters are more diverse (gender-swapped and race-swapped) from Townshend's original character sketches. That, in and of itself, is not an issue, but it does make you wonder how much of Townshend's original vision for the story comes through in this treatment and how much may have been changed or amended (either by outside forces or Townshend himself, decades removed from writing the plot).

[Jasmine Sierra · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received an eARC from Image Comics via NetGalley.

An eco post-apocalyptic dystopian 200 years into Britain’s fascist regime who has banned all music. Citizens of London are tethered day in day out to the government’s dreamy technology. This story follows fight of the underground resistance group and the Londoners’ plight under the fever dream of the regime. Life House has a classic vintage sci-fi feel, quintessentially British characters and, of course, jam packed with Who Easter eggs. The art is wonderful and this would make a fantastical animation. There’s a lot of fascinating parallels to today’s world and I cannot wait to see what the vinyl sized printing of this comic looks like when it releases!

[Dylan Zucati · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's fine. I think it's supposed to be set after Tommy, but if you can make sense of that, you're a better Who fan than I.

The visuals were phenomenal and I loved how atmospheric they got. I just wish someone other than Pete Townshend had written it about something other than how important (his) music is. If you've got a day to kill, it's not a bad way to do it. Just don't expect to have your world rocked by anything revolutionary.

[Lisa Gisèle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received a complimentary copy of this book via Netgalley. Opinions expressed in this review are my own

Life House was exactly what I thought it would be. Semi confusing story plot that makes sense in the end accompanied by amazing illustrations. I enjoyed my time reading this illustrated novel.

[Peggy · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a play.. I would like to see it. I understand it was on BBC.
It is an odd, sad book but with some great ideas that stand out..
and i would love to see the play performed. *(with WHO music)

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[David Biddle · Rating 5 out of 5]

More people need to read this sort of dystopian music novel. It's really exquisite. Gave me courage to finish Beyond the Will of God. You can go "out there" with a story if you "in there" with your mind.

[Jeffrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, kind of strange. The writing is pretty good and the art is okay. Not totally sure what happens at the end. I'd rather listen to Who's Next.