Pete Townshend is addicted to online shopping.
Pete Townshend loves online shopping
The 79-year-old rocker believes “everybody is an addict” but The Who guitarist doesn’t think being hooked on splurging on Amazon is as damaging as when he was hooked on alcohol and drugs.
Speaking on the ‘What It Takes’ podcast, Pete said: “I go on Amazon and I buy things that I’ve already got. I don’t know why I do that. It’s an encumbrance. I’ve got an electric toothbrush, why did I buy another one?
“I think everybody is an addict, so I don’t blame addiction on anything but the fact I’m a human being.
“So if I have addictions now, and I think I do, although they’re not alcohol and drugs, it’s because I’m a human being. I need dopamine.”
The ‘My Generation’ hitmaker has now been sober for over 30 years and he believes the glorification of drink and drugs when his band were in their prime led to stars – including his bandmates Keith Moon and Jon Entwistle – dying too young.
He said: “Keith, in one show in San Francisco, he took two elephant tranquillisers before he got on stage to perform with us.
“Literally, went one, two, three, four, and collapsed. The idea that it was all a fantastic game…
“I just drank. I had an experience later in life with drugs, I had my little stab at it, but it was a very short period.
“As of today, I haven’t drunk alcohol for nearly 32 years.”
Pete previously claimed taking heroin helped him do “dangerous, radical” things.
Reflecting on the struggles in his relationship with The Who’s manager Kit Lambert when he was writing his infamous ‘lost’ rock opera ‘Life House’ in 1970, he told The Times newspaper: “I’ve used heroin myself and it doesn’t disable you.
“It mostly means you don’t enjoy food or sex, but also that you don’t give a f*** and that can allow you to do dangerous, radical things.
“Kit was in New York, forging a new career for himself. I was noodling about with The Who, trying to make a record to equal ‘Tommy’, and he just wasn’t interested.
“He didn’t like my interest in spirituality, which came after some serious LSD crashes, and he was strangely disdainful of my marriage. I was with this very pretty woman who wore flowery dresses, lived in a house by the river, we had two pretty little daughters . . . and he sneered at it.”
