Description
Label: Virgin – TCV 2592
Format: Cassette
Country: UK
Released: 1989
Genre: Rock, Pop, Stage & Screen
Style: Pop Rock, Musical
All songs written by Pete Townshend except where noted.
“I Won’t Run Any More” – 4:51 Vocals by Pete Townshend with Deborah Conway
“Over the Top” – 3:31 Vocals by John Lee Hooker
“Man Machines” – 0:42 Vocals by Simon Townshend
“Dig” – 4:07 Performed by The Who
“A Friend Is a Friend” – 4:44 Vocals by Pete Townshend
“I Eat Heavy Metal” – 4:01 Vocals by John Lee Hooker
“All Shall Be Well” – 4:02 Vocals by Pete Townshend with Deborah Conway and Chyna
“Was There Life” – 4:19 Vocals by Pete Townshend
“Fast Food” – 4:26 Vocals by Nina Simone
“A Fool Says…” – 2:51 Vocals by Pete Townshend
“Fire” (Arthur Brown, Vincent Crane, Mike Finesilver, Peter Ker) – 3:47 Performed by The Who
“New Life/Reprise” – 6:00 Vocals by Chyna with Pete Townshend and Nicola Emmanuel. Contains small extract of a live performance of “Magic Bus”
The Iron Man: The Musical by Pete Townshend, released in 1989, is an adaptation of Ted Hughes’ story The Iron Man, produced and largely composed and performed by Pete Townshend of The Who. It also stars Roger Daltrey, Deborah Conway, John Lee Hooker, and Nina Simone.
The three then-surviving original members of The Who (Daltrey, John Entwistle, and Townshend) performed as a group in two songs, “Dig” and “Fire”, although the latter was a cover of The Crazy World of Arthur Brown’s hit. (The Who would later perform “Dig” live during their 1989 reunion tour.)
“A Friend Is a Friend” and “I Won’t Run Anymore” were commercially released as singles; “Fire” was issued as a promo-only single in the United States.
A stage version was mounted at the Young Vic theatre in London in 1993. On the strength of this, Warner Bros. optioned the story for a movie which, with a very different adaptation of the story, became The Iron Giant; Townshend received an Executive Producer credit
Characters
Hogarth: Pete Townshend
The Vixen: Deborah Conway
The Iron Man: John Lee Hooker
The Space Dragon: Nina Simone
Hogarth’s Father: Roger Daltrey
The Crow: Chyna
The Jay: Nicola Emmanuelle
The Frog: Billy Nicholls
The Owl: Simon Townshend
The Badger: Cleveland Watkiss
Released 27 June 1989
Recorded 1986–1989
Studio Eel Pie Studios, London
Genre Rock
Length 45:36
Label Atlantic (US)
Producer Pete Townshend
HOW PETE TOWNSHEND’S ‘IRON MAN’ MUSICAL LED TO ANOTHER WHO REUNION
“I’ve always been very comfortable with the idea of pretentiousness,” he told the Associated Press. “It seems to me that’s what art most aggressively is about.”
Inspiration for this latest project came in the ’80s when Townshend was working as an editor at the publishing house Faber and Faber. He became acquainted with British poet laureate Ted Hughes, who wrote The Iron Man. Townshend had been entranced with the teen novel since the mid-‘70s.
The story focuses on a giant made entirely of iron that appears in a bucolic English town, where he eats farm equipment, angers the townsfolk, becomes friends with a young boy and battles a space dragon. But it also tackled very complex themes to which Townshend was attracted.
“Ted’s book connected with me at many levels,” Townshend said in his book, Who I Am. “It was a post-war book, attending to the futility of the nuclear age: when a single bomb can wipe out an entire country. […] By putting a young boy at the center of his tale, I was always working with the system I knew best: The problems of growing into manhood at such a time.”
After meeting Hughes, and expressing his interest in developing his story into a musical, Townshend started roughing out lyrics and music for “I Eat Heavy Metal,” “A Friend Is a Friend,” “Over the Top,” and even “Fake It” – which would end up on his 1993 solo album, Psychoderelict.
News that Townshend was working on a musical resurrected hopes that the Who might reform. Townshend knew better, though: “The music I’d composed so far was definitely not suitable for the Who, and I knew Roger [Daltrey] would hate it.”
Townshend mostly stuck to his original idea of having a variety of voices during these sessions, ignoring suggestions of the band’s manager Bill Curbishley. His old band only regrouped to record a cover of the Crazy World of Arthur Brown’s “Fire” and an original called “Dig,” the most Who-like song on the record with vocal phrasing that fit with Daltrey’s singing style.
Also, in a bit of casting genius, John Lee Hooker was the voice of the Iron Man, deftly handling lyrics like: “I eat heavy metal and gargle premium gas / I drink heavy water and nitro-demitasse / I eat heavy metal and chew up a limousine / I munch barbed wire in my submarine.”
![LOST PROPHETS: Thefakesoundofprogress CD [Gold album in the UK, Nu Metal success]](https://yperano.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/18024-LOST-PROPHETS-Thefakesoundofprogress-CD-Gold-album-in-the-UK-Nu-Metal-success.jpg)
![LOVE.45: Larger Than Life CD [Alternative, Pop, Rock, hard rock + Elvis Presley cover] ..](https://yperano.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/18110-LOVE.45-Larger-Than-Life-CD-Alternative-Pop-Rock-hard-rock-Elvis-Presley-cover.jpg)
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.