They Are All In Love

This obscure Townsend song is one of my favorites. To me, its about loneliness and looking upon lovers that increase that loneliness. Its also about a guy or girl who is not in the dull mainstream and who doesn't know where he or she fits in the commercial and media worlds. Further still, its about Pete, who has gone past his days as the "original" punk rocker and calls out for the young punks to stay young and "high" because he, Pete, has become a domesticated citizen recycling trash. The reference in the last verse to a "woman in child birth growing ugly in a flash" is not to be taken literally or suggest that a woman who is giving birth is literally ugly. It is a typical Townsend-like metaphor for the swift change in Pete's life from a handsome fashionalbe young rocker to a guy that looks like anyone of us. If you dig this song, please send me an email. I figured out the chords and most of Nicky Hopkins piano solo and play and sing it from time to time.

I think the "recycling trash" bit probably refers to his sometimes ultra-negative estimate of his own work. When the punk movement was breaking into prominence he thought they were the future and he was the past, washed-up, a "prostitute" as he put it. None of that was true, but that was Townshend's view in his more depressive and/or drunk moments.