Pete Townshend's Lifehouse: one of rock's great 'nearly' projects has finally found its moment

William Faulkner put it best in his novel, Requiem for a Nun, when he wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” For Pete Townshend, for so long the creative force behind the Who, the past never seems to leave him. With good reason. It was Townshend who wrote the band’s legendary and groundbreaking concept album Tommy, Townshend who crafted the band’s only slightly less legendary Quadrophenia, and Townshend who will forever be worshipped as the man who made windmill strokes the ultimate rock and roll cliché.

He is also the man who, in 1970, lovingly created, and then reluctantly discarded one of rock’s greatest nearly projects, Lifehouse, the great abandoned Who sci-fi