‘Pete Townshend had us running around spinning the speakers' — State of Sound

THE STATE OF SOUND INTERVIEW

‘Pete Townshend had us running around spinning the speakers’

On the release of the Bookshop Bands’ new EP Oz Sucks, Ben Please talks about the creative chaos of working with Pete Townshend.

21 February 2026

Left to right: Beth Porter, Pete Townshend and Ben Please. Photo: Martin Tompkins

David Rea: How did your collaboration with Pete Townshend come about?

Ben Please: Beth had been doing some recording in one of Pete Townshend’s studios, and she and I wanted to write some songs but we didn't have anywhere to stay which would be conducive. So I rather cheekily asked Pete Townshend if it might be possible to stay at the studio and he said, ‘Yeah, that's absolutely fine. Go for it. Leave the key where it was’. So we stayed there and we wrote these songs at his studio. And then I left a little box of Bookshop Band CDs to say thank you for letting us stay.

Anyway, about a month later he emailed saying thanks for the CDs. And then he said, ‘If you ever want to come back, if you're on tour and you need somewhere to stay, you know where the key is’. That was really lovely. And then I cheekily replied, ‘That's really kind, Pete. When we come back, would it be possible to borrow the studio and do some recording?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, of course, go for it’. And then about a week before we arrived, he sent another email saying: ‘Let's just do an album together’.

During the subsequent sessions with Pete Townshend, you recorded what became your 2024 studio album Emerge Return, and the songs for your new EP Oz Sucks, released on 20 February. What was it like recording those songs with Pete?

Pete particularly likes how Beth and I sound as a band. So the recordings would always start off with Beth and me sitting down with lots of mics all around us, and we’d perform a song, basically recording our bits live. And he'd capture that in this sort of wonderful, very sort of expensive 1970s studio kind of way, with all his lovely mics and everything. I always feel our live sound is better than our recorded sound. The music we've done with Pete is effectively live albums, but with that extra element that he was adding.

“Pete Townshend would fire up one of his organs, which might take an hour to set up and record, and then very quickly he'd be like, ‘No, that's not adding anything’.”

So after Beth and I had recorded our take of the song (we only did maybe three takes maximum), we'd pick one and then sit back and have a think about what we wanted. Pete was very particular; he didn't want to put things on for the sake of it. To use the book analogy, he wanted to put little chapter markers in that would add a bit of interest as the songs go along — bringing in a different instrument, or filling out a particular section. So he took a very minimal approach that was very purposeful. I think he wanted to retain the sound of what Beth and I have, but add a little bit of the magic that he's really good at.

So Pete would fire up one of his organs or something else, which might take an hour to set up and record, and then very quickly he'd be like, ‘No, that's not adding anything’. And then sometimes he'd be like, ‘Yeah, this is it, this is it’. At one point he got a sound from a synthesiser, and then had us running around spinning the speakers hanging from the ceiling, just to sort of scatter that sound around the room.

It sounds like you worked together really well, despite the fact that on paper you and Pete appear to be very different artists.

You know, The Bookshop Band obviously have a sound; we're defined a lot by what we sound like and what instruments we play. And that's partly defined by what we can carry into a bookshop to play. So it is very acoustic and quite gentle. So it feels a long way away from the sort of music Pete does, but actually I think our musical tastes are the same. Genres and styles of music are completely irrelevant to what I like. It's all about whether I like the songs; it's about the actual moment in question. That's the important thing.

“So while Pete Townshend was recording us, he was talking to Joe Boyd: ‘I've got this band that remind me of The Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention, and I would like to record them in a similar kind of way’.”

I understand Pete Townshend was in touch with Joe Boyd during the recording of Emerge Return, and the album was mixed by John Wood, the engineer who worked with Fairport Convention and Nick Drake.

Yeah, we reminded Pete of Sandy Denny (Beth sounds a bit like Sandy Denny), The Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention. So when he was recording us, he was talking to Joe Boyd. He said, ‘I've got this band that remind me of The Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention, and I would like to record them in a similar kind of way’. So he was doing things under the advice of Joe Boyd about how to recreate that kind of session. And then when it came to mixing the album, we got John Wood to come in and do the actual mixes, trying to create that similarity to the extreme.

The second part of our interview with Ben, in which he talks about the Oz magazine obscenity trial which inspired The Bookshop Band’s new EP, will be published on 28 February, 2026.