Pete Townshend‘s Scoop series (comprised of Scoop, Another Scoop, and Scoop 3) features a multitude of demos, outtakes and unreleased material by Townshend and The Who.

For fans of the guitarist and The Who, it provided a rare insight into the recording process of the band’s biggest hits.

In 2002, Townshend gave an interview to Gibson about the set, going even further into the mind of a creative genius and explaining the reason behind the release.

Take a look at some of the excerpts below:

What was the motivation behind releasing the first Scoop CD, back in 1983?

I’m not quite sure what I was up to back then. I know that I was listening to a kind of draft Scoop that Spike [Helen Wilkins, Townshend’s editor and producer] had put together for me during the last Who tour in 1982, so it must have been a project I began to get interested in while The Who were still in their first phase, prior to first breaking up. I think I partly wanted to debunk the myth that my demos were better than The Who versions of my songs. Many demos had been released in various forms at various times, and many were bootlegged. What was clear was that my demos were often just different in some essential way to The Who version.

I also wrote music that The Who would never ordinarily record, and I thought I would like the world to hear that, too. It’s hard to say whether the collection works in either sense. Who fans buy this stuff. They aren’t all ready to indulge my idea of myself as a free spirit, musically speaking, but the collection sold 200,000 double albums. That was a gross of about $3 million. There were no recording costs, and no cash advances from the record company to me over and above what I normally received for my regular solo albums, so everyone was happy.

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