Pete Townshend interview: 'We felt complicit in Keith Moon's death'

Pete Townshend of The Who performs onstage on September 15 in New York. Photo / Kevin Mazur /Getty Images

'I've never really liked The Who," announces Pete Townshend. "I'm serious. I think that they undermined the craft, they undermined the ideas, they turned into a heavy, stupid band that could get a bigger reaction smashing a guitar than playing a beautiful solo. I never liked it, I still don't like it."

The 74-year-old guitarist and songwriter may sound emphatic in his condemnation of the band he has led since 1964, but it is more complicated than it seems. This week on Facebook he apologised for comments in a Rolling Stone interview suggesting he was happy his old bandmates, drummer Keith Moon and bassist John Entwistle, were dead.

"Thank God they're gone. Because they were f------ difficult to play with." Moon died of a drug overdose in 1978, aged just 32. Entwistle died of a cocaine-induced heart attack aged 57 in 2002, one night before the start of a US tour.Townshend claimed sensationalist headlines missed the irony in his remarks, noting: "To this day I am angry at Keith and John for dying. Sometimes it shows."

As anyone who has interviewed him might attest, part of the problem is his conversational style. Townshend is a brilliant, highly articulate individual who zigzags from proposition to contradiction, vigorously interrogating different viewpoints with passion and humour, like someone arguing with themselves in search of some core truth or revelation.

There is no doubt that his feelings about The Who are conflicted. "We've seen Elton John and Queen biopics, so what about a Who biopic? Film opens, Keith Moon is throwing a television through a hotel window. The end. That would be good enough for me. Every artist is reduced to a meme. That's ours."

The Who photographed in London in 1965. L-R Pete Townshend, Keith Moon, Roger Daltrey and John Entwistle. Photo / Getty Images

But he will also say: "We lost so much magic when Keith and John died. The chemistry when they played, that was The Who to me. We've had to become something else."

Townshend and Daltrey continued with a brilliant touring band, and yet some part of the guitarist's ambivalence about The Who still relates to his absent colleagues.

"As funny as it was that Keith used to do crazy things that would make us laugh, there was always this sense that he was gonna die young. So we weren't surprised, but we felt that we'd been complicit. And then John, taking incredibly powerful heart medication and doing lines of coke, you know. The Who has been a nightmare. There were fun bits, I suppose. But I was drunk most of the time."

Nevertheless, this leads Townshend into an affectionate digression about Seventies recording sessions.

"We used to keep a bar in a flight case. Where you'd expect to find equipment, you'd open it up and we had draft beer and bottles of brandy. John would be there with his big globe of Remy Martin, Keith would arrive in a pink Rolls-Royce dressed as the Pope, the storytelling was glorious and we'd be laughing for days.

And then we'd start to play, slightly hung-over, and bam! Magic would happen. I might play a phrase and before I'd even finish, John is playing it, he's almost ahead of me. Those years were wearing and terrifying, they really were, but they were also full of great moments where you just go into the zone and your fingers start to play themselves. And that was magical. When they were gone, I lost that. I really miss it."

Next week, The Who will release their 12th album, simply titled WHO. It is fantastic, packed full of big, questioning, philosophical rock songs, sung with power and feeling by frontman Roger Daltrey, and driven by Townshend's complex melodic progressions and dramatic power chords. A copy sits on the table between us in a bar in Chelsea, south-west London, with a snappy cover by the great pop artist Peter Blake. Despite his comments, Townshend is clearly delighted with it.

"I really needed to reconnect with what matters to me, which is creativity, songwriting, the dignity of being a composer."

So he set himself the task of writing new songs for Daltrey to sing. "Our relationship has never been better, never been healthier or more direct. But we are very polarised. He exhorts the whole notion of performing and I hate it. So when I was trying to work out what we had in common, I didn't run out of fingers on one hand. We're old. So I wrote songs about that."

There is a clutch of rip-roaring political anthems alongside offbeat songs addressing spiritual and carnal love. But four belting rockers at the album's heart grapple with the challenges of being an old musical warrior in a changing world: All This Music Must Fade, I Don't Want to Get Wise, Hero Ground Zero and Rockin' in Rage.

"When I joined The Who, Roger Daltrey was a bully, an A---hole and a street fighter, and from that moment I felt safe under his protection. And I love to think about Roger as somebody who can reconnect with his rage and strength and power and defiance as a young man. At our age, we can honour the Dylan Thomas idea to 'rage, rage against the dying of the light'. Think of this as a long, drawn- out deathbed scene."

Surprisingly, The Who almost broke up before making the album. At a meeting in December last year, Daltrey was reluctant to commit.

"So I got up and walked out. And that was the end of The Who." He started to make plans for a solo show before Daltrey capitulated, going on to proclaim this the best Who album since Quadrophenia. Townshend feels validated, yet the question remains why he has persisted with a band he is so conflicted about.

"I ask myself the same question. If I don't like this, why would I do it?" he says. Townshend talks about his role as a family man, breadwinner, friend to band and crew and benefactor to charities.

"People say you don't need the money, but it doesn't hurt to have an incentive." He tells a story about helping a relative pay hospital bills. "When I write that cheque, my heart flies because I feel like I've been graced. So I'm not saying I pay a high price. I find it easy to do what I do, and it seems to have a high function and reason for being."

This leads to a wide-ranging discussion encompassing his journey from art college to becoming one of the godfathers of art rock, and the role The Who played articulating a generational divide. "I think society was in terrible trouble, and we had to draw a line."

Townshend spins bewildering theories about the mass psychological childhood brutalisation of his post-war generation, and how that lies at the root of the world's current political and social problems.

"The millennials say it's your fault, you boomers! They're f------ right. But we had to find some way to cope and that was by living in denial."

He connects his own memories of childhood sexual abuse (which he wrote about in 2012 autobiography Who I Am) to his being cautioned by the police in 2003 after admiting he used his credit card to access a child pornography website. Townshend claimed to have been trying to demonstrate banks were complicit in internet paedophilia, and feels exonerated by the police admission that no pornography was found on his computers.

"It was a f------ f--- up. I mishandled it. It's so strange to have this in your psyche. I know I will go to my deathbed and as I fade away, I will have to wake up that four-year-old boy inside and say 'Sorry, son. I could not fix what happened to you. I can't explain it. But thank you for staying with me.' "

The hour scheduled for our interview stretches closer to three. Townshend has been getting very busy of late. This month, Coronet published his debut novel, The Age of Anxiety, which he plans to turn it into "an opera and an art installation, f--- the pretension!"

He might even write more songs for The Who. "As much as I dismiss it as a brand name, The Who is a pillar around which so much revolves. I've had a few cracks at making art that contributes to society, that can make you look at yourself, not as a reflection but a challenge. Maybe there's time for one more."?

We are still talking as we walk out. "Next year, I'll be 75," he says.

"This is a time of life when the clock speeds up so fast, one year blurs into another. But as long as I'm fit and I can keep my brain alert, I'm hoping that I can use these last few years to accomplish something. The big question is why keep doing this? And the answer is really simple: because I have to."

The Who: Who will be released by Polydor on Dec 6.