[Bev]

He puts it down to “White Knight Syndrome,” which is apparently brought on by being too eager to help others. It was, says Pete, his keenness to help counter the child pornography trade that made him give his credit card details to a supplier of such material.

Those who believed his previous explanation that he was “researching” child abuse will doubtless believe this one, too, while those who don’t are likely to remain skeptical. The book will probably sell well, and Townshend, who was put on the sex offenders’ register for five years, will continue as one of the more intriguing figures in the rock cosmos.

He tends to live above the tat of his trade, and the interviews he gives are laced with references to his taste and erudition — the Francis Bacons on the walls of his grand house on Richmond Hill, the literary apercus that trip effortlessly from his lips, the science documentaries beaming from his laptop.

From one of these interviews came the telling observation: “He is arguably the first rock star Freud would have loved.”

And here might lie the key to everything. In I Can’t Explain, which The Who recorded in 1964, Townshend writes: “I’m getting funny dreams again and again / I know what it means / But I can’t explain.”

That Townshend is a troubled soul is no secret. And if it was, his whole oeuvre blows it. Before The Who, pop songs tended to deal in quick-burst declarations of love, happiness and heartbreak. Townshend took the genre into the realms of trauma and incomprehension.

He has spoken of being “psychologically triggered,” possibly by the experience of abuse when he was young.

“I had the sense that there was some stuff in my childhood that was difficult and strange,” he has said, “but I couldn’t remember it. I’d spoken to a few therapists, who said: ‘If you’d been abused you would remember it — you wouldn’t have blacked it out,’ although one did say, ‘What you could have blacked out is some abuse you enjoyed.’ ”

He was born in west London in May 1945, a week after the end of the Second World War. Pete’s parents were showbiz types — his father, Cliff, played sax, and his mother, Betty, was a singer. His early years were “almost paradise,” he recalls, but everything changed for the worse when he was six.

Betty was having an affair, his parents’ domestic life was in turmoil, and Townshend was sent to live with his grandmother in Westgate-on-Sea, Kent. He soon discovered she was no ordinary, kindly granny.

“She turned out to be clinically insane and very abusive,” he says, “this loon grandmother who walked around naked under her fur coat and tried to s— bus conductors.”

Somewhere in this mix was an “uncle” — later the model for the sinister Uncle Ernie in Tommy — who Townshend suspects may have abused him.

By the time he returned to London, Townshend had discovered music. His mad granny had, at least, given him a cheap guitar and on it he tried to out-strum the likes of John Lee Hooker and Bo Diddley.

At Ealing Art College, he formed a band with John Entwistle. In 1964, they were joined by an old schoolmate, Roger Daltrey, and a wild-eyed drummer from Wembley called Keith Moon. The Who were born.

The band was instantly different. For a start it was resoundingly British. The Rolling Stones took their cues from American R&B, while the Beatles took them from everywhere, but The Who took theirs from the parka-wearing, scooter-riding, up-for-aggro mods, who at the time were the most prominent British youth-rebellion oddity.

Townshend was the original Modfather and the Union flag was the band’s motif.

But with Townshend at the productive helm, their music expanded into previously untrodden areas, such as rock operas, and in that sense fulfilled Townshend’s dream of steering pop into the cultural mainstream.

Like most of the survivors of rock’s imperial age, The Who (though only Townshend and Daltry are left) can’t quite understand how they are still going, yet they show no inclination to quit; in November, the pair take their 1973 opus Quadrophenia on a 36-venue tour of North America.

It has to end sometime, though, and that may be why, before he takes off, Townshend is keen to clear up a few misunderstandings.

Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/entertainment/Pete+Townshend+tries+clear+child+porn+misunderstanding/7324956/story.html