The Who star makes cryptic comment about 'the end' after farewell tour unveiling

The Who guitarist Pete Townshend, the mastermind behind anthems My Generation and Substitute, shows no signs of slowing down after marking his milestone 80th birthday
Legendary The Who guitarist Pete Townshend, who wrote the 1960s rock anthem I Hope I Die Before I Get Old, has just turned 80 – but says he feels like a new man.
Or at least part of him does. 'That song wasn't a state of mind – it was a threat!' he laughs. 'I don't feel old – I just got a new knee.' And Townshend reveals that although he's not planning to retire just yet, he admits that The Who's days of going on the road are numbered.
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After 58 years since first touring America, one of the greatest – and loudest bands in rock history – has announced its farewell US tour, aptly titled, The Song Is Over, this summer. 'Whether it's the end of The Who…?' Townsend muses, before adding, 'It's certainly the end of touring in America. I asked Roger if it's the end of touring Europe, and he said. 'We'll have to wait and see'.'
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Speaking to My Cultural Life on Radio 4, Townsend reflects on the dark times in his life that created his wild man of rock persona, trashing guitars on stage and wrecking hotel rooms, but says even at 80, he has an edge.
'I feel like a diamond with a flaw. I am a dangerous f***er,' he reveals. 'I was a proponent of rock and roll as a philosophy. But when I started exploring my inner darkness on stage, my stage persona – smashing guitars and turning it all up – I was very detached and I didn't enjoy doing it.'
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He also acknowledges now that after years of a long-running feud with his 81-year-old bandmate Roger Daltry, the balance of power between them has shifted. 'Roger has said in the past that we would go on touring until we drop dead – but the needle has shifted,' he says. 'It was always me who said that, 'I reserve the right to stop,' and I have stopped twice – once for 11 years when I worked with Faber and Faber as a book editor.
'So I always thought I was holding the cards – but I think Roger holds the cards now." Although Daltry founded the band in 1964 when the pair met at Ealing Art College, Townsend wrote the rock group's huge teenage anthems including My Generation, Substitute and I Can See For Miles.
He admits his co-founder thinks he's pretentious when he says The Who was an art project for him as much as a pop band. 'What was difficult was the other three members didn't (feel that way),' says the father-of-three. 'If Roger and I were sitting together and I was doing an interview now about My Cultural Life, he would spend most of his time laughing.'
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While Townsend planned to be an artist, it was Daltry who asked him to join The Detours – which became The Who. 'Roger sees it as his band to this day – he started it. He had been expelled and came back and asked me to be in his band.
'And that's true, and I'm grateful, but for me, the beginning of my life as a musician and an artist was when I wrote the first song I Can't Explain.' While the band played pubs and weddings, Townsend kept his hobby a secret.
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'I wasn't serious about being in a band,' he admits. 'Roger was lead guitarist – but he wasn't a particularly good player. I was gawky and had a big nose and just strummed.
'But we had a good looking lead singer who the girls liked and we became quite successful. ' The young, confused Townsend was so sure he didn't want to be in a band, he even forecast its demise.
'I wrote myself a manifesto – 'The Who are a band who are chopping away at their own legs'. Then one day I'm driving home in my mum's yellow van and heard my song, I Can't Explain, come on the radio, and I thought, 'My manifesto! I don't want to be in a rock band. No – this is not what I want to do for the rest of my life. But wow – people are listening to this'.'
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By now Daltry was lead vocalist and the line-up included drummer Keith Moon and bassist John Entwistle, and along with guitarist Townsend, released their 1969 rock opera album Tommy to huge critical and commercial acclaim. But a decade later, in true rock and roll style, Keith Moon died, aged 31, in 1978 from an accidental overdose of the prescription drug Hemineverin, prescribed to combat alcoholism.
Then in 2002, bass player John Entwistle's dodgy ticker gave out after the 57-year-old took cocaine in a Las Vegas hotel room. 'The Who is a clumsy machine because we've been missing two members for a long time,' says Townsend. '(Roger and I) are very dependent on each other. We're getting old and we have different needs.
'But if Roger wanted to perform MY music, if I can put it as bluntly as this, I would be honoured. It's not about there being an argument between – we're just accepting our current situation.
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And he adds, 'We've never agreed on very much, but that's not to suggest there's a war on, because there isn't.' Age has finally mellowed the old enmity between him and Daltry, but Townsend says the abuse he suffered as a child created a dark side to his personality.
He was officially cautioned for accessing a website containing images of child abuse in 1999, which he explained was for his autobiography. Born into a musical family right at the end of the war, Townsend first went out on the road with his musician parents aged just 13 months old.
'They were in very popular swing dance bands,' he recalls. 'My first memories are passing out beer bottles to band players on the tour bus.
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'When The Who first started touring in the UK, I knew my way to all of the gigs because I'd done it so many times with my dad.' But his happy childhood came to a sudden end when his mother went on tour and sent him to live with his grandmother in Margate.
'Why my mother sent me to my grandmother who had abandoned her when she was seven, I don't know, but I left my friends and school behind in Acton,' he says sadly.
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'It was just horrible and I don't remember a lot of it – I kind of black it out. She was nuts and abusive and cruel and surrounded by extremely pervy men all the time who interfered with me. It was a really shitty time and in the end somebody reported my grandmother for abusive behaviour.
'My parents saved me – they got back together and eventually I had two brothers,' he says about returning to his home in Acton, West London. 'As far as I was concerned, that was when my childhood began.'
Despite his father being a musician, Townsend says he didn't encourage his son to join a band at school. 'My father didn't think I had any musicality,' he admits. 'My mum was very encouraging. When our band started, she lugged our kit around, helped us get gigs.'
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The rock legend has been open about his lifelong battle with depression and substance abuse, but he has been sober for 40 years now. 'I sometimes wonder if my parents knew I was damaged – I've done all of the things that people do who have fallen into addiction and bad behaviour,' he speculates.
And explains how his 1965 hit My Generation was about him pushing back against his dad. 'I drew the line with My Generation,' he explains. 'Dad's music was his generation – love and romance after the war. We didn't have that reason for being – we needed to reinvent ourselves. Rock and roll was our generation. I was overthrowing my dad's big band generation.'
The Who created some of the most powerful moments in rock and roll history especially when they performed at Woodstock in 1969 – and the hair-raising refrain of Tommy's Feel Me See Me Touch Me played out across the half a million festival goers as the sun rose in the sky.
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They went on to sell-out stadiums around the world, but Townsend felt that by the late 1970s, they'd begun to lose themselves. 'The band had turned into a prog rock outfit. I felt we have to reconnect with our roots – and I wrote Quadrophenia about the Marquee and Shepherd's Bush – where we'd grown up.'
Again, Townsend's creative philosophy behind the 1979 rock concept album which tells the story of a young mod Jimmy set in 1965 was lost on his bandmates. 'The other guys didn't identify themselves with Jimmy at all. They didn't care about the manifesto that was buried in the middle of it.'
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It was the first album Townsend had total control over, but tensions between him and Daltry boiled over. 'It led to the only incident in which Roger and I have actually had a physical fight,' he admits. 'I'd been working all night on stage tapes and was late for rehearsal and we had an argument and I behaved badly and he knocked me out.
'But when I finished it, I thought, 'Wow, you know, they've let me do this'.' Like Tommy, Quadrophenia was adapted for film, and recently has been staged as a mod ballet. Townsend adds, 'Jimmy being vulnerable expressed the universality of what teen boys seem to go through. So it has new relevance.'
The 80-year-old has as much creative energy today as he did 60 years ago, but he says it's time to do new things. 'I'm proud The Who have been able to create a form of music that lasted, and I'm not disowning my past, but I'm driven by the need to be creative. The idea that I could retire and go sailing and stop writing feels like a waste of time.
'I might have five, or 10 or 15 years if I'm really lucky at being able to work with music and art. Nothing is off the map now – I might even do some dancing when I get my other knee done!'

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