Who I Am: A Memoir by Pete Townshend - review

In 1967 Pete Townshend heard the voice of God. Confirming his reputation for working in mysterious ways, the deity chose to introduce himself to the Who guitarist at the Rolling Meadows, Illinois branch of Holiday Inn. "Suddenly it became clear that I longed for a transcendent connection with the universe itself, and with its maker," writes Townshend, adding, in a deadpan segue, that the band's drummer Keith Moon had other priorities on that tour. "While I made progress with my search for meaning, Keith was causing havoc with a birthday cake, a car, a swimming pool, a lamp and a young fan's bloody head."

The comical contrast explains what made the Who both one of the biggest bands in the world and one of the most restless. While Moon embraced rock stardom with open arms, Townshend wrestled with it, forever trying to justify himself to the spectre of the avant-garde artist and reliable family man he might have been. Townshend's years of psychotherapy ensure that Who I Am, which he first tried and failed to write in the mid-90s, isn't one of those rock memoirs that puts the what before the why. His past is a puzzle he is sweating to decipher. When a record label boss chides "Your fans don't know who you are any more," Townshend reflects: "Had they ever known? Even now I'm still trying to find out who I am." Or as the hero of the Who's Quadrophenia album has it: "Schizophrenic? I'm bleeding quadrophenic."

In Townshend's mind, the cataclysmic power of the Who's early work was rooted in trauma. At the age of six he was sent to live with his mentally ill grandmother, Denny, "a perfect wicked witch", who, he is convinced, allowed him to be sexually abused by her lovers; he also alludes to giving his mother's lover "the green light". The precise events elude him ("My memory just shut down") but the shards of detail are chilling: an unlocked flat, the "little Hitler moustache" on one male visitor, the beckoning of a car door. In one of disappointingly few insights into his songwriting, he retrospectively interprets his 1966 "mini-opera" medley "A Quick One, While He's Away" as a cryptic account of his time with Denny.

Townshend also believed that his music, informed by his art-school studies, reflected the damage done to a generation born amid post-war rubble and confronted, in adolescence, by the existential terror of the Cuban missile crisis. "As I raised the stuttering guitar above my head, I felt I was holding up the bloodied standard of endless centuries of mindless war." Most of his audience, one suspects, just enjoyed the noise and spectacle.

How many fans of the Who knew or cared that his ritual guitar-smashing was inspired by Gustav Metzger's theory of auto-destructive art? Or that the 1965 song "The Kids Are Alright" was partly informed by Purcell's Gordian Knot Untied? Call him pretentious – he does, happily, call himself that more than once – but it was this highbrow mission that propelled him towards the dizzying ambition of albums such as The Who Sell Out, Tommy and Who's Next. After a fruitless attempt to sell one grand concept to his bandmates he complained to his first wife, Karen: "It's like trying to explain atomic energy to a group of cavemen."

Townshend's unease with certain aspects of rock stardom may have pained him but it kept him relatively stable throughout the band's early years. Between 1967 and 1973 he steered the Who to greatness while spurning drugs and (most of the time) infidelity, and studying the teachings of the Indian mystic Meher Baba. Only later, as he confesses, did he become a cliché. On the Who's 1980 US tour he spent around $40,000 on cocaine and often fell asleep cradling a bottle of brandy. By the following year he was hanging out in New York crackhouses and conversing with the devil. "I was turning into Keith Moon." There were psychological shocks that might explain this downward spiral – Moon's death from a sedative overdose in 1978, or the 11 Who fans who were killed in a crush at a gig in Cincinnati a year later – but Townshend earns the reader's sympathy by refusing to ask for it. His prose is crisp, clear and unflinching.

Most rock memoirs run out of gas once the classic songs dry up and the major crises have been overcome, but Townshend's life after sobering up and splitting the Who in 1982 was never dull. He worked as an acquisitions editor for Faber and pursued several political causes in between sporadic reunions and solo albums. He also suffered from depression, briefly resumed drinking and saw his beleaguered marriage disintegrate. In 2003, he was arrested for accessing child pornography.

Townshend isn't coy about his sexuality. He says he is "probably bisexual", citing his attraction to Mick Jagger ("the only man I've ever seriously wanted to fuck") and a one-off liaison with the journalist Danny Fields. He describes his adulterous pursuit of several younger women in terms that often make him seem seedy and pathetic. But on this subject he is adamant that, as a victim of abuse, he was researching an exposé of the child porn industry. He is either a liar or the victim of a cruelly ironic misunderstanding. The evidence against him consists of a single unprocessed credit-card payment.

That cloud remains, but elsewhere there is sunlight. He has remarried, and his fractious relationship with Roger Daltrey has mellowed. Unlike Moon and the Who's bass-player John Entwistle, he has survived his addictions. He recalls singing the climactic line of "A Quick One, While He's Away" – "You are forgiven!" – while "thrashing at my guitar … frantically forgiving my mother, her lover, my grandmother, her lovers, and most of all myself". Without a guitar in his hands, reaching that cathartic moment proves rather more challenging, but Who I Am is an unusually frank and moving attempt.