[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

[no subject]



Troubled past haunted Townshend
By Richard Woods in London
January 15, 2003


JUST after nine o'clock last Saturday morning, Pete
Townshend answered the door at his three-storey
Georgian home in Richmond Hill, west London, wearing
only a dressing gown.
He was confronted by a tabloid journalist who accused
him of downloading child pornography from the
Internet. 

Townshend, the creative force behind the Who and one
of the grand old men of rock, appeared startled.

His hell-raising days when the Who were regular
tabloid fodder are long gone, even though John
Entwistle, the band's bass player, recently died of a
heart attack after a night of sex and drugs with a
young stripper. 

"I am not a pedophile," was his response. "I think
pedophilia is appalling." 

But he did admit he had paid to look at a child
pornography website: "I have been involved in a
campaign against pedophilia on the Internet but it
fizzled out." 

By Monday night the star had been arrested under the
Child Protection Act, 1978. He has since been released
on bail. 

The shadows of Townshend's disturbed sexual past first
came to public attention in Tommy, his rock musical,
more than 30 years ago.

The son of a saxophone player and singer, he was sent
away from home when he was about six to live with his
grandmother in Broadstairs after his parents
temporarily separated. 

The grandmother, an eccentric who had an affair with a
wealthy industrialist, he once recalled, used to walk
about naked apart from her fur coat. 

"The bizarre thing is that my parents felt if they
sent me to live with this woman it would concentrate
her mind," Townshend told one interviewer. 

On Saturday, as suspicion crowded in on him, Townshend
made a second statement: "I believe I was sexually
abused between the age of five and 6 1/2 when in the
care of my maternal grandmother, who was mentally ill
at the time." 

Whatever happened to him as a boy, he returned to his
parents and, when he was 12, along came two brothers,
on whom he doted. 

His great collaborator in the Who, Roger Daltrey, was
among those with whom Townshend had a mixed
relationship. As Townshend said in an interview with
Playboy in the 1990s: "I probably shouldn't talk about
this, but I'm on good enough ground now with Roger to
address it. He used to be the worst bully, terrorising
other kids. He was a tough guy at school, pushy,
always using it to get his way. In the band he used to
get what he wanted." 

The band burst into the big time with the single I
Can't Explain, which made the top 10 in 1965. More
hits came in 1969 with the rock opera Tommy, filmed by
Ken Russell, and again in 1973 with Quadrophenia, both
composed mainly by Townshend. 

Tommy, the story of a deaf, dumb and blind child, has
echoes of troubled childhood. Among its characters is
a bully called Cousin Kevin  and Townshend once
admitted he was driven by a vengeance that ties itself
to the kind of abuse children suffer at each other's
hands. 

The darkest and most menacing character in the rock
opera was Uncle Ernie, who sexually preyed on Tommy.
His song, Fiddle About, written by Entwistle, was the
first graphic treatment of child abuse in modern
popular music: "I'm your wicked Uncle Ernie/ I'm glad
you won't see or hear me/ as I fiddle about. Your
mother left me here to mind you/ Now I'm doing what I
want to/ Fiddling about/ Fiddling about." 

For the Who, success seemed assured. But the
hard-drinking, hotel-smashing lifestyle took its toll.
Keith Moon, the band's drummer, died at 31 and
Townshend became an alcoholic. 

In the early '80s he quit drinking and embarked on a
solo career. In 1983 he became an associate editor at
the publisher Faber & Faber. He seemed to have entered
a period of stability. After some early homosexual
experiments  two conscious, one unconscious,
according to Townshend, though he admits not being
able to remember much about it all because he was
"completely smashed out of my head"  he married Karen
Astley in 1968. They had one son and two daughters. 

Beneath the rich-man-of-rock's family life, however,
troubled passions and pressures seemed to inform his
work. His follow-up to Tommy was Lifehouse, a
multimedia concept that envisaged a dystopian
technological future. 

Townshend seemed to refer to the project on Saturday,
saying: "I predicted years ago that what has become
the Internet would be used to subvert, pervert and
destroy the lives of decent people." 

Though his ambitions for Lifehouse failed, other
schemes followed. In the early '90s he produced a
concept album about an ageing rock star who is accused
of sexually exploiting a young fan called Rosalind. 

In 1993 he had success with a Broadway version of
Tommy, but his production of a musical of Ted Hughes's
The Iron Man bombed and he hit the drink again. His
wife confined him to the garden flat of their home and
gradually he recovered. He finally parted from his
wife in about 1999 and he has since been in a
relationship with 28-year-old Rachel Fuller. 

His estranged wife, Karen, has dismissed claims that
he is a pedophile as ridiculous, saying: "You know it
won't be him." His daughter Emma says: "I am just
hoping it will all blow over. He's a funny one  but
in a good way. I am lucky to have him." 

Townshend has said he welcomes the police
investigation because he wishes to clear his name. The
Sunday Times


=====
-Brian in Atlanta
The Who This Month!
http://www.thewhothismonth.com
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com