Finally, the Beak has exposed himself. With the alter ego Moon-clown dead and the Who alive and running at a healthy commercial clip, Townshend has at last constructed an album [Empty Glass] in tune with the lights which only he sees. Here he comes, then, with Wagner and the Sex Pistols and his synthesizer in his pocket and a lot on his mind.

Poor Pete. He doesn't have the sly loneliness of a Ray Davies or the leather eye of a Jagger or McCartney's mental flab; still spare and sparky and hardly even dazed by his early middle age, he just has his great intelligence, his rampaging doubts, his extreme intensity and his Remy Martin Cognac. This last item, his lubricant these past few years, stimulates the doubly schizophrenic mental state of quadrophenia while it also forces the poetic powers; a very spiritual chap, Pete frets and worries...