A lot of my audience are in their 50s. But they want me to pretend to continue to be pretending.

Even modern English people are imperious, superior, ridden by class. All of the hypocrisy and the difficulties that are endemic in being British also make it an incredibly fertile place culturally. A brilliant place to live. Sad but true.

Everything that I had done creatively related to two or three incidents that happened to me when I was a child that I'd forgotten. Everything, absolutely everything.

I just could not believe that 30 years later we're still looking at people who are supposed to write little 2-minute pop that when they actually try to do something that's a little bit more they regard it as pretentious.

I think obviously adulthood has changed things. But I think what's actually changed is the times have changed. Now, the suicide bit wasn't evident really in society. It was only evident in show business. It was evident that one of the outcrops of our lifestyle was a kind of nihilism.

It wasn't just about flashing lights and pinball machines blowing up and things like that. It was about using encores, bringing back the good songs and using techniques that I knew about from rock performance.

The problem for me, still today, is that I write purely with one dramatic structure and that is the rite of passage. I'm not really skilled in any other. Rock and roll itself can be described as music to accompany the rite of passage.

The Who in the early years weren't really mods. I was an art student. Roger always calls himself a rocker. Keith was quite a mod-looking kid by today's definition of the word. But John Entwistle was very kind of parochial in the way that he dressed. So we weren't mods but our audience were.

Bob Dylan did the first really long record-Like A Rolling Stone-I think it was four minutes.

But what was interesting about what the Who did is that we took things which were happening in the pop genre and represent them to people so that they see them in a new way. I think the best example is Andy Warhol's work, the image of Marilyn Monroe or the Campbell's soup can.