9 Pete Townshend. Psychoderelict.

My Generation, Baba O’Riley, Behind Blue Eyes, Substitute… Pete Townshend’s work for The Who stands high in the pantheon of rock greats. His solo albums started well with 1972’s Who Came First, and peaked with 1980’s Empty Glass but kept coming. Buoyed by the success of his rock operas Quadrophenia and Tommy, Pete decided to push boundaries on this 1993 concept album. His biggest fans call it challenging; his detractors call pretentious drivel. The semi-biographical record centres on a washed-up 60s rock star, Ray High, who can no longer write songs and whose manager teams up with a tabloid music reporter to revive his career via a sex scandal apparently involving 14-year-old superfan Rosalyn.

The result is an unlistenable mess, with dialogue and narration inserted between songs along with snippets of Who classics like Who Are You. New numbers like Now And Then and English Boy are sadly submerged under synthesisers. Track two, Meher Baba M3, is one of three instrumental remixes of Baba O’ Riley featured. English Boy is arguably the best song, although you might reasonably ask why Ray/Pete sings it with an American accent.

In the narrative High’s manager beds the tabloid journalist and works with her to create a scandal. Underage Rosalyn sends Ray pictures of herself posing on her mother’s grave baring her “witch’s teats”. Except Rosalyn doesn’t exist, the pictures are of the journalist who just happened to have dodgy pictures of her 14-year-old self. The manufactured scandal has the unlikely effect of boosting High’s record sales. In Don’t Try To Make Me Real, he sings, ‘Make me of pornography in a paedophile wheel’ – this bad taste nonsense happened just a decade before Townshend’s real-life January 2003 arrest on suspicion of using child pornography – he was cleared four months later). At the death the journalist becomes a rock star herself after releasing the song Flame, a collaboration with High, who had known about the scam all along.

The album tanked, failing to even make the US Top 100 – Empty Glass had gone Top 5. Realising the extent of this artistic folly, Townshend re-released it without the constant interruptions and performed stripped down acoustic versions onstage. He later resurrected its characters on The Who’s 2006 album, Endless Wire. Psychoderelict would be his last solo album but it begat a live tour with actors that made more sense and was received better than the record. Later Townshend blamed rock pseuds in the music press who always wanted to talk about the artistic drive behind pop music, “and before you know it you get seduced; for me that was always a great danger, which is why I frequently disappeared up my own arse.”

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