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When — also last night — a half-drunk guy started heckling me for playing ‘You Better You Bet,’ which he thought was cheesy. We were screaming at each other angrily, then both started to laugh. The man thing I can understand — must be my Irish blood.”

With the new album and new tour, Townshend has found that his often less-than-friendly relationship with singer Roger Daltrey, the Who’s only other original member, “just gets better. We’ve always respected and loved each other, but have often said we don’t care that we don’t actually always like each other. That is changing now; we do like each other. Maybe this happens because of an increased dependence, but more because we see each other very clearly now.”

Daltrey recently told the New York Times that making “Endless Wire” gave him a sense of closure about the Who. What did Townshend think of the singer’s comment?

“Is he going fishing?” the guitarist responded.

Never the retiring type, he finds performing and recording “quite easy, but writing songs is a conundrum sometimes. I often write songs that sound like they belong in the catalog of Irving Berlin or Cole Porter rather than the Who.”

Right now he’s struggling with a different kind of writing. Having done a stint as an editor at a British book publishing house in the 1980s, he is writing his memoirs, and hopes to publish them before he turns 65 in 2010.

“I am up to 1968, the premiere of ‘Tommy’ at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London before an audience of baying, drunken journalists baying that I was sick,” he explained.

For someone who wrote the classic lyric “hope I die before I get old,” Townshend finds no challenge in aging as a rocker, other than health.

“I’ve never been sick yet, apart from self-inflicted troubles,” he said.

“Aging is rarely graceful I’m afraid — there are so few exceptions. When I look in the mirror, I see a very competent Jewish lawyer. I would trust him with my divorce, not sure about my evening at the arena.”