"I've had a few tags attached to my name," says Pete Townshend, millionaire. "Junkie, reformed junkie, junkie turned Faber and Faber editor." Adding author, poet, solo artist, filmmaker and, once again, newly thrilled father-to-be, Townshend at 44 is quite the renaissance man.

Regarding himself as "someone who tends to dabble about a bit and then get out", he personally prefers the term dilettante.

Townshend's also a guitarist, of course, an ageing rock star with hearing problems, a guitar-smashing legend, a founder member of The Who. It is these qualities he's acting on now.

Before The Who's 25th anniversary this year, there was no band. Keith Moon had died, and after dragging on to an acrimonious tour and listless album, It's Hard, in 1982 Townshend, Roger Daltrey and John Entwistle called it a day.

Seven years on, their 40-date American tour's completed and the three of them are back-slapping for cameras in preparation for tonight's and forthcoming London dates. Why, there's even a smashed guitar lying around

albeit smashed for charity.

It's amazing what anniversaries can do. But Townshend wasn't galvanised into rock and roll action by a wave of nostalgia, a burst of bonhomie. Speaking frankly in a typically circuitous manner over a cup of tea at the Hard Rock Cafe, he analyses a selection of the logical, sensible motives behind his return to the stadium stage.

"Looking back, as you do on anniversaries, I realised I'd become rather preoccupied w bad things and that actually I was proud of the band and what we'd achieved. I realised what a wonderful life I'd had.

"Over and above everything else, I realised I'd done it and stayed alive, come out in one piece, in love and married to the same woman, Karen, and not fallen into one of those tragic showbiz spinoffs.

"It was time to own up and say, 'You are Pete Townshend of The Who and that's not something to be ashamed of, uneasy about …

"Of course when the band stopped work in '82 that's not the way I felt. I felt dirtied, humiliated, locked in. We could have toured the world endlessly, stadium after stadium after stadium. We were really on a high but it was all very empty."

Having finally let go, Townshend found himself adrift in the tempting world of the Arts with the sort of money that opens doors and minimalises the effects of failure.

"I've never been worried about selling records anyway," he says on the subject of his solo musical career. "It's never mattered to me that people might say, 'Pete Townshend? He'll never be as successful as he was with The Who' because I never felt that successful with the

An obsession with words, linguistics, semantics and that sort of stuff

band. It's working that I enjoy."

His book1 an honest and introspective collection of short stories entitled Horse's Neck1 met with critical acclaim. On top of this there's his job at Faber (taken up in 1983) which for someone who admits to having "an obsession with words, linguistics, semantics and that sort of stuff" is obviously ideal.

Townshend consumed a well-documented excess of

drugs and alcohol some years ago. Today the man is very different.

"I remember earlier this year I sat down with Karen and we talked about whether we were going to have more children. We were considering adopting.

"I said to her then, 'I'm 43 years old and I still have difficulty being the one who instigates things.' Then the question came up about getting the band together for this tour and there was the same problem. I dithered."

Townshend then made his decision "let's go" on both counts.

"Fruitful," he says. "I've decided to go on living and not to retire." He is a changed and consolidated man. "I had to be cajoled into the job at Faber but now I want to go back with my ideas after the tour and say, 'Listen! I want to do this, this, this and this.'

"That's the kind of person I want to be in the future," he says wistfully. "It's never too late to change1and in your forties you're still vaguely young … really. You start to get set in your ways when you become truly satisfied with silence."

The new contented Townshend felt no qualms about performing, and anyway, he points out, the pull of The Who transcends (if only temporarily) personal differences. "John and I were at school together, played for the first time probably when we were about 15-16. So when the band gets together now there's a strange chemistry. It's like being with your mum. You don't always like it, but it feels like home."

This discomforting insight notwithstanding, the band1 once the arrogant, snarling leaders of a generation of mods1 still puts up a mean fight. As one critic remarked, "They're not The Who but they're as close as you're going to get."

"Even so," adds Townshend, "I'm surprised at my viciousness on stage. Even on this tour I wasn't angry with anyone else but I was vicious with myself. I actually impaled myself on my guitar … knocked my fingernails off "I actually quite like myself, but I suppose everyone has one part of

band to go back in the studio. I don't want the band to reform. It seems that quite a few people do but," says Townshend, with a slight thump of the fist, "I'm quite insistent on getting exactly what I want."

Pete Townshend, multimedia figure, is just on loan.

The Who begin four nights at Wembley Arena tonight and give two performances of their rock opera Tommy at the Royal Albert Hall on 31 October and 2 November

Pete Townshend: "I've decided to go on living and not to retire." Picture by Oliver Lim