guitar and a movie screen. Then the promoter, Harvey Goldsmith, told me half a million people were coming and I said, 'I'm scared, I don't think I can do it.'

Hence, another Who reunion.

Meanwhile, "Lifehouse" was never far from his thoughts. Significantly, his 1993 solo album, "PsychoDerelict," was about an old star revisiting a failed project from his youth.

What's more, he was resolving most of the problems that had perhaps hamstrung his attempts to complete his most difficult project. Like many a middle-aged man of the therapy generation, he worked on sorting out confusion about his relationship with his late father, Cliff, a big-band sax player often absent during his childhood.

"I think the creative process requires that you should be, not bad in a rock 'n' roll cliché way, but disturbed in a way and doing something out there to find out who you are," he says.

"What's happened to me recently is not that I've had any revelations or discovered who I am, I've just had a long period of acceptance, which is partly to do with giving up booze and finally realizing that I used to drink because it fixed something that was wrong with me—which was a feeling of being unable to fit in, unable to value myself.

"So now, instead of avoiding specifics—you know, let's keep it [expletive] abstract!—I tend to be writing songs about whether I love life, or whether I love God, or whether I love my girlfriend, or whether I love me, or whether I love anybody at all."

However it may fit his self-analysis, this new state of mind enabled him, at last, to return to "Lifehouse."

"It inspired me and continues to inspire me," is his simple explanation, confirmed this year by the appearance of the six-CD "Lifehouse Chronicles" (1971 demos, new recordings, orchestral versions, a BBC radio play). While the magnum opus can be ordered only via the Web, a single-CD edition, "Lifehouse Elements," was released in U.S. record stores last week by Redline Entertainment—just four days after his 55th birthday.

So at last he has translated his one great failure into achievement. He can afford to bask a little, sit back and reflect on the constant, paradoxical gift he has exercised on behalf of the Who's and his own audience. As he writes in the booklet accompanying "Lifehouse Chronicles": "What I was best at putting into words for them was the frustration that they could not put anything into words."

Phil Sutcliffe is a London-based writer and a contributing editor to Q magazine.