I have terrible hearing trouble. I have unwittingly helped to invent and refine a type of music that makes its principal proponents deaf.

Backstage, I get sleepy, and want to curl up and snooze. I never get nervous, whatever the event. I feel quite detached until I walk on stage, and then some gear inside me clicks and off I go like a wind up doll.

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 Who is now a brand, not a band; but it is a brand that is upheld by its audience, not an industry or a cynical moneymaking machine.

Poverty is not something people impose on themselves for want of effort and community organisation. It is constructed by divisive and discriminatory laws, inflexible organisations, acquisitive ideologies of wealth, a deeply rooted class system and policies which serve privilege in the short term and destroy society in the long term.

As a young man, every bone in my body wanted to pick up a machine gun and kill Germans. And yet I had absolutely no reason to do so. Certainly nobody invited me to do the job. But that's what I felt that I was trained to do. Now no part of my upbringing was militaristic.

If it screams truth rather than help, if it commits itself with a courage that it can't be sure it really has, if it stands up and admits that something is wrong, but doesn't insist on blood, then it's rock n' roll.