‘My wife sends me sleep bubbles’: The extraordinary world of Pete Townshend

When most rock stars have trouble sleeping, they fall back on Valium, temazepam, heroin or Jack Daniel’s. But Pete Townshend, guitarist and songwriter for The Who and — we’re pleased to discover — Spectator subscriber, isn’t much like most rock stars. Sober now for three decades, he calls instead on his wife Rachel’s psychic powers.

‘Sometimes,’ he says, ‘when I’m having difficulty sleeping, Rachel — who has some… certainly, some kind of healing powers — will say to me, “Do you want me to send you a sleep bubble?” Now, I often go’ — he mimes squirming like a reluctant child — ‘“No, of course I don’t need you to send me a bloody sleep bubble! I’ll just take more codeine.”’

Not very rock’n’roll, is it? ‘No, it’s not very rock’n’roll. But I go, “Yes, darling, that would be lovely. Thank you.” And my head hits the pillow and I black out. Either she’s hypnotising me or she’s really sending me a sleep bubble, or maybe I’m just cooperating with her eccentricities — I don’t know what — but her sleep bubbles work. So it’s not always that far from home. And in my own world, my own intuition is extraordinary: absolutely extraordinary. And I don’t talk about it very much…’

The question arises because Townshend’s first novel, The Age of Anxiety, which we’re here to discuss, is shot through with ideas of ecstatic and paranormal experience. Its narrator, a dealer in outsider art, hallucinates demons in a bedpost during heroin withdrawal; one of his clients is an old rock star who had a nervous breakdown, lived as a hermit for years and communed with angels; and the main protagonist, the narrator’s godson, is a musician who starts to experience debilitating aural hallucinations, picking up the anxious internal monologues of those around him.

Those are the basis of the 15 or so ‘soundscapes’ — described in something like prose poems in the text — that Townshend builds the story around.