He came from a musical family: his father, Cliff Townshend, was a professional alto saxophonist in the Royal Air Force's dance band the Squadronaires and his mother, Betty (née Dennis), was a singer with the Sidney Torch and Les Douglass Orchestras.

The two split when Townshend was a toddler and he was sent to live with his maternal grandmother Emma Dennis, whom Pete later described as "clinically insane", later citing this experience as having unknowingly influenced the plot of Tommy.

[10] The two-year separation ended when Cliff and Betty purchased a house together on Woodgrange Avenue in middle-class Acton, and the young Pete was happily reunited with his parents.

After bringing out one failed single ("I'm the Face/Zoot Suit"), they dropped Meaden and were signed on by two new managers, Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert, who had paired up with the intention of finding new talent and creating a documentary about them.

[38] However, it was the release of the Who's third single, "My Generation", in November that, according to Who biographer Mark Wilkerson, "cemented their reputation as a hard-nosed band who reflected the feelings of thousands of pissed-off adolescents at the time.

It became a commercial smash, reaching number one in the UK, and spawned two successful hit singles, "Baba O'Riley" and "Won't Get Fooled Again", that featured pioneering use of the synthesizer.

In 1979 Townshend produced and performed guitar on the novelty single "Peppermint Lump" by Angie on Stiff Records, featuring 11-year-old Angela Porter on lead vocals.

Through the rest of the 1980s and early 1990s Townshend would again experiment with the rock opera and related formats, releasing several story-based albums including White City: A Novel (1985), The Iron Man: A Musical (1989), and Psychoderelict (1993).

Townshend also got the chance to play with his hero Hank Marvin for Paul McCartney's "Rockestra" sessions, along with other rock musicians such as David Gilmour, John Bonham, and Ronnie Lane.

A production described as a Townshend rock opera and titled The Boy Who Heard Music debuted as part of Vassar College's Powerhouse Summer Theater program in July 2007.

The Who performed at the Super Bowl XLIV half-time show on 7 February 2010, playing a medley of songs that included "Pinball Wizard", "Who Are You", "Baba O'Riley", "See Me, Feel Me", and "Won't Get Fooled Again".

[119] In the early days with the Who, Townshend played an Emile Grimshaw SS De Luxe and 6-string and 12-string Rickenbacker semi-hollow electric guitars primarily (particularly the Rose-Morris UK-imported models with special f-holes).

When the excited audience responded enthusiastically after he accidentally broke the head off his guitar on a low ceiling during a concert at the Railway Hotel pub in Wealdstone, west London, he incorporated the eventual smashing of his instrument into the band's performances.

Townshend also used a Gibson EDS-1275 double-neck very briefly circa late 1967, and both a Harmony Sovereign H1270[126] and a Fender Electric XII for the studio sessions for Tommy for the 12-string guitar parts.

Townshend has written several scripts spanning the breadth of his career, including numerous drafts of his elusive Lifehouse project, the last of which, co-written with radio playwright Jeff Young, was published in 1999.

Several of Townshend's essays have been posted online, including "Meher Baba—The Silent Master: My Own Silence" in 2001, and "A Different Bomb", an indictment of the child pornography industry, the following year.

At about this time, Townshend, who had been searching the past two years for a basis for a rock opera, created a story inspired by the teachings of Baba and other writings and expressing the enlightenment he believed that he had received from them, which ultimately became Tommy.

[147] In a 1989 interview with radio host Timothy White, Townshend apparently acknowledged his bisexuality, referencing the song "Rough Boys" on his 1980 studio album Empty Glass.

[150] Townshend accepted a caution from the Metropolitan Police (the Met) as part of Operation Ore, a major investigation on child sexual abuse images conducted in 2002–2003.

Townshend was on a sex offenders register for five years, beginning in 2003, after admitting he had used his credit card to access a child sexual abuse images website.

[151][152] Townshend said he accessed the images as research in a campaign against child sexual abuse[153]—specifically, to prove that British banks were complicit in channelling the profits from paedophile rings.

[citation needed] Townshend wrote in a 1977 Rolling Stone article: For a few years, I had toyed with the idea of opening a London house dedicated to Meher Baba.

[citation needed] Townshend performed at a 1995 benefit organised by Paul Simon at Madison Square Garden's Paramount Theatre for the Children's Health Fund.

[citation needed] As a member of the Who, Townshend has also performed a series of concerts, beginning in 2000 to benefit the Teenage Cancer Trust in the UK, which raised several million pounds.

[163] On 4 November 2011, Roger Daltrey and Townshend launched the Daltrey/Townshend Teen and Young Adult Cancer Program at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, to be funded by the Who's charity Who Cares.

In Britain, the facilities are very, very, very lean indeed ... although we have a national health service, a free medical system, it does nothing particularly for class A drug addicts – cocaine abusers, heroin abusers ... we're making a lot of progress ... the British government embarked on an anti-heroin campaign with advertising, and I was co-opted by them as a kind of figurehead, and then the various other people co-opted me into their own campaigns, but my main work is raising money to try and open a large clinic.

[166] Further examples of Townshend's drug rehabilitation activism took place in the form of a 1984 benefit concert (incidentally the first live performance of Manchester band the Stone Roses), an article he wrote a few days later for Britain's Mail on Sunday urging better care for the nation's growing number of drug addicts, and the formation of a charitable organisation, Double-O Charities, to raise funds for the causes he'd recently championed.

[citation needed] Townshend also personally sold fund-raising anti-heroin T-shirts at a series of UK Bruce Springsteen concerts and reportedly financed a trip for former Clash drummer Topper Headon to undergo drug rehabilitation treatment.

Townshend's acoustic performances of three of his songs ("Pinball Wizard", "Drowned", and "Won't Get Fooled Again") were subsequently cited as forerunners and inspiration for the "unplugged" phenomenon in the 1990s.

Townshend shares songwriting credit on two songs ("Love on the Air" and "All Lovers Are Deranged") on Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour's 1984 solo album About Face.