Who I Am by Pete Townshend: review It's not that he has led an uninteresting life - far from it. His father, who had been a Blackshirt, played saxophone and clarinet in a swing band called the Squadronaires, a style of music which young Pete, who was born in 1945, would help to blow away. At Ealing Art College he joined Roger Daltrey's band the Detours, which by 1964 evolved into The Who. He became rich and famous, travelled everywhere, met everyone, and his story is, as one might have hoped, full of sex and drugs and industrial quantities of rock-and-roll. His band mates, and all the many interesting figures in his life, are oddly insubstantial. One has no sense of them as actual people, merely as bit players in the story of a chippy, self-pitying and humourless bore. The contrast with Keith Richards's brilliant Life could hardly be greater. Incidentally, while Keef claims that Mick Jagger has "a tiny todger," Townshend recalls it as "long and plump." As early as 1970 he apparently foresaw the internet - "virtual experience, piped in through digital technology" - and in 1991 he wrote a fictional scenario in which a "rock star's redemption from isolation was triggered by an investigative journalist who intercepted his email and set him up to look like a paedophile." Which raises another difficulty. On a street in Teddington in 1995 Townshend met "a remarkable young man" called Oleg, who had grown up in a Russian orphanage where children were sexually abused, as Townshend himself had been, aged six, by a creepy "uncle" - the inspiration for the "wicked Uncle Ernie" in his rock opera Tommy. In 1998, in an attempt to get in touch with Oleg, he typed the words "Russian orphanages boys donations" into an internet search engine, clicked on one of the results, and saw some appalling images: "Like most men I had used the primitive internet of the time to look at pornography ... but I had never seen anything like this." The next year, "with a clear mind and serious mission," he set about investigating child pornography on the internet. Wishing "to speak about the unspeakable ... from the position of someone who had suffered abuse," and seeking to expose the complicity of the banks in that vile business, he visited a site which said "Click here for child-porn," and used his Barclaycard to pay $7, which he "immediately cancelled." One day in 2003 Townshend found himself - albeit unnamed - on the front page of The Daily Mail, and his house surrounded by reporters. Arrested, and shown a cheque he had written for the relevant Barclaycard bill, he was offered a choice: accept a caution and be entered on the sex offenders" register, or go to court. After waiting months for his computers to be scanned - they were clean - he was "utterly exhausted," and even though if he told the truth in court "it might do some good for the cause I still longed to shout about from the rooftops, I didn't think I would survive it." Hmm, yes, well. He has had to accept that he's unlikely to be offered a knighthood, and I doubt if Who I Am will persuade the Honours Committee to relent. Who I Am by Pete Townshend 538pp, HarperCollins, t £18 (PLUS £1.35p&p) Buy now from Telegraph Books (RRP £20, ebook £9.99) þþ