Pete Townshend working on new musical and Who album

The Who's guitarist has announced he is writing a rock opera to rival Tommy and Quadrophenia starring, er, an ageing pub-rocker named Walter
Pete Townshend of the Who
The Who's Pete Townshend ... 'I want to take on ageing using angry rock'n'roll'. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

Pete Townshend has announced plans for a new musical, songs from which will appear on a new album by the Who. Forget mods, rockers and pinball wizards – the production, Floss, concerns the angst of the ageing Baby Boomer generation.

"I am writing a new musical," Townshend blogged. "Floss is an ambitious new project for me, in the style of Tommy and Quadrophenia. In this case the songs are interspersed with surround-sound 'soundscapes' featuring complex sound effects and musical montages."

Townshend said the album is designed as an outdoor "son et lumière piece", to be debuted in 2011. He is in talks with producers in New York but hopes to release some of the musical's more "conventional" songs on a new Who album next year.

The musical tells the story of Walter, a pub-rock musician, who hits it big when one of his songs appears in a car advert. Suddenly wealthy, Walter becomes a "house-husband" as his wife, Floss, takes up horse riding. "When [Walter] tries to return to music after a 15-year hiatus," Townshend wrote, "he finds that what he hears and what he composes evoke the ecologically rooted, apocalyptic mindset of his generation. Shaken by this and torn by personal difficulties, he and Floss become estranged."

Townshend described the piece as a sort of response to My Generation, the 1965 hit he calls "the most explicitly ageist song in rock". "At 64," he wrote, "I now want to take on ageing and mortality, using the powerfully angry context of rock'n'roll."

The guitarist's announcement comes as a pleasant surprise after a year and a half of depressing interviews in which Townshend said things like "I am no longer a member of a band called the Who". Singer Roger Daltrey made similar comments, saying, "I think [the Who] have done enough already. It would be great to have something new, but it doesn't really matter." The Who's last album was 2006's Endless Wire.

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