Pete Townshend pats One Direction fans on the head

To save time with their new single, One Direction simply got some grown-ups to take an old Who song and pretended it was theirs.

When the world pointed out that Best Song Ever is pretty much just Baba O'Riley, One Direction fans reacted with the usual misplaced groupthink, and decided to launch a pre-emptive attack on The Who.

After every blue police phone box had been reduced to a smouldering wreckage, they suddenly realised The Who was a band, and so off they danced to Twitter to circle their wagons and wave their tiny little fists:

We crashed twitcam broke the record leaked a song are you really gonna mess with us?? #DontTouchBestSongEver http://t.co/mGDF0q2jG2

— PerezHiltonLife (@PerezHiltonLife) August 16, 2013

Not entirely clear how being able to "crash twitcam" is going to change the basics of copyright law but good luck with that. I'd love to see it in court:
"So, we have heard from the lawyers for The Who publishers, and their musical experts and precedent. What argument do you have for One Direction?"
"Well, your honour, I have only one very weak argument, but I shall call upon a couple of thousand teenagers to make the same weak argument over and over again in case that changes the facts."

Heartwarmingly, it even turned into a crossover between two sets of fandamentalists:

Into this teen-tinged tag-team Twitter takedown storm stepped Pete Townshend. His statement is masterful:

"No! I like the single. I like One Direction. The chords I used and the chords they used are the same three chords we've all been using in basic pop music since Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran and Chuck Berry made it clear that fancy chords don't mean great music – not always. I'm still writing songs that sound like Baba O'Riley – or I'm trying to!. It's a part of my life and a part of pop's lineage. One Direction are in my business, with a million fans, and I'm happy to think they may have been influenced a little bit by The Who. I'm just relieved they're all not wearing boiler suits and Doc Martens, or Union Jack jackets. The funniest thing is that in Canada this year I met with Randy Bachman once the leader of GUESS WHO who told me that he not only copied Baba O Riley for their hit You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet, but he even called his band after us. Why would I not be happy about this kind of tribute?"

Of course, bringing the Guess Who into the story will mean One Direction fans will be attacking Toys R Us to destroy that face guessing game, but there's always collateral damage.

You'll note that not only does Pete calm the fears that The Who are calling for the song to be banned, but he also does nothing that would prevent his publishers suing One Direction's publishers for a lovely large payday.

And that's the difference between experience and enthusiasm.

The John Peel Lecture: Technology is bad

I'm not sure that a lecture is the best way to memorialise John Peel - Radio One's short-lived Keeping It Peel day of music felt more in keeping than a bloke from a band Peel wouldn't have played for a good two decades standing behind a lectern, talking.

It's even more disappointing that Pete Townshend's debut lecture was little more than yet more banging on of the wailing that the music business has been disrupted by technology; the sort of thing that older musicians were chuntering on about years before Peel's death:

He also argued against unauthorised file-sharing, saying the internet was "destroying copyright as we know it".
"The word 'sharing' surely means giving away something you have earned, or made, or paid for?" he said.

Townshend, clearly, has never shared a joke he heard down the pub, or the name of a great curry house in Bridlington.

He works from the arguable starting point that "copyright as we know it" is a thing that we should weep tears for - and seems to have just completely ignored that alongside the growth of the internet, copyright has changed and grown and still manages to support a fleet of well-paid lawyers and lobbyists.

Still, if Townshend is upset at unlicensed filesharing, he must be delighted that a company like Apple has found a way to actually sell music online, and make money from everyone's labours, right?

No.

"Is there really any good reason why, just because iTunes exists in the wild west internet land of Facebook and Twitter, it can't provide some aspect of these services to the artists whose work it bleeds like a digital vampire, like a digital Northern Rock, for its enormous commission?" he asked.

Apple should employ 20 talent scouts "from the dying record business" to give guidance to new acts and provide financial and marketing support to the best ones, he added.

To be fair, this is a new idea, albeit a potty one. Apple have some sort of moral duty to find work for displaced A&R men? But why only twenty of them? To cover the entire world?

The desperation to try and force the record label model onto digital music is a fallacy of old-school thinking: really, A&R in the sense of coked-up failed drummers travelling as far out as New Cross, trying to grope the lead singers of up-and-coming bands before comparing notes with other A&R men and recommending taking the most conservative route possible is a dying art.

The very digital changes Townshend complains means bands don't need to rely on the dumb luck of an A&R person turning up when they're having a good night, and liking them, and introducing them to a label any more. There isn't the need for that level of intermediaries; artists can go direct to the market and - because the level of investment required to get a recording onto iTunes is much, much lower than that needed to get records into Tescos - they're much more able to self-fund and find their own sales.

It must be scary if a business that you did very well out of has suddenly vanished. It's understandable that you might rail against it. But it's like radio acts suggesting that television broadcast without pictures for a few hours every day. Just because you don't like the new world isn't a good reason to stop it.

Gordon in the morning: More on Mick's manhood

So it turns out that we're still talking about the size of Mick Jagger's cock. Last year, you'll have shut out of your mind, Keith Richards claimed that it was so miniscule, it was no tool at all.

Today, though, Pete Townshend has decided to defend the honorable member:

He said: "I think it's sad that we will only remember Keith's book because of what he said about the size of Mick's genitals. Which, by the way, to use an apt term, is b*******.

"I've seen them and they are not small. And it is not just the balls that are big."

Pete doesn't appear to consider that, perhaps, he happened to see Mick fully deployed while Keith couldn't stir Mick to such heights.

Gordon describes Pete's testimony as "first hand experience". If Mick was that huge, surely he'd have needed a second hand?

Townshend doesn't like the downloads

iTunes? The young folk don't know what they're missing, reckons Pete Townshend;

Although he is quoted as saying that the idea behind companies like iTunes is “brilliant”, he said he prefers to buy music on CD.

"iTunes simply doesn't have heart. It is software attached to a bank, nothing more, nothing less.

“Brilliant, but heartless,”

It's not known if Townshend downloaded any music for research purposes before coming to his decision.

The other option, a piece of plastic that you buy from a store attached to a bank, who then shove more money to another bank on behalf of a multinational conglomerate, is, of course, the very essence of what rock and roll was about.

While we have some sympathy for Pete's argument, if a song requires a physical format to be able to touch you, surely it's not a very good song at all?

The pop museum

There's an interesting piece by Emma Townshend, daughter of Pete, in today's Times, worrying that - because pop memorabilia collections tend to dissipated, the future might not be great for future archivists:

David Hesmondhalgh, Professor of Media and Music Industries at Leeds University, sets out the problem: “Pop music is full of transient, fleeting stuff that's very hard to keep. What you have out there is a lot of fans who are collecting. I'm wondering what happens when this generation of people die: where will all those collections go?”

Landfill, mostly, we guess.

Townshend was inspired by a visit to France:

An article in last month's French Vogue highlights what we're missing. Charlotte Gainsbourg shows us round her father Serge's now-infamous Paris apartment which she plans to open as a museum. Each room feels as if Serge just went out to get his Gauloises: strewn with magazines, guitar leads, tape machines and gold records, they have an extraordinary flavour of the man. The value of the collection as a key to Serge Gainsbourg is inestimable because it hasn't been broken up into saleable items. It can provide an amazing glimpse into his off-the-scale way of life. There's nothing else like it anywhere in the world.

Hmm. The daughter of Pete Townshend suggesting the model to follow might be a daughter of a rock star carving a niche for herself as her father's archivist.

The introduction to the story makes a quite alarming claim:

There's more documented evidence for Handel than for Jimi Hendrix, who lived in the same London house 200 years later

although, it turns out, this isn't quite true:

Sarah Bardwell['s] Mayfair building was the 18th-century home of the composer Handel, but in recent years a blue plaque was put up for Jimi Hendrix, who lived in the top-floor flat during the winter of 1968.

“Yet we have infinitely more documented evidence for Handel, who lived in this house from 1723 to 1759, than we do for Jimi Hendrix,” Bardwell explains.

That would seem to be suggesting not that there's less documentary evidence about Hendrix life than that of Handel, just less at that particular house. Which might be sad, but is less alarming.

Townshend pere explains that a lot of the problem is that rock didn't seek to leave any traces:

My father Pete Townshend of The Who says: “My early manifesto for The Who was that we would destroy everything about us in a very short space of time. It was like an art installation idea, which was that there would be nothing left after 18 months. I'd been indoctrinated at college, firstly by people like Gustav Metzger, saying it was the artist's duty to make their work self-destruct, but on the other hand, by my art-school friends telling me that in ten years' time all information will be on the back of a pin head that you put behind your ear and then everybody will know everything. So it seemed as if there was no need to keep stuff.”

We're not so sure that things are quite as grim as Emma paints it - she's quite disdainful about the Hard Rock style of collecting, but the desire to fill awful burger bars with old guitars and stage costumes has given a value to a lot of material which would otherwise, in all likelihood, have disappeared; there are more collections and holdings than you might expect.

The real problem is knowing what we should be preserving. It's impossible to retain everything - you only have to visit those dingy flats full of piles of newspapers to know where that madness lays. Pete Townshend does:

“Wading through is deeply disturbing and exhausting. It's like moving house. And there's an arrogance, a smugness, to keeping everything, like people who keep every one of their child's drawings.”

So what do you keep? How do you know if, fifty years hence, a ticket to a Hoosiers gig is going to have more value than a Kate Nash set list?

Preserving the music might be seen as being the first priority: Townshend visits the Sound Archive:

One of the few bastions of curatorial care for our popular music is the British Sound Archive at the British Library. “We try to get a copy of everything commercially issued in the UK,” says Andy Linehan, the curator. (And there are shelves and shelves of printed materials, including a collection of the NME dating back to 1926.) “We have voluntary agreements with the major record labels; then a significant part of the job is picking up all the smaller labels, encouraging them to send copies into us. We even try to cover limited editions - we have hundreds of Fierce Panda recordings. Basically - we try, we try, we try.”

A collection of NMEs which dates back 26 years before the first issue is quite impressive. But you've got to love a man whose job involves gathering Fierce Panda records.

Emma suggests that, perhaps, we need a proper national collection on the model of the Lottery funded writer's archives. It's not a bad idea. If only we weren't pissing away all the lottery money on the Olympics.

Townshend: Police aren't Classic

Pete Townshend has been grumbling about the suggestion that the Police are part of the pop pantheon:

“The Police are punk. They’re a punk band,” Townshend reportedly said. “They’re not classic rock. You know, you’ve got the Stones and the Who. Classic rock — finished. It’s all over after that … This is just music. It’s not clasic [sic] anything.”

We can see what he's saying - although a pantheon which consists of two is a little small - but the Police punk? Maybe you could argue that their worthwhile work was New Wave, but... punk?

To be honest, since we've always assumed anything that gets called "classic rock" is a shorthand for "overblown, over-rated and over-stayed", we'd say that the Police are spot on Classic Rock.

Daltrey quits one song in

Last night's Who gig at the Tampa ended somewhat sharply when Roger Daltrey walked off after just onsong. A few moments later, Pete Townshend came on with an explanation:

He told the crowd that Daltrey had bronchitis.

"I just talked to Roger and he can barely speak," Townshend said. "I tried to get him to come out here, but he's really, really sick."

The band will try again March 25th.

Who, where, when. The why and how is up to you.

The Who are playing some enormous gigs this summer:

22 May Birmingham National Indoor Arena
23 Sheffield Arena
25 Newcastle Metro Radio Arena
26 Hull City AFC
01 June Swansea City AFC
23 Cheshire Knowsley Hall
24 Glastonbury Festival
26 London Wembley Arena

The one in Knowsley Hall sounds like a lovely day out, doesn't it?

'I suppose I'd better get round to saying something, then'

'I SUPPOSE I'D BETTER GET ROUND TO SAYING SOMETHING, THEN': Roger Daltrey has strolled up to the support of his bandmate Peter Townshend. Barely weeks after the story first broke, Daltrey has helped out by raking over the ashes and making the whole thing, which had started to die down, return to the headlines again.

Pete must be drafting the 'thank you' card now - "Cheers for reminding everyone that I paid money to a kiddie porn site, Rog; choosing the middle of the furore of 'Is jacko a kiddie-tickler' to make your move has really helped me."

Interestingly, Roger says this is the worst thing he's ever had to deal with - which must piss off Entwistle that 'bloke admits to downloading porn' is harder to cope with than 'friend dies shagging hooker while on massive coke binge' a bit, and then says that "the least police and our society owes Townshend is to make [his case] a priority and get it dealt with as quickly as possible."

It's not quite clear why we, as a society, owe Townshend this speedy treatment. Since Pete says he wasn't doing anything wrong, why should the prospect of going to court cause him any worry? And if he hates child porn with all the passion he claims, wouldn't he rather than devoting their attention to his case, the police prioritised instead the investigations into the other names on their list of kiddie porn subscribers?

After all, it took Mr T several years from punching in his credit card details and looking at the pictures of naked kids to get round to telling the police about the shocking discovery - why should the police suddenly start to get a wriggle on now?

But this doesn't make any difference, Pete

"Pete Townshend says he can prove he isn't a paedophile" announced six music news, subtly ignoring the important fact that you can't - as Baghdad may or may not be demonstrating - prove a negative. Of course, what Pete's website actually says is that he believes he can now prove that he wrote to the Internet Watch Foundation last year. This is insignificant - firstly, his initial contact is claimed for August 2002, well after the first arrests of kiddie porn users were being announced, and years after he claims he started downloading child porn.

More importantly, Pete Townshend isn't being accused by anybody of being a paedophile; the criminal act in question is of downloading child porn. He's admitted himself he paid to see child porn - there's room for debate over his motives, and if what he looked at should be illegal - but lets not pretend that telling the police you've stolen some fags means that you haven't broken the law.

Boris against the porn world

The Spectator's leader column has weighed in with a typically confused piece on Pete Townshend.

"It may turn out that he has not committed an offence" (erm, except he's admitted that he has) "but his reputation has been destroyed forever" (we're not quite sure how The Spectator are able to look into the future.)

But just in case there's a danger of them being thought of as being sympathetic, the paper rushes to make clear they're here to have a bit of a gawp at Ceaser, then to bury him, then point out that they never liked him. Townshend's explanation - who, remember, the Spectator just said might not have done anything wrong - is suddenly making "pathetic excuses."

Perhaps the problem is that Boris Johnson isn't sure if he's got any opinions here, and so he quickly scampers off from simultaneously saying how its a bit of a shame that the people who get arrested on Operation Ore will never be able to rebuild their reputation (funny how 'Oh yes, you're the chap who looked at the kids being raped' is one of those things you can't shake off) and damning the people on the list as "warped and pathetic" to consider the actual nature of the crime.

The problem is, reckons the paper, not that Townshend looked at pictures of children, but that he paid for them. It wouldn't be a problem if he hadn't. So is Johnson's paper suggesting that, providing no money changes hand, the swapping of pictures of small boys being fucked is fine?

Just in case we run away with the idea they know what they're thinking about, they suddenly change tack and say how much better off we'd all be if there was no porn at all, anywhere. Ever.

So, let's just get this straight:

Pete Townshend perhaps hasn't done anything wrong.
It's terrible that people accused of child porn offences can never leave the stigma behind.
People accused of child porn offences are twisted and sick, but don't deserve to be punished unless they actually pay for the images.
We'd be better off if there was no porn at all. But, presumably, if there must be porn, it should be free.
All clear?

"Who are all these people typing 'Lolita' into search engines?"

That's what Pete Townshend wants to know. Hmmm, could they be the same people who've made Tatu the second most played video on The Box?

Pete in full

The Smoking Gun has offered up the full text of Pete Townshend's article about discovering porn on the web. It's dated January 2002. Interestingly, it deviates again from some of Townshend's own reported remarks (here, he was looking for information about Russian Orphanage Boys when he stumbled on a child being raped - wasn't the story at the weekend that he was surfing with one of his kids?) and claims that it's possible to get from Google to kiddie porn without actually typing any words. Possibly so (we reckon you might just about be able to do it clicking through the directory options - potentially) but you'd have to be hugely single minded and definitely searching; no way you could do it by accident. He claims that he was on the point of calling the police, but instead decided to talk to a lawyer "off the record" instead; the lawyer advised him that it was better to say nothing.

Okay, so far this could be plausible - we're not sure about the search engine that returns porn on 'russian + orphanage +boys', the return being so worded as to not be clear what lay at the end of it, but let's buy that for a moment. And let's say that Pete did think to call a lawyer rather than a police station when he saw the hideous video.

We're supposed to then believe that, having been warned of the possible consequences of reporting this incident, when Townshend later pumped his credit card details in for another site, he didn't know he was breaking the law, as he told The Sun? How would that be possible?

And why is there no mention of this further "research" in his treaty? And if he'd been advised by this lawyer that going public with his concerns may reflect badly on him, why did then apparently write about on his website in January 2002? And if he chose to do that because of the death of his friend mentioned in the article, why did he not go to the police at that point but instead wait - by his own account - almost a year to go and see them? If Pete Townshend is indeed a victim of circumstance - and it's not impossible - circumstances have really ganged up on him big style, haven't they?

In defence of Pete

IN DEFENCE OF PETE: In yesterday's Guardian, Rod Liddle kind of defended Pete Townshend by suggesting that it's not much good for society to make looking at things illegal; in the same edition Zoe Williams suggested that his arrest was part of panic and confusion about child porn. Well, hers and Rod's maybe - she suggested that typing "child pornography" into Google "could land illegal matter on to my hard-drive." Both miss a rather important point - Townshend wasn't idly Googling or clicking by accident; he paid money to people selling images of children being sexually abused. His crime wasn't looking, or even searching, but in providing cold, hard cash to the people running the sites. It's a vital distinction.

There's a more considered support for Townshend by Howard Owens at BlogCritics, which carries a large chunk of an article on Townshend site from a year ago, where Pete talks about his anger at the availability of child porn and suggests that Google should be made to censor searches on certain terms and words (cheers, Pete). This, suggests Owens, backs Townshend's claims that he was doing research and not merely perving off on pictures of kiddies. Well, maybe. Although you could argue that a lot of paedophiles do use the cloak of child protection as a cover for their activities; or even that writing angry articles about child porn proves disgust, but doesn't disprove self-disgust.

To me, the key question seems to be: Pete finds all this kiddie porn online in 1996-7, and is angry and disgusted about it. Why is it that he only goes to the police to complain about it in December of 2002, when the papers have been reporting that police are going round arresting people who've given their credit card details to the site? Surely, the way to protect children would be to complain at the earliest available opportunity, not five years later?

The King is half-undressed

Doubtless Pete Townshend will be delighted at Jonathan King's kind words of support for him on the Tip Sheet. Pausing only to murmur how sad it is about Maurice "I knew him well in the sixties" Gibb, King then suggests its "even sadder" about Pete Townshend (because, after all, being caught buying kiddie porn really does knock dying young after a screwed-up operation into a cocked hat, doesn't it?

King continues:

"but I warned you all when it happened to me. The unholy alliance between police and media, combined with Britain's extraordinary sex laws has meant its open season on celebrities.

But hold on Jonathon, weren't you convicted of sexually abusing minors - not the same thing at all. Indeed, at least publicly, hasn't Townshend been saying how angry people like you make him?

"Whether it's false allegations provoked by publicity as it was for me, and will be for Pete, John Leslie and all the others, or, true past skeletons coming out of star's closets, it's going to get worse. Watch out for those tabloid Pete stories acquired by agents like Maxi boy. I see there are now senior politicians in the frame. Could that be ugly rumours? (all you need for conviction, evidence is not necessary)."

This is just pure bollocks, isn't it? Apart from anything, Townshend said he went to the police himself a couple of months ago. And while false allegations are certainly worrying - we see Van Morrison's shaken off those allegations about sexual harassment - what's the problem with celebrities who've sexually exploited children being exposed? "True past skeletons" are, you know, Jon, crimes. Are you really suggesting if you're famous you should be allowed to get away with buggering small boys?

And "all you need is ugly rumours -[clever wording, King - cheers] - evidence is not necessary" is just extreme ridiculous. Indeed, Gary Glitter's case shows that the interest of the press tends to work in the person's favour, since it was the press involvement that led to his acquittal in the trial over him shagging that fourteen year old. Evidence is still all. You got caught. I hope that your lack of remorse is noted by the parole board.

"What I want to know is - do they do kiddie porn in braille?"

Maybe you should ask one of your contacts?

He's funding his own investigation

According to the Celebrity-tax-ometer thingy at Tax Central, (assuming he doesn't do anything like tax avoidance), Pete Townshend should be paying thirteen pence a second in income tax - nearly four million quid a year. That's double the amount the police were hoping for to carry out all the investigations under Operation Ore...

The shame

Let's skirt as quickly as possible past the obvious jokes - The Kids Are All Tight; Hope we date before you get old, etc etc - and ask: what the hell was BBC News 24 doing last night?

Obviously the police search of Townshend's home was news, and you can understand the minute-by-minute news service waiting to pounce the moment anything happened. But yesterday evening, the 6 pm bulletin carried a continuous live feed across the bottom the screen of Townshend's front door. This added nothing to our understanding, told us nothing about the story (child porn users have white front doors?) and turned the serious search of Townshend's home into a Rolling News Circus. Fair enough, the media scrum would have been bad enough anyway, but for the BBC to ensure we could keep an eye on a closed door lest the other news - impending war, cabinet splits, missing women - bored us a little too much. Had we flipped, we might have missed... erm, a policeman in shirt sleeves (child porn users = well heated homes?) emerging, saying nothing and getting into a car and driving off. The excitable editors at N24 should take away a valuable lesson that something doesn't become news just because there's a news camera pointing at it.

Meanwhile, we were amused to see the Star's editorial yesterday - "How many more celebrities will it take before the government understands that we hate paedophiles?" So not only do we need celebrities to help us choose which supermarkets to shop in and how to vote, but we can't even know something is wrong until someone we've vaguely heard of commits a crime now? No wonder the gangsta rap/guns story is such a runner, as it involves Number One Recording Artists. Presumably burglary must wait until that one off Hollyoaks who's just dyed her hair black buys a tin of treacle and some brown paper. But it's nice to see the Star on its high horse about child porn. Remind us which national daily ran a front page picture of a child in a bikini top with the headline "She's Fifteen, She's 38DD*, and on her sixteenth birthday she's going to show them to you?" That would be The Star, of course.

(* - we can't remember the actual size of the breasts in question)

Thanks for clearing that up, Pete

THANKS FOR CLEARING THAT UP, PETE: Pete Townshend has attempted to ensure that he can argue press coverage means he can't get a fair trial... um, sorry, given an interview to clear his name to today's Sun. The pattern of a story slightly shifting is quite pretty if you hold it up to the light.

Now, it seems, he's looked at "three or four" sites after "accidently stumbling across one" - it's funny how it's so easy to accidently stumble across a child porn site, type your credit card details in, press the confirm button and start looking at pictures of children being abused - it happens before you even realise it, doesn't it? Though how Townshend squares the "it was all a horrible accident" with the "it was all done in the name of research" argument isn't clear.

“I have never purchased any forms of child pornography or wished to own any. I saw the first awful photo by accident. It repelled me and shocked me to my very core.

So shocked you went out and looked at other sites? Was this because you weren't shocked enough?

“I was not breaking the law at the time. This was in the winter of 1996/1997. It was then illegal to download, which I did not do, not to search and view.

Hello? Pete, mate, what do you think you're doing when you access a webpage? You're downloading it, aren't you? You might not be *saving* the document permanently, but you're still having to copy the thing from the remote computer to your own. And even if you didn't right click on anything, this is surely all a legal nicety, isn't it? Wouldn't you be as upset if I came and peered in through your bedroom window even if I didn't take pictures?

“I did not think using a credit card was illegal either at the time. As a public figure I would never have given details had I known I would be breaking UK law."

Right. So, you're expecting us to believe that you're so stupid that it didn't occur to you that paying cash to people who sell pictures of kids being raped might not only be stinkingly unethical but also illegal? And, hang on a moment...

"[The Internet] is allowing child porn to be circulated freely around the world, crossing borders, allowing laws to be ignored...

- hey, Peter - maybe all the people downloading child porn aren't ignoring the laws. Maybe they just didn't know what they were doing was illegal.

Ah - it was an academic interest, was it?

Let's not be too quick to condemn Pete Townshend for using his credit card to buy kiddie porn - it may be easy to suggest that if he really was researching a book and "wanted to know what was there" - and who wouldn't be puzzled what may lay behind a link saying "Kids being fucked here", after all? - that maybe he should have contacted, say, a police department or one of the many academics (actual academics) who have already done this sort of research.

It would be cheap, wouldn't it, to suggest that it would be of little comfort to know that the person paying the bloke flogging pictures of her being raped was only handing over the cash to gather some material for a book - I know I have no problem with kiddie pornographers getting rich from flogging images, providing the end users are merely writing details of the pictures down in spiral bound notebooks, after all.

After all, how could Peter be a paedophile - look, he's calling people who find that sort of thing "mentally ill" (although if he believes child porn users are mentally ill, wouldn't his "anger and vengeance" be misplaced?)

Let's take him at word. Which still makes him at best morally dubious and very, very stupid, doesn't it?