Mike Myers' "Austin Powers" Was BAD for England?

[Brian Damage]

THE WHO star PETE TOWNSHEND has taken aim at MIKE MYERS' AUSTIN POWERS creation for "trivialising" what was going on in London during the swinging 1960s.

Townshend fears a generation of film fans got the wrong message about the pivotal moment in British culture - and it's all thanks to the funnyman's hirsute, frozen spy who brings free love and bad teeth to modern times.
The rocker hopes the British musical debut of The Who's Quadrophenia will help today's youth understand exactly what was going on in the Swinging Sixties.

He tells TimesOnline.co.uk, "Austin Powers has done a lot of damage to the image of swinging London, parodying what had already been parodied by lazy American newsreels over the years.

"In a sense, my mission is to bring back some of the greyness, the bleakness of those years, and demonstrate to the cast that what happened simply had to happen, otherwise we would all have gone nuts... it was a vital rebellion.
"Everything was turned on its head. Girls looked like boys, boys wore eyeliner and danced alone or in pairs like girls. Today we are facing something of the same kind of upheaval."

And the rocker feels the world is on the verge of another mod revolution - just like the one documented in Quadrophenia.

He adds, "In the financial mess we are in how will young people express their need to be different? Roger Daltrey often says that Mod wouldn't have happened if well-paid work hadn't been available."