The Who [ tickets ] will tour again, according to founding guitarist Pete Townshend, who verified rumors that the band would tour in 2006 in a Christmas Eve posting on his website.

Townshend offered few details about a potential Who tour, aside from confirming that the legendary British rockers would tour sometime next year in support of an album of new Who material, the groups first since 1982's "It's Hard."

Word had previously spread among Who fans that Townshend was considering bringing his semi-retired band out of the pasture for a tour and album in 2005, developments that failed to appear mainly because of Townshend's insistence on not touring without new material to play. Current Who drummer Zak Starkey's commitment to touring with Oasis this year prevented the Who from recording new tracks.

"I have said many times, repeated up until a few days ago, that I am reticent about committing to a tour without a completed new Who album under my belt" Townshend wrote in his online diary.

Townshend revealed that the new Who album will likely not be released in traditional LP form, though not the exact nature of it. "Who manager Bill Curbishley has come up with a great scheme that may circumvent the need for a CD full of Green Day and White Stripes impersonations. No, it is not an 'EP.' It is a truly inspired idea," Townshend wrote.

More importantly for fans of the group, Townshend seems to have recaptured the desire to play loud rock music onstage. "What I care about is that [singer] Roger Daltrey feels comfortable with the songs I write so he can sing a few of them on stage--while I lunge around looking gorgeous and playing show-off guitar like a kid in a music shop. After forty-five years of this crap I've just started to enjoy it," he wrote.

The posting also mentions the possibility of the entire tour being webcast online, with a mixture of free and pay shows.

The Who [ tickets ] last toured in 2004, shortly after the death of bassist John Entwistle.