NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - The cascading golden locks are cropped close now and he just turned 60, but Peter Frampton feels he has rediscovered the creative drive that made him one of rock's biggest acts.

He readily admits the energy that made his 1976 album, "Frampton Comes Alive" rock's biggest-selling live recording, got lost in an alcohol and drug-induced haze for many years.

"I got sober seven years ago. Not that I was a habitual user, but I would drink, and I would drug, whatever..." he told Reuters in an interview.

"I'd been doing it for a while and you never get to the point where you can think clearly enough to mature or to grow. It stunts your growth as a person.

"I had to do what I had to do to get where I am now, but what I'm saying is the clarity I have, the enjoyment of the creativity is so much greater," he said.

The British-born guitarist, who became a U.S. citizen after the 2001 attacks and now lives in Cincinnati with his third wife, Tina, says the proof is in his new album, "Thank You Mr Churchill."

It finds him in introspective mood, and fittingly nostalgic for a man who turned 60 last month.

"I had this piece of music and an idea which was: What would it have been like if my Dad had not come back from the war? If the Allies had not won?"

He recalled growing up on the southern outskirts of London with still bombed-out buildings and his baby orange juice rationed well into the 1950s.

Frampton's father did return from the war, and it was his family who started him on his life's musical journey.

His father had played guitar in a college band and his mother had won a scholarship to drama school, although she did not go. But it was a banjolele (a banjo-ukulele hybrid) from his Music Hall-loving grandmother that got him interested in music when he was about seven.

Later, "Vaudeville Nanna," who is immortalized on a track on the new album, would buy Peter his first guitar and by the time he heard American rock 'n rollers like Eddie Cochrane and Buddy Holly on the radio, he was hooked.

But, like many English guitarists, his big influences were Hank Marvin of The Shadows and Bert Weedon.

Frampton played in a band at school called the TrueBeats. "It started basically because of the Shadows and Hank Marvin. He was really the reason I wanted to be a guitar player."

Frampton left school at 16 and joined a London band, the Herd, who had a few psychedelic pop hits. But for Frampton, the band was a stepping-stone to bigger things.

He was dubbed "The Face of '68" by British teen magazine Rave because of his boyish, photogenic looks but it was his guitar-playing that got him noticed too and that year he formed Humble Pie with Steve Marriott of the Small Faces.

In 1976 he went solo and "Frampton Comes Alive," recorded mostly at a couple of gigs in California, sold over six million copies in the United States alone and earned Frampton Rolling Stone magazine's Artist of the Year accolade.

More than four decades later he got Marvin to play on his last album, "Fingerprints."

"It was like a dream come true," he said.