{"id":79180,"date":"2025-08-18T17:06:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-18T17:06:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/79180\/"},"modified":"2025-08-18T17:06:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T17:06:07","slug":"the-who-play-going-mobile-for-first-time-in-history-at-tour-launch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/79180\/","title":{"rendered":"The Who Play ‘Going Mobile’ for First Time in History at Tour Launch"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe Who<\/a> began the North American leg of their The Song Is Over farewell tour Saturday evening at the Amerant Bank Arena in Sunrise, Florida. And even though this isn\u2019t technically a Who\u2019s Next tour, their set featured seven of the nine songs from the 1971 landmark LP. That includes \u201cGoing Mobile,\u201d which the Who had never before played live.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cGoing Mobile\u201d is Pete Townshend\u2019s ode to a life lived on the road, and he sang lead on it himself. \u201cI don\u2019t care about pollution,\u201d he sang. \u201cI\u2019m an air-conditioned gypsy\/That\u2019s my solution\/Watch the police and the tax man miss me\/I\u2019m mobile.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tTo be clear, this wasn\u2019t the first time members of the Who have performed the song live. Pete Townshend played it in February 2000 at two special solo Lifehouse concerts at Sadler\u2019s Wells Theatre in London, England. And it\u2019s been featured at 141 Roger Daltrey concerts between 2009 and the present. Each time, Simon Townshend \u2014 Pete\u2019s younger brother and Daltrey\u2019s longtime solo bandleader \u2014 played guitar and delivered the vocals.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tBut until Saturday night, it hadn\u2019t been done at an actual Who concert. Simon Townshend has been part of the Who\u2019s touring band since 1996 (with the exception of their 1999\/2000 tour), and he once again handled the \u201cGoing Mobile\u201d vocals even though his brother Pete was on the other side of the stage. <\/p>\n

\n\tThat means we now have 144 live performances of \u201cGoing Mobile\u201d across Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend, and Who concerts. Simon Townshend has sang it 142 times, Pete Townshend sang it twice, and we still have yet to see Pete sing it on the same stage as Roger.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd despite many complete performances of Tommy and Quadrophenia over the years, the Who has never done Who\u2019s Next straight through. At this point, they just need to add \u201cGetting In Tune\u201d and \u201cMy Wife\u201d to make it happen. They\u2019ve done \u201cGetting In Tune\u201d as recently as 2014, and it wouldn\u2019t take great effort to bring it back.<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMy Wife,\u201d however, is a very different story because John Entwistle wrote it and sang lead. They haven\u2019t done any of his signature songs since he died in 2002. But they faced a similar dilemma with \u201cBell Boy\u201d on the 2012\/13\u00a0Quadrophenia\u00a0tour since that\u2019s a Keith Moon tune. They solved it by showing archival concert footage of Moon singing the song. If they wanted to bring \u201cMy Wife\u201d back, they could do something similar with an old Entwistle video.<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tThe rest of the Who\u2019s Song Is Over setlist was nearly identical to the shows they played last month in Italy. It includes nearly all of their hits alongside a handful of deep cuts like \u201cI\u2019ve Had Enough,\u201d \u201cTea & Theatre,\u201d Love Ain\u2019t For Keepin\u2019,\u201d and \u201cThe Song Is Over.\u201d The latter song is the last song they played with longtime drummer Zak Starkey before a very messy separation<\/a> with him earlier this year.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Who\u2019s tour continues Tuesday night in Newark, New Jersey. The U.S. leg wraps up September 28 in Las Vegas. As of now, there\u2019s no word about additional overseas dates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Who began the North American leg of their The Song Is Over farewell tour Saturday evening at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":79181,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341,12444],"class_list":{"0":"post-79180","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-music","12":"tag-the-who"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79180\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}