(Credits: Rick Guest)
Fri 12 September 2025 14:30, UK
If you listen to Pete Townshend enough, one gets the sneaking suspicion that he views The Who as a catastrophic failure.
The Who are undeniably one of the most famous and celebrated rock bands ever, influential enough to have everyone from Aerosmith and David Bowie to the Sex Pistols and Green Day wear their imprint. Successful enough to be selling out arenas 60 years on from their formation. What more could Townshend possibly want?! The answer, unfortunately, is basically everything.
It seems that everything The Who did came from a place of Townshend reaching for the transcendent and failing to get there. I’m sure a man as spiritually minded as he must know that that’s basically the point of the exercise, that true transcendence comes from knowing you can’t achieve it and trying anyway. The problem is, he probably thinks he could have got there if he didn’t have bloody Roger Daltrey telling him to stop being a twat and write some hits the whole time.
That’s not to paint Daltrey as the conservative dullard that Townshend has done in the past. The former wasn’t merely a pragmatist but someone who is, above all, practical, sometimes to a fault. Even then, he saw the potential in some mad ideas, like rock operas and albums as conceptual art pieces about selling out. However, sometimes people with their heads in the clouds need someone to keep them anchored to the real world, which was Daltrey’s role in the band.
If he was sensible to a fault, Townshend was the opposite. An ideas man for good and ill, who was constantly thinking of ways to improve his own work, especially after it came into the world. This is arguably where the latter’s reputation as something of a grump came from. Any given interview shows him talking about how every peak of The Who’s career could have been better or came from a great failure of something more artistically interesting.
Which Who album did Pete Townshend claim to be mistimed?
The best example of this is probably the grand folly of The Who, Pete Townshend’s ludicrous multi-media fare Lifehouse. However, even when he talks about beloved, successful albums, he’s not happy. He’s not even blaming outside interference either because most of the time, that didn’t happen with The Who, especially in their mid-1970s pomp. No, these were records that he conceived of, wrote, recorded and in most cases produced that went on to sell buckets of copies with a handful of hit singles, yet is he happy? Absolutely not.
Case in point, in a 2019 interview with Guitar World, he talked extensively about the band’s last great album, Quadrophenia. Anyone else would be happy with an album half as beloved as that, especially when you take the film and even the ballet made from it into question. But no. Townshend still finds some way of talking about it like it’s a missed opportunity, saying, “In a weird way, Quadrophenia should, in context, have come before Tommy.”
He elaborated: “Quadrophenia was an attempt by me to talk about how, in The Who’s early career, we and our audience, through disaffected heavy male-oriented rock and roll, began to feel spiritually empty. And that gave birth to the experimentation with drugs and Indian mysticism. That kind of leads into Tommy.” One really starts empathising with Roger Daltrey here, don’t they?
Yet, they wouldn’t be The Who without this unrelenting perfectionism balanced by grounded execution, as they thrive on tension. It’s a sign that proves the old adage: Shoot for the moon, because even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.
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