(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sat 25 October 2025 10:06, UK
What is your favourite song by your favourite band? There’s a good chance that the track you are thinking of is, generally, quite an annoying song for them to perform. That’s certainly what happened to Roger Daltrey.
Often, the songs fans adore the most are those their creators despise most. Ostensibly, playing such songs over and over, hearing fans chant the lyrics into the night and facing the radio the following morning can become rather grating. This was certainly true for Robert Plant’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’, Thom Yorke’s ‘Creep’ and Kurt Cobain’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. For the quintessential rock singer, Daltrey, a classic song by The Who ran its course many years ago.
In the early 1970s, The Who’s guitarist and primary songwriter Pete Townshend abandoned Life House, his rock opera follow-up to Tommy. Several songs from the project were ultimately released in the band’s masterpiece 1971 album Who’s Next, including ‘Baba O’Riley’, ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ and ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. It is often regarded as the band’s greatest effort, and it is certainly packed full of fan favourite tracks.
Although the band has a vast discography chock-full of iconic hits, Daltrey once admitted that ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ is the only one he’s ever got tired of performing. Considerin daltrey has been on a stage for the majority of his life, one might expect some tracks to get up his nose a little, but you’d also imagine that it wouldn’t be the songs that his fans are most excited to see, and that track is certainly one of them. “That’s the only song I’m bloody bored shitless with,” he confessed to Rolling Stone in 2018. “I don’t know why, but I’m being honest.”
Daltrey has long been the agitator of the band in terms of getting back on the road. It has always seemed, especially in the later years when it was just him and Pete Townshend of the original quartet, that he was the driving force behind any touring. So when he admitted, “All the others I can approach like I’m singing for the first time,” it was quite a shock. “I don’t know what’s happening there psychologically. Maybe it’s the song, but I never seem to be in the same pocket where I’m singing it for the first time.”
Roger Daltrey on stage with The Who. (Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
The iconic vocalist has named one other Who track that he’s not fond of hearing or performing, this time, because of a curse. Appearing on the Howard Stern Show in 2015, Daltrey revealed that the band’s founding drummer, Keith Moon, encountered difficulty when attempting to record ‘Music Must Change’ for Who Are You in 1978.
“Keith couldn’t play the drums to it,” Daltrey said. “It was in a three-four. Keith couldn’t play normal drums. Keith could play great Moon drums, and that was it.”
Since Moon couldn’t conform to “normal” drumming measures, The Who employed a session drummer to take over. However, Daltrey would come to regret this decision when, on September 7th, 1978, Moon passed away following a drug overdose. Naturally, Moon’s bandmates had difficulty coming to terms with the loss. For Daltrey, ‘Music Must Change’ recalls the humiliation the band put their drummer through when hiring a replacement.
In 1979, The Who returned to the road with Kenny Jones as Moon’s replacement. They would include ‘Music Must Change’ as part of their live shows for a couple of years but ultimately dropped it from setlists for many years after the tour of ‘81.
Following two decades of dormancy, The Who decided to bring ‘Music Must Change’ back into the fold. “We brought it back in 2002 for the last tour with John Entwistle, and we rehearsed it,” Daltrey told Stern. “We were going to do it in the show, then John died.”
The founding bassist, Entwistle, died in Nevada in 2002, aged 57, the night before The Who were scheduled to play the first concert of their US tour. With its connection to the deaths of both Moon and Entwistle, Daltrey regards ‘Music Must Change’ as a cursed track and avoids singing or listening to it at all costs.
It’s only right that these personal feelings should intertwine with the performance of the tracks, and it is totally expected that he wouldn’t want to perform them. But, considering just how professional Daltrey has always been as a singer, it is still somewhat surprising that two of the band’s tracks would be so staunchly hated.
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