(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Thu 27 November 2025 17:30, UK
When Pete Townshend first joined The Who, he was never that concerned with their longevity all that much.
As far as he was concerned, bands of their calibre only stuck around for a few years, so it was a logical conclusion for him to throw caution to the wind and then end up back at art school a few years after the singles dried up. But while the public had a bit more to say about the band’s classics, Townshend felt that a lot of records weren’t near the standard they set for themselves.
Then again, no one is a better critic of an artist’s work than the artist themselves. As much as people like Oasis hype themselves up as one of the greatest bands in the world, even they are sure to have their days when they are a little bit insecure about whether they’ve created a masterpiece or a piece of auditory trash whenever it’s time for them to throw their songs out into the world.
But while Townshend always saw his job as a songwriter as a craft, it wasn’t like he was going to make anything subpar for the hell of it. Tommy and Quadrophenia are brilliant rock operas that tell fantastic tales from beginning to end, and when you look at the rest of the band, they respond in kind to nearly every single power chord or pick scrape that Townshend ever made on record.
Even when Townshend had one of his ideas completely mangled, the band still found ways to work around it. We’ll never know what Lifehouse could have been like if it was released as intended, but Who’s Next is still one of the most airtight set of songs in all of classic rock, especially when they hit tracks like ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ and the mammoth closer ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’.
Although Townshend could have taken all the credit if he wanted to, he never forgot the power that they had as a band before anything else. Roger Daltrey was the best voice to sing all their songs, and with John Entwistle and Keith Moon driving the rhythm section, they were practically unstoppable when making albums like Live at Leeds. So when Moon passed away, Townshend felt that the band weren’t being entirely truthful when they started making albums like Face Dances.
All of them could still play, but Townshend figured that their time as a true band had fallen apart the minute Moon passed away, saying, “You have to realise that what made me stop making Who albums is very much the same thing that happened to Led Zeppelin. Somebody in the band died. And unlike them, I was very slow to get the message. We made another two albums that we probably shouldn’t have made. It’s Hard and Face Dances contained really good material for a solo album but they weren’t classic Who songs.”
While Kenney Jones does do an admirable job at driving them forward, it’s easy to see what Townshend is talking about. I’d argue that there are some classic Who songs to be found on those records like ‘You Better You Bet’ and ‘Eminence Front’, but when looking at the kind of power and precision that Moon had, it’s hard to really argue that something feels like it’s missing from both records.
That hasn’t stopped Daltrey and Townshend from making other albums with Entwistle under the band’s name, but Endless Wire and Who aren’t trying to be the natural extension of what Tommy was. At this point, all it serves to do is remind everyone of the kind of band that dared to bring rock and roll to theatrical proportions back in the 1960s.
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