(Credits: Far Out / Harry Chase / UCLA Library)
Thu 4 December 2025 11:00, UK
Getting your own way is famously difficult within the dog-eat-dog world of the music industry; even some of the greatest rock stars of all time, like The Who’s Pete Townshend, have occasionally had to strike up compromises and adhere to the demands of record company executives at one time or another, but that doesn’t mean they went without a fight.
When The Who first emerged onto the airwaves, from their roots in the mod nightclubs of London, they represented an angry new generation of rock and rollers. Playing with a short, sharp, and endearingly anarchic style, and striking upon era-defining anthems like ‘My Generation’, Townshend’s outfits were the proto-punks of the swinging sixties, and they weren’t bending over themselves to appease the wants and demands of the music industry, either.
After all, Townshend’s artistic drive did not involve a desire to follow trends. At every possible turn, The Who devoted themselves to an entirely new area of rock and roll expression, whether it was the postmodern masterpiece of The Who Sell Out, or Townshend’s exploration of rock opera on 1969’s Tommy – an album that ushered in an entirely new age both for The Who and the rock landscape more generally.
That album, in fact, formed a pivotal moment in the band’s trajectory, allowing them to move on from the youthful rock of the mid-1960s into something with a much longer shelf-life. However, the planned follow-up to Tommy, Lifehouse, never came to fruition. The narrative of that particular rock opera was never completed, and the band eventually abandoned the idea entirely in favour of creating a much more digestible album in the form of Who’s Next.
Despite that collective decision, and the undeniable brilliance of Who’s Next as an album, though, Townshend always seems to have harboured some disappointment that Lifehouse never worked out. Even during the production process for Who’s Next, there was still a core part of his being hoping to capture the same expansive brilliance that had been planned for the band’s 1971 effort. “I was still hoping for a double album when we were making Who’s Next,” he confirmed to Rock Cellar.
“It was a tough time. It became a tough time,” the guitarist recalled of the making of that particular record. “But it was also a very important lesson for me. I’d given up, in a sense, on the idea of working with Kit. That was the big thing,” he said, highlighting the fact that the band’s severed relationship with former producer and manager overshadowed the album’s production somewhat.
As it turns out, though, the replacement producer in Glyn Johns didn’t exactly adhere to Townshend’s plans, either. “When Glyn took over, I was hoping that he would make a double album,” Townshend recalled. “That was all. That’s why I gave him the script.”
Inevitably, though, it didn’t quite pan out that way, and Who’s Next ended up being a single album, with a new notable tracks from Lifehouse strangely omitted from the final tracklist. “I thought leaving off ‘Pure and Easy’, was like leaving fucking ‘Amazing Journey’ off Tommy,” the songwriter attested. “It’s the song that sets the scene, that gives Lifehouse the backbone.”
For all its internal conflict and artistic disappointment for Townshend, though, Who’s Next is still among The Who’s greatest works, capturing the profound genius of the guitarist’s songwriting talents at that time in the form of classics like ‘Baba O’Riley’ and ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ among others. What’s more, Townshend’s appetite for rock opera innovation was eventually settled in the form of Quadrophenia a few years later.
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