(Credits: Alamy)
Sun 22 February 2026 8:00, UK
The Who are the British invasion’s ultimate survivors.
Even across the 1970s, once much of their Billboard-conquering Brit peers had long passed as the day’s Grade-A chart toppers, the era’s biggest rock acts were pretty much down to Roger Daltrey’s fronted former mod outfit, The Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin.
Yet, by the decade’s end, Zeppelin had strutted into implosion and near parody and the Stones, while enjoying a disco pick-me-up with ‘Miss You’, had certainly entered a new phase everybody knew wasn’t touching their golden album run a decade earlier. It was The Who who seemed to endure with undimmed primacy, right at home with the punks as their raucous godfather and dropping the infectious ‘Who Are You’ with effortless ease in 1978.
Their greatest pivot came around 1969’s Tommy. It was here that the Who moved away from their taut Swinging pop to a wider rock expanse, owing to principal songwriter Pete Townshend’s grander sense of conceptual rock opera songcraft. Matching such creative ambitions was Daltrey, who seemed to enter a new whirlwind of confidence as the long-haired, bare-chested shammy-suited frontman, wielding a whole new level of commanding charisma that future Zeppelin crooner Robert Plant would take serious notes from.
Three months after Tommy’s drop, The Who were pulled to New York state to play the lauded Woodstock Music and Art Fair. It was here that many fans would first witness the band’s elevated platform as a summoner of thunderous rock heft, marking a distinctly more arresting sound than the peace and love typifying the four-day programme.
However, the festival was beset with issues. Despite the rosy countercultural memory of the hippy gathering, bad weather, technical mishaps, inept management, and a chaotic slew of drugs across the Bethel dairy farm tested many a talent’s patience, Daltrey was no exception.
Having reportedly necked a cup of tea laced with LSD beforehand, Daltrey and The Who took the stage at 5am on the Sunday morning, delayed after becoming embroiled in a spat with the promoters taking their time to pay them. Finally receiving their cash, the band took the stage to play a significant chunk of Tommy on their set, with peace activist Abbie Hoffman allegedly invading the stage and taking a whack from Townshend’s guitar.
“Looking out unto the predawn gloom of Woodstock, making out the vague shape of half a million mud-caked people as the lights swept over them, I felt in my sleep-deprived, hallucinating state that this was my nightmare come true,” Daltrey recalled in his 2018 memoir Thanks a Lot, Mr Kibblewhite: My Story. “The monitors kept breaking. The sound was shit. We were all battling the elements and ourselves. Music and peace.”
It’s a sentiment reflected elsewhere, famously John Fogerty, less than impressed with the festival’s sedate atmosphere when Creedence Clearwater Revival took the stage, and Grace Slick candid about her preference for the Monterey International Pop Festival. Through mud, tight promoters, and dodgy PA, you can bet Daltrey and any other act there that weekend don’t regret being there for a second.