(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Fri 26 December 2025 17:11, UK
Living life in one of the world’s greatest rock and roll bands doesn’t give you much time to stop, look around, and appreciate what is happening around you. During the dizzying heights of The Who’s glory years, for example, Pete Townshend rarely had a moment to himself to pay attention to the artists emerging around him.
Back in the mid-1960s, when Townshend and his gang of anarchic young mods were first elevated from dingy R&B nightclubs to the mainstream stage, they represented the youthful rebellion at the heart of the swinging sixties; London’s latest out-of-step upstarts. Inevitably, though, that reputation was as fleeting as youth itself, and The Who quickly transformed themselves into the operatic masters of an entirely new realm of the rock world.
While many of their early contemporaries fell by the wayside, then, The Who have always been skilful in maintaining their position on the upper echelon of rock, moving gracefully from spectacularly loud hard rock-adjacent performances to extensive stadium rock-esque shows played to thousands upon thousands of adoring fans across the globe.
With that unparalleled position of rock and roll power, though, Townshend tended to lose sight of the next generation of performers rising through the ranks. During a 2025 chat with Rolling Stone, the guitarist made the rather bold – albeit it indisputable – claim that “The Who invented stadium rock”, but also that the band didn’t tend to appreciate the younger groups who made stadium rock their predominant art form.
“We gave it away,” he continued. “Our timing was terrible.” Nothing reflected The Who’s strained relationship with the world of stadium rock quite like their Live Aid set in 1985, which tended to show the band’s age. “When we did Live Aid, we could barely fuckin’ play,” he reflected. In comparison, the younger stadium rock outfits blew The Who out of the water.
“Queen were in the middle of a tour, walked out there, took the whole thing, and turned it into an advert for themselves,” he recalled. Still, that undeniably incredible performance didn’t do much to endear Townshend to Queen at the time. “I never really appreciated what Queen was about, to be honest,” he admitted. “I liked ABBA, but I didn’t really connect it with the lighthearted pop diversity of Queen’s catalog.”
In hindsight, though, it is impossible to dispute the fact that Queen were the kings of stadium rock back in the 1970s and 1980s. Freddie Mercury’s penchant for theatrics and the colossal sound of Brian May and company could fill the acoustics of any stadium or arena across the globe, in ways that a group from the old school, like The Who, weren’t particularly well adapted for.
What’s more, the quality of Queen’s Live Aid performance only served to shine a light on the fact that The Who had aged a lot since their 1960s heyday, having lost the percussive skill of Keith Moon along the way.
Having been on the road pretty constantly for two decades by the time they arrived at Wembley Stadium, Townshend and the band were pretty understandably fatigued. Whereas Live Aid was the kind of stadium show that Queen always thrived on, so perhaps the Who songwriter’s dismissal of the band wasn’t based solely on their musical output.
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