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(Credits: Alamy)<\/p>\n
Sun 22 February 2026 8:00, UK <\/p>\n
The Who<\/a> are the British invasion\u2019s ultimate survivors.<\/p>\n Even across the 1970s, once much of their Billboard-conquering Brit peers had long passed as the day\u2019s Grade-A chart toppers, the era\u2019s biggest rock acts were pretty much down to Roger Daltrey\u2019s fronted former mod outfit, The Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin.<\/p>\n Yet, by the decade\u2019s end, Zeppelin had strutted into implosion and near parody and the Stones, while enjoying a disco pick-me-up with \u2018Miss You\u2019, had certainly entered a new phase everybody knew wasn\u2019t 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 \u2018Who Are You\u2019 with effortless ease in 1978.<\/p>\n Their greatest pivot came around 1969\u2019s 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\u2019s 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<\/a> would take serious notes from.<\/p>\n Three months after Tommy\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s patience, Daltrey was no exception.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s guitar.<\/p>\n \u201cLooking 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,\u201d Daltrey recalled in his 2018 memoir Thanks a Lot, Mr Kibblewhite: My Story. \u201cThe monitors kept breaking. The sound was shit. We were all battling the elements and ourselves. Music and peace.\u201d<\/p>\n