IT has been 55 years since the British rock group, The Who, made their first influential recordings, but they are still going strong. They recently announced a new album, to be followed by a string of concerts, including Glasgow’s SSE Hydro on March 23.
When they played two shows at the Glasgow Apollo in February 1981 (pictured here, with guitarist Pete Townshend and singer Roger Daltrey), the Herald’s reviewer noted that they “attracted an audience which ranged from elderly hippies to latter-day Mods. Long hair and Afghan coats mingled with neat trims and parkas, as if two entirely different generations had come together.
“It would have been easy for The Who to have rested on their laurels and simply played a medley of their better-known hits. Surprisingly, they did not sing ‘My Generation’, but seemed to concentrate on newer numbers. The biggest response, however, was reserved for ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, with Roger Daltrey swinging his microphone out over the heads of the audience and Pete Townshend flailing madly at his lead guitar”
The band’s colourful, brilliant drummer, Keith Moon, had died in 1978. His replacement was Kenney Jones, who had played with The Small Faces and The Faces. Jones, the Herald observed, had had a difficult task of replacing Moon, but was “warmly received by the audience, who seemed to realise his dilemma”.
Moon’s death was one of a number of misfortunes experienced by The Who in the late 1970s. They released a studio album in 1981 and another in 1982. “A tour followed”, says The Who: The Official History, “but it lacked the aggression, magic and chaos The Who had become famous for. Later that year The Who quietly split up”.
And that was it for a number of years, apart from an appearance at Live Aid, in 1985. They toured in 1989, to mark their 25th anniversary, and resumed touring in 1999. The band’s bass guitarist, John Entwistle, died in 2002.
Writing in his 2018 memoir, Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite, Daltrey, now 75, says: “You don’t retire from this business. This business retires you. You can play notes and you can sing notes but what you can’t do is cheat on the intention of the music. And I think that’s why we’re still successful. We still don’t cheat.
“The chemistry between me and Pete is still special. We were given that gift and now The Who is the two of us.”
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