Features

Relix Celebrates the Super Bowl with The Who

Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend

In honor of The Who’s performance at this year’s Super Bowl—we’re rooting for The Saints if you must know—we’ve dug into the archives to bring you an excerpt from a 2006 cover story we did with the mighty Pete Townshend. Below Townshend talks about The Who’s setlists, his relationship to the audience and The Rolling Stones.

How do you balance a setlist between the songs you and Roger want to play and those songs you know the Who audience always wants to hear? And how much responsibility does a top-price rock band have to give the people what they want vs. playing a set that’s challenging and satisfying for the band itself?

There may be what looks to be an obvious connection between top-price rock and greatest-hits roundups, but I think our situation is so eccentric. It isn’t just that we produced our hits so long ago, but that we stopped producing new music after only 17 years. We have been doing sporadic road work for 42 years. We didn’t produce that many records as the Who, but of the ones we did make, several really stand out—_Who’s Next_, Tommy and Quadrophenia are so much more than Who records. They are part of the foundation stones of rock method. Even to play a smattering of songs from these three records takes a couple of hours.

My hope for this forthcoming tour is that we will be able to do what we did in 1989, but without such a huge band. For that tour, we rehearsed 135 songs and got to play most of them at some point. But the Who isn’t the Grateful Dead. We are a parade of our own unique history—a celebration, an act. We are like wandering minstrels constantly doing the same story; our set piece may be the same, like Punch and Judy, but the world changes.

I hope we can play a lot of our new recording on tour. It has to at least compare to what we already play every day, which just happens to be some of the best rock music a band can enjoy playing. We’re spoiled. Roger is often quite fearful about approaching dangerous new material, whereas I am quite cavalier. But that doesn’t make me brave; it might make me stupid.

The Who’s audience used to be a prime inspiration for your writing. What do you have in common with the Who’s audience at this point?

When the Who’s audience—or a big part of it—could still be traced back to our neighborhood roots in West London, I used them as my inspiration. They were my patrons. They commissioned me to write what they could not express. Sometimes I pleased them, sometimes I didn’t. I was actively encouraged by them in the late ‘70s to explore myself, and quite a few of them identified with my darker solo work. But our American audience, the ones who kept the vast Who machine in action, with its studios, trucks, helicopters, lasers and enormous overhead, started to trouble me. The problem was that radio began to be controlled by advertising agencies, not program directors. Disk jockeys who were Who fans could play Who songs—but only those on a limited list written by those who paid ad revenue. The list included the songs we all now know as Who classics. This made it hard not just to get new songs aired, but also to get feedback on how we were doing. The irony is that those few classic songs have now embedded themselves so deeply in the American consumer’s consciousness that they are almost used as hymns by filmmakers and advertisers.

In 1982, we had to persuade people that our new music was as good as what we had done ten years before. It seemed mad, so I decided to stop trying. Today, we have to persuade people that our new music is as good as what we did between 1964 and 1982. It still seems mad.