Pete Townshend on the “best album that The Who made”
In the early 1960s, several British bands began to latch onto the American rock ‘n’ roll craze. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who and The Kinks made significant strides in 1964 and established a stable British presence in the US charts the following year. Hits like ‘All Day and All of the Night’ and ‘My Generation’ were the start of something truly transformative in Western pop music. However, if these bands were to last, they needed to establish more coherent identities.
For their part, The Kinks brought a distinctly English edge to their psychedelic hits like ‘Sunny Afternoon’ and ‘Dandy’. Thanks to the lyrical genius of frontman Ray Davies, they continued to prosper into the early 1970s. Meanwhile, Pete Townshend, the guitarist and principal songwriter of The Who, began to show that rock music could convey tight narratives in his revolutionary rock operas.
Speaking to Guitar World in a past interview, Ray Davies revealed his longstanding admiration for Townshend and The Who. “Most of the bands The Kinks toured with were just in it for the fun: to make money and buy a nice car,” he said. “But with The Who, you got the feeling that they were out to rewrite the rules. Which attracted me because I was trying to do the same thing.”
After juggling a few conceptual ideas in A Quick One and the spiritual psychedelic era album The Who Sell Out, Townshend unveiled his first and most famous rock opera, Tommy. The 1969 album was a huge success for The Who, igniting Townshend’s already restless creativity. For his next rock opera, he envisioned an project of unprecedented scope entitled Lifehouse, in which he would use audience interaction to create new music.
Townshend toiled with the ambitious idea for several months before abandoning it. According to frontman Roger Daltrey, Lifehouse was the closest The Who ever came to breaking up. Fortunately, the band managed to capitalise on the residual material, releasing most of it on their masterpiece album Who’s Next in 1971.
Although Who’s Next carried no distinctive narrative from start to finish, fragments of Townshend’s story existed in classic hits like ‘Baba O’Riley’ and ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. The guitarist has since returned to the Lifehouse project on several occasions, most satisfactorily in the 2024 graphic novel Life House. Townshend discussed his return to the project in a 2023 interview with Far Out.
For many fans, Tommy is The Who’s most enduring opera and Who’s Next is the greatest all-rounder LP. Despite being immensely proud of Tommy, Townshend has several misgivings about it and, principally, has never liked ‘Pinball Wizard’. Since Who’s Next is a reminder of a failed concept, he feels the band’s most consummate product was 1973’s Quadrophenia. “I think it’s the best album that The Who made,” he told Steve Harris in 1996. “I also think it’s one of the most cohesive stories that I wrote, and in doing this kind of thing, I learn a tremendous amount.”
Following the spiritual and fantastical stories of Tommy and Lifehouse, Quadrophenia was a more Earthly concept. The story revolves around a mod, Jimmy, who struggles to find purpose and identity in his life as he enters romantic relationships and clashes against the rockers on Brighton Beach. The concept was adapted into the popular movie of the same name starring Phil Daniels in 1979, though Townshend has said on several occasions that he wasn’t particularly pleased about how the movie turned out.
Speaking to Steve Harris, Townshend discussed his early 1990s remix of Quadrophenia, claiming that the remastered version finally did justice to the album ahead of stage adaptations. “I’m particularly proud of the remixing of Quadrophenia, which I think is partly why I wanted to accelerate this live performance aspect of it,” he said. “Although I’m very proud of what I did, I took on more than I could handle. Towards the end, particularly in the mixing, I think I ill-served the record. When we’ve remixed it, it’s really turned out to be absolutely spectacular, in my view, just fabulous.”