The Who Not Rushing First New Album Since 1982
Surviving Who principals Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey are making progress on the first new album under the group name since 1982’s “It’s Hard,” but Daltrey says there is no timetable to finish the project.
“It will come out when it is ready,” he tells Billboard. “What’s the point of trying to give yourself deadlines that aren’t really important? I think we have to get it good before we can finish it.”
Describing the process of developing material, Daltrey admits, “We are doing it in a very different way. All the time that [the late bassist] John [Entwistle] was in the band, we kind of felt we had to go in as a group. Now, it is really only Pete and I, and Pete wants to do all the guitars and some of the bass playing. Whether we will end up going into the studio with a band and recording it all again, I don’t know. These are all the kinds of bridges that we need to cross.”
Daltrey says he has three tracks written for the project. “One of them is particularly fantastic in the older Who-type vain,” he enthuses. “Another is particularly fantastic in a completely different way. These songs are all about the spirit and the emotion. Whether or not they are successful in today’s world, who knows? The business is totally different now.”
The artist says he’s particularly excited about the Townshend song “Black Widow’s Eyes,” which concerns Stockholm syndrome. “The fact that he’s done that in music and words, and he completely sums up Stockholm syndrome in this song, is so haunting,” he says. “Imagine how difficult it is for Pete. He doesn’t need to write another song. God almighty, all that music out of one head. But he seems driven at the moment, which is great because I’ve always felt that he was the kind of writer who would write his best stuff at the age he is now. His skills have caught up with his intellect.”
As previously reported, the Who will tour Europe this summer, with additional international dates to follow later in the year. “If we can go out and play festival spots and play our hits, we can relight the fire,” Daltrey says. “It’s amazing when young people see the band. We’ve had an incredible resurgence with young people.
Daltrey is also involved in a long-in-the-works biopic about late Who drummer Keith Moon, but declined to reveal details. “We’ve had three or four scripts written, and we’ve never quite nailed what we wanted to do,” he admits. “We’ve got a new writer. A very famous writer, a Pulitzer Prize winner indeed. I can’t name him because I don’t know the situation at the moment. You can’t tell someone’s life story in two hours on film. If I can do it, I hope to make a real rock’n’roll film that will be funny, poignant, sad, celebratory, all the things that Moon was. But if I can’t, I’m very glad that I’m holding the reins and stopping any bad films of Keith Moon being made.”
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