Despite this, they found themselves back in the recording studio, a place they arguably didn’t need to be, as creating another album seemed like an ill-advised move, given the circumstances.
Only eight months after Moon’s passing, The Who returned to the stage for the first time with Faces drummer Kenney Jones alongside them. (Farout) The new album marked their first record without Moon, and his absence was audible across the LP. Face Dances was the sound of a group who had lost their identity and was bereft of that special spark that once catapulted them to superstardom. It came 16 years after the release of their angsty debut LP, My Generation. Within that period, their lives had substantially changed, and their eyes began to slip off the ball.
While The Who were still live specialists, the low quality of their new output was unavoidable. Their new material gravely lacked the firepower that previously made millions fall in love with them. Additionally, tension between Townshend and Daltrey escalated significantly around this time.
While they’ve always had their issues, tensions boiled over like never before on one fateful night at London’s Rainbow Theatre in 1981. That night, an inebriated Townshend allegedly drank four bottles of brandy before getting into a physical altercation with his bandmate.
“I managed to convince the guys in the band that I would stay alive if they allowed me to work with them again,” Townshend recalled years later. “I had difficulty proving to Roger in particular that I was going to enjoy working with the Who, and that it was important to me that the band end properly, rather than end because of my fucking mental demise,” he added.
Despite the failure of Face Dances, they returned to the studio to make 1982’s It’s Hard, which proved to be another mistake. The recording sessions strained their relationships even further, and judging by Daltrey’s remarks, it was seemingly no longer an enjoyable experience. Instead, it had become just a job.
The album wasn’t up to Daltrey’s standards, and he saw it as a half-baked effort that should never have been released. As much as the frontman would have liked to have never released the project,
Daltrey poured scorn on the album by calling it a “stop-gap album”. However, his criticism has been less subtle as the years have passed.
Some years later, Daltrey admitted: “It’s Hard should never have been released”, and in another interview, he honestly noted: “Face Dances and It’s Hard were made by a band who were very unsure about whether or not they wanted to be making a record, and I think that’s a terrible doubt.”
Instead Roger Daltrey names his favourite song by The Who and the one he never will play again: “Really is off the wall”. For Daltrey, he couldn’t look past the vastly covered and widely known but extremely moving ‘Behind Blue Eyes’, but it hangs on Daltrey’s vocal performance. “‘Behind Blue Eyes’ really is off the wall because that was a song sung by the villain of the piece [Jumbo], the fact that he felt in the original story that he was forced into a position of being a villain whereas he felt he was a good guy.”
“There is also one song, and I won’t ever play it again. There’s a song on the Who Are You album, it’s called ‘Music Must Change’. Every time we played that in the studio, Keith couldn’t play the drums to it. It was in a three, four. Keith couldn’t play normal drums. Keith could play great Moon drums, and that was it.”
