Roger Daltrey said the distinctive requirements of singing the Who's songs meant he would have no choice but to retire at some point, and he was ready for it to happen at any time, even though he still loves touring.
In a new interview with Forbes, he accepted that “retirement age” was close and he'll stop when he could no longer “sing to where it touches the audience.” (UCR)
“The Who’s music is very different from most rock,” Daltrey said. “You’re dealing with words from a deep inner space within us all. They have to connect the singer to the audience. If I lose the power to do that, well, I will stop, even if it’s after this tour. I don’t want the downward slope where you’re not quite as good as you used to be.”
He cited the band's classic song “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” which appeared in the recent movie Top Gun: Maverick. “That’s the beauty of [Pete] Townshend’s writing: You can put any kind of action film behind the pulsating music,” he said. “
Then there’s my scream in that song. I can only imagine where that might be [in the movie]. ... Pete had indicated a scream in that part of the song, and I thought, ‘This needs to be completely and utterly primal.’ I’ve always been into the primal shock connection to the audience that a voice can have. ‘Love Reign O’er Me’ has the same kind of thing with the last ‘love.’”
Daltrey noted that he was “lucky enough to be in that generation of bands who believes rock music can be much more than just a three-minute single appealing to teenagers. Here we are at this grand old age of 78, 79 … where people bring their grandchildren to shows, some of them 8 years old. Eight ‘til 80! To know that rock music has achieved that, and that the Who was part of it is the thing I’m most proud of.”
“I don’t want to be like one of these guys that dies on tour,” he explained. "Roger is of the opinion that he wants to sing until he drops. That’s not my philosophy of life. There are other things that I want to do, still want to do, and will do, I hope. I hope I’ll live long enough to do them."
Pete talks on his Inevitable Retirement.
Townshend says as well that he doesn't intend to retire from making music or creating, but he likes the idea of being able to say no to life on the road. "I tend to go into a hotel, build a small recording studio, and try to write songs," he explained of tour life. "That’s how I spent my time in hotel rooms." The rocker further noted that the days of hitting the road out of an obligation to industry executives, and for "a load of people to get a smile on their face," are behind him.
When Rolling Stone Magazine phoned up Pete Townshend in february at his new home in the English countryside, only real goal was to talk about the Who’s upcoming American tour where the band will be paired with local symphonies.
Rolling Stone Quest: Tell me about the show. Sounds like it’ll be similar to the one you did in 2019.
Yeah. We were interrupted by the pandemic. We had a bunch of shows that had been postponed, a couple because of illness with Roger, and also a Vegas stint that should have been tacked on to the end of the tour. And also a visit back to Cincinnati to, at last, close the loop on the disaster that happened back in 1979. We’ve done a lot of work on that. There’s been a documentary [The Who: The Night That Changed Rock] about it. That’s been in the air.
"Two things happened to me over the years. One was dealing with Keith Moon’s death [in 1978] where everything suddenly changed and we needed to replace him not with just another drummer, but with a keyboard player and a brass section. He was actually playing orchestrally, in a sense, as a drummer.
And then when John Entwistle died [in 2002], there was another space left. That was because he was filling up so much of the musical spectrum with his bass sound, which was not a traditional bass sound. And so when he was gone, there was suddenly space for me … not so much to try and fill up the void he had left, but a space where I could have a different approach. I started to solo. I had to learn to practice the guitar [laughs], which I hadn’t done much of before. I’ll never be a famous shredder, but I can play better than I could when we were in the Live at Leeds years, for example." (Read the full article here)
The guitarist, 75, is working in his home studio and “wants to make another” if it was worthwhile financially, calling streaming income “a joke”.
Pete Townshend said the Who’s most recent album, 2019’s Who, caused resentment because it cost too much to make.
Will there be another Who album? I don’t know,” Townshend told Uncut in a new interview. “It was great to have an album out there, something that the fans liked, and I was really proud of it. But far too much money was spent making it. It went out of control completely and ended up costing me money. I can’t go on doing that.” He recalled the work as having been “tough” and added that he believed Daltrey felt the same.
