The 2024 Teenage Cancer Trust benefit concert series, held annually at the Royal Albert Hall in London, will wrap up with a previously announced March 24 show saluting The Who’s Roger Daltrey. Unfortunately, the singer’s Who bandmate Pete Townshend has revealed that he no longer will be taking part in the star-studded event.
The concert, dubbed Ovation, will celebrate the charity series’ 24-year history, while paying tribute to Daltrey, who is stepping away from his duties as the event’s main organizer after this year. Both Daltrey and Townshend had initially been announced as part of the performance lineup, along with Robert Plant, Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, ex-Jam frontman Paul Weller, and Stereophonics singer Kelly Jones.
“I am sorry to say that I will not be performing with Roger at his OVATION event on Sunday 24th March,” he wrote. “It was assumed by the organizers that I would be appearing after the two Who shows with orchestra, but in fact I will be in New York doing TV shows to support the opening of The Who’s TOMMY on Broadway which happens on March 28th.”
Townshend also noted that he had a special event he was attending on March 27.
“I’m sorry for anyone who feels I have let them down,” he added. “[M]y New York dates have been in my calendar for several months and I have tried to address this calendar conflict with Roger and Who management without any result.” “I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, Roger should have a knighthood for his Teenage Cancer Trust campaigning.”
Townshend went on to assure fans that “Roger is perfectly capable of blowing your minds in a solo show without me, and has a wonderful array of guests lined up to celebrate his 24 years of producing and performing at the annual Teenage Cancer Trust Concerts at the Royal Albert Hall.”
“I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, Roger should have a knighthood for his Teenage Cancer Trust campaigning.”
The Who’s Tommy, the landmark rock opera that opened on Broadway in 1993, will return for a new run in March 2024. Nederlander Theatre will host the production starting with previews on March 8 before a full opening on March 28. The original run closed in 1993, before a one-off revival by the original cast in 2008.
“We Didn’t Know ‘Tommy’ Would Be A Hit”: Since making its initial debut at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in Soho London in early May 1969, The Who’s ground-breaking rock opera Tommy has taken on many different forms. From a Woodstock set to a ballet, a Tony-winning musical and then a classic double album in 1969.
Now 50 years later, Pete Townshend’s conceptual masterpiece has one again been reimagined as a live rock record featuring an ambitious new orchestration by renowned composer and arranger David Campbell on Tommy Orchestral. “When I heard the live recordings of it [Tommy], I thought, this needs to be out there on record,” “There’s something about the night this was captured on this record, it had an energy and a spirit about it – truly the spirit of 1969.”
“It came out in a time when the youth in America were really being hammered by the Vietnam War,” explains Daltrey. “It was kind of a spiritual awakening in some ways. It captured people’s imagination and off it went.”
With Tommy, Uncle Ernie, Cousin Kevin and the other cast of characters, every one of them is a “metaphor for the human condition,” Daltrey says. Anyone can be one of these archetypes, it just “depends of how you deal with the situation you’re faced with”.
The Who frontman Roger Daltrey has offered his take on modern music, arguing that rock is “dead” and that rappers are the “only people saying things that matter”.
One of rock’s veterans has claimed that the gig is over: only rappers have anything to say now. Roger Daltrey, now 79, the singer with the groundbreaking British band the Who, said he was saddened that rock had “reached a dead end”.In an interview with The Times Magazine, conducted as the band played the Desert Trip “festival to end all festivals” in California, Daltrey suggested that because of his band’s innate aggression they still had a tang of danger.
Daltrey said: “The sadness for me is that rock has reached a dead end… the only people saying things that matter are the rappers and most pop is meaningless and forgettable.” “You watch these [new pop stars] and you can’t remember a bloody thing.”
When asked about new music from The Who, he laughs. “What’s the point? What’s the point of records? We released an album 4 years ago (The Who’s twelfth studio album, WHO was released on 6 December 2019) and it did nothing. It’s a great album too, but there isn’t the interest out there for new music these days. People want to hear the old music. I don’t know why, but that’s the fact.”
You play some of our records today and they sound as modern as they did the day they were released.”
“I think it’s the style that (Pete) Townshend writes in and the position of his psychology that you wrote from, this is so different than anything else that’s out there.”
This follows previous comments Daltrey made in 2014, when he bemoaned the current generation of music artists for lacking “angst and purpose“.
