The Who song Roger Daltrey refuses to play live: “We dropped it for a long, long time”
The Who have honed their craft as a live act over 60 years to perfection. During that time, Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend picked up every trick in the book and contributed a few of their own for others to copy. They’ve also collated an immensely strong back catalogue full of hits, making their job easy on stage.
Admittedly, most of the material they play derives from their early years, when Keith Moon was still alive. Following 1982, they became a nostalgia act rather than attempting to stay relevant and have only released two albums of original material in the last 42 years. However, as their material is so beloved, nobody is crying out to hear a new album from The Who.
Even without adding new material, The Who have a wealth of choice when selecting the material for their live sets. However, there’s one song that Daltrey now refuses to sing, and there’s a sentimental reason why he prefers to leave it buried in the past. As their output has shown following Moon’s death, he was an irreplaceable part of The Who. However, during the final chapter of his life, the drummer’s health declined significantly, and his relationships with his bandmates also became particularly fractured.
Moon’s addiction struggles began to infect every area of his life, including his ability to play his instrument. The final album that the band recorded before his tragic passing was the 1978 release, Who Are You. The record features ‘Music Must Change’, a track Moon was unable to play in the studio, which was an alarming moment for his bandmates.
The drummer was widely regarded as one of the most talented technicians in rock, so it seemed implausible that he couldn’t contribute to ‘Music Must Change’. Despite Moon’s best efforts, they were forced to recruit a session musician to play the drums on the final recording.
Although the group immediately inserted the track into their set following the album’s release and Moon’s death, they have refrained from performing ‘Music Must Change’ since a concert in 1981. Daltrey is determined to never perform it again, which he made clear upon appearing on Howard Stern’s programme on Sirius XM in 2015. The singer told the legendary broadcaster: “There is one, 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.”
They tried everything with Moon to help him learn the track, but it was all to no avail. Daltrey revealed one particularly peculiar technique they attempted: “He just couldn’t do that, so he had to do it with a pair of squeaky boots walking the pavement and do a squeaky walk to do the rhythm. Anyway, Keith is not on that recording on the record, and straight after we made that record, he died.”
For Daltrey, the song is a reminder of Moon’s dark last days and later took on a secondary ominous meaning to him. The singer sorrowfully explained: “We played the song when we got back together with Kenny Jones as drummer, and then we dropped it for a long, long time. We brought it back in 2002 for the last tour with John Entwistle, and we rehearsed it, we were going to do it in the show, then John died.”
As a result of Entwistle’s death, Daltrey believes a curse is now attached to ‘Music Must Change’, and The Who will never risk performing it again due to the bad omens it brings. It’s a track that reminds him of the painful loss of two former bandmates, who both died far too young. Although, in reality, there’s no curse attached to ‘Music Must Change’, Daltrey has strong reason to believe otherwise.
