The most underrated album by The Who, according to Roger Daltrey
Musically, The Who centralised a match made in heaven with Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey. Though they experienced significant tensions from time to time, it was these frustrations that pushed the music to new levels of excellence, pushing them to create some of the most legendary tracks in the history of rock music.
For the most part, working with Townshend for Daltrey was like trying to get the top-of-the-class kid to open up about his secrets while working on a school project. Most of the time, it was the kind of friendship where you knew you appreciated and admired one another but couldn’t stand each other at the best of times, and the dynamic often felt like a high-stakes balancing act.
Daltrey respected Townshend’s brilliance and drive, but their different approaches and personalities often clashed, leading to animosity, arguments, and even fistfights. A lot of these issues actually arose from Townshend’s shut-off ways of working, which would see him writing independently from the rest of the band without much leeway for taking on new ideas.
Even when he wrote ‘My Generation’, Townshend infused the song with his own personal experiences while incorporating elements from others’ perspectives to fit his larger vision. For Tommy, he became intensely focused on the central narrative of a boy who learns to connect with his family through music. While working on Quadrophenia, Townshend and Daltrey frequently clashed over the album’s mix and the direction of the band, leading to explosive disagreements and conflicts.
This was often rooted in the ways Townshend preferred to work, but other times, it was compounded by things going on in his personal life that made him put his walls up. This happened most notably during the writing for The Who by Numbers, a time when Daltrey had yet to learn the recipe for encouraging Townshend to open up so that the record could feel like a collective and collaborative effort again.
As a result, Townshend powered through, writing in solitary while pushing away anyone who attempted to get through to him. In Daltrey’s mind, this was a major problem because it left the rest of them out of the process. However, it also resulted in a brilliant record, even if the rest of their audience doesn’t appreciate it as much as he feels they should.
In an interview with Uncut, Daltrey discussed the album he regards as the most underrated in their discography. He chose The Who by Numbers because it has an overtly “dark” edge due to the “terrible agonies” Townshend was going through, like alcohol abuse and marriage issues. This injected the album with a “brooding, deep, introspective” feel that Daltrey loved, but it materialised out of a situation he thoroughly loathed.
“He was also starting to write himself into a very cosy situation where nothing was shared, which put the rest of us in a very difficult position because you don’t want to upset a working apple cart,” Daltrey reflected. After the fact, he learned the hard way that to get through to Townshend, he should have checked in more because he may hold up a “stone wall”, but he “really wants you to knock down the fucking wall and come through it.”
However, it’s never as easy as that, especially when a supposed friend doesn’t always tell you what they’re thinking or what it is that they need. Supposedly the silver lining from his experience was the gorgeous melancholic lines Townshend threaded through The Who by Numbers and the whirlwind of sombre notes and emotions that will forever remind Daltrey of a specific moment in time.
