Pete Townshend names the best band he saw live: “The maddest I’ve ever seen”
As the 1960s started to expand in the wake of the British invasion, there was still no one who could compare to The Who. While Pete Townshend had opened up people’s minds to what a rock act could do on albums like Tommy, their true power showed itself on the live stage, where every member seemed to be running on pure adrenaline from the minute that the first chord rang out. For every exciting act, though, there’s always someone to top what has come before, and Townshend considered Queen as the ones taking his brand of rock and roll that much further.
Because as much as Townshend loved telling a story with his music, there were only so many directions a concept album could take in those days. Quadrophenia may have set the world on fire, just like the deaf, dumb, and blind boy had, but sometimes, the concept is worth more than just an album, like on the Lifehouse project.
If The Who were both live entertainment and glorified theatre, Queen were pure spectacle right out of the gate on their first album. Even by most musicians’ standards of being rough around the edges on their debut, ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ was proof that these were seasoned pros, already having their trademark harmonies intact and pummelling riffs that could even put Led Zeppelin to shame.
But even though Townshend practically invented the idea of the power chord, Brian May took the guitar in a different direction. Because if the vocal harmonies worked so well, then why not layer the leads in the same way? So now, whenever Queen came on the radio, you were also getting a guitar symphony right alongside the sing-along choruses.
Even when they transitioned into their pop selves in the 1980s, not one piece of their talent was lost along the way. Freddie Mercury still commanded those arena crowds the same way that he did a rowdy club, and May made every one of his riffs sound gigantic when tearing through their set at Live Aid.
While Townshend was hard at work putting together songs like ‘You Better You Bet’ for Face Dances, he knew that Queen were well above anything that they could have reached, recalling in Who I Am, “I went to see Queen at Wembley, and I thought they were about the maddest group I’d ever seen. They were bigger than The Who in the UK by this time.”
At the same time, it’s hard to measure The Who next to Queen by the 1980s. Since they had lost one of rock’s trademark characters, Keith Moon, they would always struggle to recapture that kind of magic, usually electing to go in different directions on tracks like ‘Eminence Front’ in their later years.
But what Queen did went beyond just their stage presence. These were musical technicians at work whenever they stepped out on that stage, and since Townshend had witnessed them at Wembley, chances are he saw fellow geniuses working to make sure they gave each and every audience member a memory that would last a lifetime.
