The one concert Pete Townshend will never forget: “It was extraordinary”
Every iconic rock band usually needs a great show to tie everything together. For a band like Kiss, the live show is more than half the reason why fans cared in the first place, and even if an act like Radiohead wasn’t looking to be grandstanding rock stars, they at least leaned into their performing selves at least a little bit. The Who may have been one of the first to take the live show to the next level, but Pete Townshend thought that Pink Floyd was carrying on the next extension of his live ambitions.
But when you see footage of what The Who were doing in their prime, it doesn’t usually seem all that spectacular now. The art of getting into a performance has certainly come a long way since the early 1960s, but for people who hadn’t seen this kind of performance style before, it must have been the equivalent of absolute anarchy whenever they went onstage.
Outside of Townshend’s electric stage presence with a guitar in his hand, seeing Roger Daltrey swinging his microphone and screeching at the top of his lungs while Keith Moon unleashed hell from behind the drumkit would have been the hardest thing anyone had ever seen. While we will politely excuse John Entwistle for just standing there half the time, hearing them tell the story of Tommy throughout one relentless piece of music was something no one had even dreamed of before.
Whereas Tommy was the first true rock opera, Roger Waters had wanted to take things to the next level with The Wall. The past few Pink Floyd projects had involved extravagant productions in the studio, but after memorialising their old mate Syd Barrett, Waters wanted to tell the story of a rockstar who shuts himself off from society onstage.
The album itself is already fairly theatrical, but seeing a wall actually being built onstage during the performance was taking things to another level. While the idea of fans looking at a wall as the group plays music sounds boring, the performance of ‘Comfortably Numb’ is still one of the most jaw-dropping sequences in any rock and roll show, with David Gilmour perched atop the wall and shredding his guitar.
The Who’s concerts may have been their own thing, but Townshend thought what Waters came up with was unparalleled, recalling in his book Who I Am, “The show was extraordinary. David Gilmour’s rendition of ‘Comfortably Numb’ will remain with me for my entire life. Roger Waters was spine-chilling, as usual, a towering and formidable presence.”
While ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ is still one of the best rock and roll performances made by human hands, Waters and Gilmour made Townshend’s pet project look like a mild light shot by comparison, especially towards the end of the performance, when everyone shouts to tear down the wall and ‘Pink’ is let out of his self-imposed exile.
Townshend may have told the story of a loner rock star from a different angle, but Waters may have managed to one-up him here. Because as much as fans love the idea of a deaf, dumb, and blind boy trying to figure out his place in the world, it’s better to have someone like Pink to take that story to a much grander scale.
