‘Tea & Theatre’: Why The Who didn’t close their final gig with a hit
When The Who played what they insist will be the band’s last ever concert back on October 1st, many fans who’d struggled to keep up with the later chapters of the Pete Townshend + Roger Daltrey frenemy saga were inspired to seek out the setlist of that farewell gig, looking for some sort of narrative closure perhaps.
What they saw was a mostly predictable career-spanning song selection, starting with The Who’s first hit single, 1964’s ‘I Can’t Explain’, then traveling loosely forward in time through ‘Who Are You?’, ‘The Seeker’, ‘Pinball Wizard’, and ‘Behind Blue Eyes’, with the monster arena rock hits from 1971’s Who’s Next closing the bill: ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, ‘Baba O’Riley’ and the inspiration for this final tour’s name, ‘The Song Is Over.’
There was another song that officially closed the book on The Who, however; a coda to ‘The Song is Over’ and a sort of bookend to the Quadrophenia song ‘I’m One’, which had been played a half-hour earlier in the set. Those who’ve seen the group in concert over the past 20 years wouldn’t have been surprised by the choice, but for fans more familiar with the classic catalogue than the 21st-century recordings, it might have raised an eyebrow.
That final number at the farewell show in Thousand Palms, California, was ‘Tea & Theatre’, a track from The Who’s 2006 album Endless Wire. As I am writing this, the song has just a shade under 228,000 streams on Spotify. ‘Baba O’Riley’, by comparison, is sitting near 706million. Since Pete Townshend first penned ‘Tea and Theatre’ as part of the Who’s first new set of tunes in a quarter-century, though, it has served an important role as a heartfelt and personal statement not just on the journey of the band, but on Townshend and Daltrey’s notoriously up-and-down relationship.
“We did it all, didn’t we?” Daltrey sings over a soft acoustic guitar line. “Jumped every wall instinctively / Unravelled codes ingeniously / Wired all the roads so seamlessly / We made it work.”
The song is a wistful pat on the back; an acknowledgement that neither Pete nor Roger could have succeeded as “the one” from the Quadrophenia song, and that they still needed one another, even after so many years, to deal with what was then the recent loss of bassist John Entwistle.
“Before we walk from this stage / Two of us / Will you have some tea / At the theatre with me?”
Speaking with USA Today just before the final gig last month, Townshend said that, “With ‘Tea and Theatre’, our closing song on this tour, as I sit to play the very tricky guitar part, Roger stands beside me and is taller. It feels appropriate. I am so glad now that when he called me to join his band in 1961, a rather lost 16-year-old at the time, I answered, and I went.”
The final performance of ‘Tea & Theatre” included only Townshend’s guitar and Daltrey’s vocals, with the rest of the band having already departed the stage. If you want to be wildly cynical or conspiratorial, you could almost attribute the firing of long-time drummer Zak Starkey earlier this year to a narrative convenience, as it would otherwise have seemed odd not to include him in the band’s final goodbye.
“Roger and I now stand almost alone together,” Townshend said back in 2013, when he was merely a 68-year-old rocker on a potential farewell tour. “We represent not only the original band, but also its Mod audience, and of course, all of our other early fans. We are connected by it.”
Pete, to his credit, did not smash his guitar one last time at the end of ‘Tea and Theatre.’ Instead, he bid a respectful adieu to the audience and, presumably, went backstage for a tea with his old friend from back home.
