The Who song Roger Daltrey said was about “being pissed and aggressive and a c***!”
You can’t have a great frontman without them putting their own spin on a band’s music. While many vocalists have been drafted into groups only to sing, it’s a common thread shared between every truly fantastic lead that they bring originality and a hefty dose of themselves to music. Just take The Who legend Roger Daltrey, for example.
The Who always were the sum of their parts. They had a drumming dynamo in Keith Moon, an expressive and unique drummer whose madcap personality underpinned his sound, a thunderous bassist in John Entwistle, whose rapid fingerstyle made a lasting mark on the likes of Geddy Lee, songwriter and guitarist Pete Townshend, the group’s director, and Daltrey, possessing a commanding stage presence and primal wail that set the scene for everyone from Eddie Vedder to Buzz Osborne.
Each man brought something vital to the fold, so it’s no surprise that things were never the same after Moon’s tragic death in 1978. Yet, before that heartbreaking moment, the group released an array of influential songs demonstrating just how forceful their collective power was.
Townshend did most of the writing, but without his bandmates, he would have struggled to bring his increasingly expansive and imaginative ideas to life. A prime example of this is Who’s Next, the 1971 masterpiece born out of the guitarist’s rock opera Lifehouse. It saw the group refine their stadium rock proclivities, drawing upon everything from acoustic ballads to cutting-edge synthesiser sounds, using Townshend’s ideas as the basis.
That is just one example of The Who coming together and moving as a unit over the line. Although fans often discuss the creative prowess of the rhythm section and Townshend, Daltrey’s role in the band is understated. One classic example of him putting his stamp on the situation came in the form of ‘Who Are You’, the title track of the 1978 album of the same name.
Famously, Townshend wrote the song after an arduous 13-hour meeting with the infamous former Beatles manager Allen Klein, who had just secretly bought a stake in The Who’s publishing without telling them. Angry after the meeting, Townshend embarked on a debauched night of getting black-out drunk with two of the biggest stars of the day, Sex Pistols members Steve Jones and Paul Cook, whose band were leading the charge against classic rock acts, apart from The Who, because they helped lay the foundations for their furious rebellion.
Although Townshend would say the lyrics he wrote were more about his new friendship with the young punks than releasing the anger concerning Klein, when the words got to Daltrey, he lifted them to new heights, adding his own perspective. While the guitarist’s portion of the lyrics pointed to “the demands of new friendship”, Daltrey used the opportunity to reaffirm his position as a fierce proto-punk and put the young upstarts in their place, given he felt “threatened” by the genre at the time. Accounting for the attitude in his lyrics and delivery, from his perspective, the song is about “Being pissed and aggressive and a c—!”
When speaking to Uncut in 2015, Daltrey recalled that at the time, the band were getting a lot of incredible accolades from these new punk acts, who were openly lauding The Who, the only group they liked from the establishment they were tearing down.
He said: “But I felt very threatened by the Punk thing at first. To me it was like, ‘Well, they think they’re fucking tough, but we’re fucking tougher.’ It unsettled me in my vocals. When I listen back to ‘Who Are You?’ I can hear that it made me incredibly aggressive. But that’s what that song was about.”
It was only in the years after, in the early 1980s, that Daltrey realised just how important punk had been for refreshing music. The Who toured with The Clash in 1982, and their live show and attitude blew them away.
