The Who songs the band don’t want to play live: “I’m bloody bored shitless”
A band that has been going for as long as The Who will, of course, begin to tire of a few tracks in the setlist. If anyone has been playing one song longer than they can remember, there are only so many times that they can start the opening guitar figure or hear the first drum beat before they realise that things aren’t clicking with them whenever they play live. But as far as Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey are concerned, the setlist would be a lot more fun if it meant getting rid of a few of their classics.
Then again, Townshend has probably lived in certain songs for longer than anyone on Earth. He had to be the one to show everyone the tune before laying it down on tape, so it would have had to be at least somewhat listenable to make it past the demo stage and played hundreds of times in the studio without someone wanting to rip their headphones off.
Towards the end of the group’s tenure, though, Townshend admitted that he started to have complicated feelings about certain tunes, including his performance on ‘Dreaming From the Waist’ and ‘Sister Disco’. While both of them are far from the group’s finest hour, Townshend felt that taking them onstage felt more like an embarrassment every time Daltrey tried to put some energy into everything.
When talking about performing them, Townshend said the sole reason he enjoyed parts of those songs is because it made Daltrey angry, saying, “‘Sister Disco’ I hate even more than ‘Dreaming From The Waist’ because there is a point in which every time we’ve done it where Roger comes over to me, stands next to me and makes some kind of soppy smile…Often that will be the moment where I look him in the face and go, ‘you fucking wanker’, and he gets angry.”
Just because a song is uninspired in the studio doesn’t mean it can’t come alive onstage. Most of the best performers can make any song work if they have the right idea, but even Daltrey admitted that some of Townshend’s epics were completely boring to play live.
Outside of boasting one of the best screams in rock and roll, Daltrey said that ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ is the kind of tune that he would have retired years ago, saying, “That’s the only song I’m bloody bored shitless with. I don’t know why, but I’m being honest. I never seem to be in the same pocket where I’m singing it for the first time.”
The same could be said for the epic ‘Rael’ from The Who Sell Out, which Daltrey thought worked much better as a studio track than a proper live cut. Looking at both of their tastes, Townshend and Daltrey also seem to resent a few of their songs for completely different reasons. You have Daltrey, who wants to relive the tunes all over again, and yet Townshend wants to forget that some of them came out in the first place.
But for those few hours onstage, though, all of that seems to melt away whenever they go for the evergreen pieces like ‘My Generation’. Daltrey might be over the screams of ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, and Townshend may have had his fill on the faux camaraderie, but whenever they break out tunes like ‘Love Reign O’er Me’, nothing else matters other than the music.
