The Who to record new album? Pete Townshend is pushing Roger Daltrey for one last record
16 December 2024, 12:29
Will The Who actually get back in the studio together one last time?
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The Who seem to have gone back and forth on their future plans in recent years.
The surviving core of Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey appear to alternate between hints of complete retirement and promises of upcoming live shows.
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But while they've just about kept their hand in on the road in recent years and given us loads of rare and previously unreleased material on various reissues, the last new album by The Who came back in 2019 with Who.
That album followed a long 13-year gap after Endless Wire, itself their first album since 1982's It's Hard.
Since then, Roger Daltrey has repeatedly ruled out any return to the studio for The Who, while Pete Townshend has been much more eager for some sort of recording comeback.
Pete Townshend speaks to Gold
"I know that if Roger and I do tour again, as I’m sure we will, it will probably be one of the last periods that we tour," Townshend told Variety.
"I would love to do another album with Roger. I really enjoyed doing the last one, but he doesn't really want to do that."
He continued: "I feel like with The Who, I’m still trying to push this elephant up the hill, with Roger being resistant to doing new creative work.
"He always says to me, 'Pete, you’ve done enough. We did enough in the early days. That's what people want here. Let's just do that'.
"So I thought about doing solo work, and I'm still a conceptualist; I still want a story to hang the music on. For me it's about pencil sketches, poems, song lyrics, playing with the latest electronic toy, doing books. It's about all kinds of things."
As for why Daltrey is against recording new material, he's previously pointed to the perceived lukewarm response to their last effort.
The Who, Isobel Griffiths Orchestra - Baba O’Riley (Live At Wembley, UK / 2019)
That's despite Who reaching number 2 in the US albums chart and number 3 in the UK, eventually going gold with 100,000 sales.
"What's the point of records? We released an album four years ago, and it did nothing," Daltrey told the NME a short while back.
"It's a great album too, but there isn't the interest out there for new music these days. People want to hear the old music. I don't know why, but that’s the fact."
