3/16/2023 0 Comments The who teenage wastelandTouching on themes of disability, child abuse and faux religion, the album was deemed sick by the music press (“ The Who’s sick opera” cried NME) and disregarded by many as a band on their way down.įans however, loved it and football stadiums across the world were duly filled. A double album that told the tale of the titular deaf, dumb and blind kid, a whizz at pinball and a spokesman for a generation. The audience now happy that The Who had settled for a recognisable “sound” were so wrong, 1969s Tommy was a game changer that not even the most die-hard Who fan could have predicted. Teen angst in tracks like Tattoo and Our Love Was rallied against the psychedelic bombast of I Can See For Miles, a song that firmly established The Who as serious rock contenders. With each song linked by a Radio London jingle or fake commercial this was Radio Who and it spoke to the transistor teens of the time with absolute clarity. It was also a taste of things to come.ġ967’s The Who Sell Out (A play on Beatles for Sale?) was a concept album of sorts to rival Sgt Pepper, a minor threat but a great album nonetheless. Manager Kit Lambert had influenced Townshend with his tastes in the classics, and this ramshackle collection of ditties, glued together to form a saucy narrative was the uneven outcome. The album still featured the three minute pop songs of before but also introduced their first mini rock opera in the form of A Quick One While He’s Away. Those happy with the rootsy, re-produced live sound of The Who, their Goldhawk Road followers, may have been satisfied with this collection of covers and raw early Townshend compositions, but they very soon came face to face with a markedly different Who with A Quick One the following year. ![]() Time spent forming their sound as The Detours and The High Numbers set them behind their contemporaries and their RnB heavy debut was up against The Beatles’ Rubber Soul, The Stones’ Out Of Our Heads and The Kinks’ Kontroversy, all albums that were playing around in the studio at the dawn of psychedelia. ![]() Their debut album, My Generation in late 1965 was hardly the experimental platter that the times were demanding. To question the album’s longevity as a fan favourite and regular feature in magazine polls, it needs to be placed in context, so here’s one way of doing so it must have been exhausting being a Who fan in the 60s. How to follow that? May as well just call it Who’s Next. An in-joke of sorts, possibly referring to the mammoth success of their previous album Tommy, an album that changed the world’s view of The Whoforever, transforming them from an upstart semi-constructed mod band from West London to an Eight legged rock beast. ![]() 45 years ago, this statement was as enigmatic as it remains today. Despite the cheeky accompanying cover shot of the band taking turns to pee against a concrete monolith, this is not a question but a statement. Look at the apostrophe and lack of question mark. Rising from the ashes of one of rock’s most notorious lost albums, Getintothis’ Del Pike looks back on 45 years of Who’s Next.
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