Pete Townshend Aims For The Who Reunion All He Needs Is Roger Daltrey

Pete Townshend has expressed a desire for The Who to embark on farewell tour dates before they “crawl off and die.” However, whether this tour would include new material following their 2019 album, Who, remains uncertain.

Roger Daltrey, Townshend’s bandmate, seems uninterested in returning to the studio, and Townshend isn’t inclined to push him. Townshend tells the Daily Beast:

“I’m not gonna try to bully Roger to do anything.
“I don’t want to have the job that I used to have around the time of Quadrophenia, which is bullying everybody in The Who to do exactly what I want to do.”

Who was a Top 5 international hit and achieved gold status in the U.K. It marked the band’s first new release since Endless Wire in 2006, which also saw chart success in both America and the U.K. If The Who does not record new material, their final performances would be the series of orchestral U.K. shows from 2023. Last year also saw the release of The Who With Orchestra Live at Wembley, a recording of their 2019 concert in London.

Townshend envisions a future tour with a smaller, more intimate lineup. “I’m hoping Roger and I can find some common ground and find some way to work again, possibly without an orchestra because I think we’ve done that,” Townshend said. “But also, there’s this sense that we’re in the last tour period of our career. Are we just hoping to do what Bob Dylan does and just keep going?”

Daltrey seems open to the idea of smaller-scale touring, having performed a series of intimate U.S. shows in June. Townshend admits:

“I’m encouraged by seeing what Roger’s doing in his solo tour.
“It seems to me that if we put a small band together and just decided to throw shit at the wall, it might be great.”

The Who’s Issues with Communication

One obstacle is their lack of communication.

“Roger and I don’t converse. We don’t talk. So, it might be difficult to land on something that we both share an interest in – but it’s there for the taking, I think.”

During the period when Townshend was “bullying” his bandmates, The Who was on a successful streak. Quadrophenia arrived in the early ’70s, part of a run of six consecutive platinum or multi-platinum albums in the U.S. Townshend reflects:

“It worked, yeah – but it was no fun.
“And at the end of that, Roger knocked me out. I asked for it, but he knocked me out. Anyway, I’m hopeful. I’m certainly not saying that we won’t do anything, but Roger and I do have a bit of a river to cross. And once we cross that river, we’ll see what happens.”