The story of The Who

Acton boys and the Detours

Roger Daltrey was born on the first of March 1944 at Hammersmith Hospital in West London, during a wartime bombing raid. As a baby he was evacuated with his mother to a farm in Scotland. Back in Acton he did well enough in the eleven plus exam to win a place at Acton County Grammar School, but he never fitted in there. He found street gangs and rock and roll instead, and at fifteen he was expelled and went to work on a building site. He could not afford a proper guitar, so he built one himself, a homemade copy of a Stratocaster. Around 1959 he formed a band called the Detours, and he ran it with his fists. Pete Townshend later said that if you argued with Roger, you usually got punched.[1] [2]

Pete Townshend was born on the nineteenth of May 1945 in Chiswick, ten days after Germany surrendered. His father Cliff played saxophone in the Royal Air Force dance band the Squadronaires, and his mother Betty was a singer. Their marriage was stormy, both of them drank, and when Pete was a small boy he was sent to live with his grandmother for about two years. He later described her as clinically insane, and said that time fed into the story of Tommy. In his memoir years later he wrote about abuse he suffered as a child. At school he was bullied over the size of his nose. His grandmother bought him a cheap Spanish guitar for Christmas in 1956, and he taught himself, never learning to read music.[1] [2]

John Entwistle was born on the ninth of October 1944 in Hammersmith. His parents split up soon after, and he was raised by his mother at his grandparents' house in South Acton, a quiet only child. He was the one Who member with formal training. He started piano at seven, moved to trumpet, and played French horn in the Middlesex Schools orchestra. At Acton County Grammar he met Pete Townshend, and the two formed a trad jazz group called the Confederates, with Pete on banjo. When rock and roll took over, John tried guitar, but his fingers were too big, and the twangy low notes of Duane Eddy pulled him toward bass. He could not afford one, so he built his own. One day Roger Daltrey spotted him carrying it down the street and signed him up.[1] [2]

In 1961 John suggested his friend Pete as a second guitarist, and the Detours played Shadows instrumentals, pop hits and trad jazz at weddings and works parties. The singer, Colin Dawson, kept arguing with Roger and left, so Roger stepped up to lead vocals and Pete became the only guitarist. A bricklayer named Doug Sandom took over the drums in 1962. He was older and married, and he often kept the peace. Supporting Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, Pete watched their guitarist Mick Green play rhythm and lead at once, and built his own style from it. Meanwhile at Ealing Art College, where Ronnie Wood was a fellow student, Pete saw lectures on auto destructive art by Gustav Metzger. The idea stuck with him.[1] [2] [3]

From the High Numbers to the Who

In February 1964 the band learned that another group was already called the Detours, so they needed a new name. Pete and his art school housemate Richard Barnes stayed up a night trying out joke names. Pete liked the Hair. Barnes liked the Who, because it had a pop punch. The next morning Roger settled it, saying it was the Who, obviously. Soon after, the band auditioned for Fontana Records, and the producer complained about the drumming. Pete turned on Doug Sandom, and Doug left the band that April. The two did not speak for fourteen years. Pete only learned much later that Doug had once defended him, when an executive had dismissed the young guitarist as gangly, noisy and ugly.[1] [2] [3]

Keith Moon was born on the twenty third of August 1946 and grew up in Wembley. He was a hyperactive boy who loved the Goon Show and explosions from his chemistry set. He tried the bugle in the Sea Cadets, found it too hard, and switched to drums, later taking lessons from Carlo Little, the thunderous drummer with Screaming Lord Sutch. By day he sold plaster for British Gypsum, and by night he played with a covers band called the Beachcombers. In late April 1964 he turned up at a Who gig at the Oldfield Hotel in Greenford, where a stand in was on drums, and asked to sit in. He played so hard he broke a bass drum pedal and a skin. The band offered him the job.[1] [2]

Their next manager was Peter Meaden, a leading face on the London mod scene. He decided the band should speak for the mods, the sharp dressed kids on scooters who loved soul and rhythm and blues. He dressed them in mod clothes, renamed them the High Numbers, and wrote lyrics for a single, Zoot Suit backed with I'm the Face, set to borrowed tunes. It flopped, even though Meaden reportedly bought up many copies himself to try to push it up the charts. Then two young film assistant directors appeared. Kit Lambert was the Oxford educated son of the composer Constant Lambert. Chris Stamp was a tugboat captain's son from the East End and the brother of actor Terence Stamp. They had come looking for a band to make a film about.[1] [2] [3]

Lambert and Stamp found them at the Railway Hotel in Wealdstone, in north west London. A lawyer told them Meaden's contract was not legally valid, so they bought him out, and the band went back to being the Who, with the slogan Maximum R and B. At the Railway that June, Pete lifted his guitar and cracked its head on the low ceiling. The crowd laughed, so he smashed the whole guitar on the stage and grabbed another. The next week the audience wanted a repeat, and Keith obliged by kicking over his drums. Destruction became part of the act, along with Roger whipping his microphone cable and Pete's windmilling right arm. Rolling Stone later named that night one of the moments that changed rock history.[1] [2] [3]

Maximum R and B and My Generation

Lambert and Stamp got the band in front of Shel Talmy, the American producer behind the Kinks. Pete wrote a song called I Can't Explain that deliberately sounded like the Kinks, to catch Talmy's ear. It worked. The song was recorded in November 1964 at Pye Studios in London, with a vocal group called the Ivy League adding backing harmonies and a young session guitarist named Jimmy Page in the room. It came out in Britain on the fifteenth of January 1965. At first it barely moved. Then pirate stations like Radio Caroline picked it up, and the band played it on the TV show Ready Steady Go, with the studio packed with their own mod fans from the Goldhawk club in Shepherd's Bush. By April it had climbed to number eight.[1] [2] [3]

The follow up, Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere, was written by Pete and Roger together and was full of feedback and switch clicking noise, so strange that the band's American label first turned it down. It became the theme for Ready Steady Go. Inside the band, though, things were raw. They were not really friends, apart from Keith and John, who went clubbing together. On a tour of Denmark in September 1965, Roger flushed Keith's amphetamines down the toilet and beat him up. The others sacked him. Roger was allowed back only on condition that the band became a democracy. He later said he knew that if he lost the Who, he would be a sheet metal worker for the rest of his life.[1] [2]

My Generation came out on the twenty ninth of October 1965. Pete had first written it as a slow blues, but the band turned it into something ferocious, with key changes, a bass solo from John that was one of the first in rock, and Roger stuttering the lines like a mod on pills. The famous line was, I hope I die before I get old. Pete always said it was not meant literally, and once explained that for him, old meant very rich. The BBC at first refused to play the record, worried it would offend people who stutter, but changed its mind as the song caught fire. It reached number two in Britain, their highest chart position there. The debut album My Generation followed that December.[1] [2]

Then the band fell out with Shel Talmy, and a bitter legal fight followed. Talmy kept the master tapes, which is why the My Generation album could not be properly reissued until 2002. The Who moved to Robert Stigwood's Reaction label for Substitute, which Pete called a parody of the Rolling Stones. Kit Lambert took over as producer with I'm a Boy, a song from an abandoned opera idea about a boy raised as a girl. Tempers stayed hot. On the twentieth of May 1966, Keith and John turned up late to a gig after spending the day with Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys. During My Generation, Pete hit Keith with his guitar, leaving him with a black eye. Keith and John quit for a week, then came back.[1] [2] [3]

Monterey, explosions and The Who Sell Out

To ease money worries, Kit Lambert set up a publishing deal that required every member to write two songs for the next album. John came up with Boris the Spider and found his role as the band's second songwriter, with a taste for dark comedy. The album still ran ten minutes short, so Lambert pushed Pete to write something longer. The result was A Quick One, While He's Away, a mini opera stitched together from short song fragments. The album reached number four in Britain. By now the mod scene was fading, Ready Steady Go was ending, and Lambert and Stamp knew the band had to break America. In the spring of 1967 the Who played a New York package show, two or three sets a day, with Keith kicking over his kit every time.[1] [2] [3]

Their big American moment came at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967. Jimi Hendrix was on the same bill, and he also planned to wreck his guitar. Pete did not want to follow him and accused Hendrix of stealing his act. In the end the Who went on first, played at full fury and destroyed their equipment. Hendrix then played with his own imported Marshall stacks, and biographer Tony Fletcher wrote that he sounded so much better than the Who that it was embarrassing. Still, Monterey made the Who's name in America. Pete also took a very strong dose of LSD after the festival, and it was his last. Within a year he had turned against psychedelic drugs completely.[1] [2] [3]

Next came a tour of American arenas opening for Herman's Hermits, and Keith discovered that powerful cherry bomb fireworks were legal to buy in Alabama. Hotel toilets began to explode. On the twenty third of August 1967, his twenty first birthday, the party at a Holiday Inn in Flint, Michigan turned into a riot of cake, fire extinguishers and furniture in the pool. Keith knocked out a front tooth, and the police arrived with guns drawn. The bill was around twenty four thousand dollars. That autumn, on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on American TV, Keith bribed a stagehand to load explosives into his bass drum. The man used about ten times too much. The blast threw Keith off his riser, and Pete later blamed it for damaging his hearing.[1] [2] [3]

Pete had been saving one song as his ace in the hole, I Can See for Miles. When it finally came out in late 1967 he was sure it would be a number one. It stopped at number ten in Britain, and he said he spat on the British record buyer. In America it reached number nine, still their biggest hit there. It sat on The Who Sell Out, released in December 1967, an album built like a pirate radio broadcast, complete with jingles and fake adverts for baked beans and deodorant. That year Lambert and Stamp also launched their own label, Track Records, and signed Jimi Hendrix. In early 1968 a tour of Australia ended with the Prime Minister sending a telegram telling the band never to return. They stayed away until 2004.[1] [2] [3]

Tommy, Woodstock and Live at Leeds

By 1968 the Who were in trouble. Their single Dogs had flopped, the stage smashing kept them in debt, and a break up seemed possible. Pete had found a new direction through a friend, who introduced him to the teachings of the Indian spiritual master Meher Baba. By April 1968 Pete called himself a disciple, and gave up drugs. In May he married Karen Astley, whom he had met at art school. That August he told Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner the entire plot of a new rock opera in an interview that ran to eleven pages. It was about a boy who is struck deaf, dumb and blind after witnessing a killing, and who later becomes a spiritual leader. Kit Lambert, who had coined the phrase rock opera, cheered him on.[1] [2] [3]

Recording began at IBC Studios in London on the nineteenth of September 1968 and dragged on for six months, with gigs every weekend to keep the bills paid. Lambert typed up a full script to help the band follow the story. Pete asked John to write the two cruelest songs, Cousin Kevin, about a bully, and Fiddle About, about Tommy being sexually abused by his Uncle Ernie, because Pete felt he could not write anything that nasty himself. When the critic Nik Cohn, a pinball fanatic, was lukewarm about the early tapes, Pete made Tommy a pinball champion and wrote Pinball Wizard. In December the band stole the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus TV special with A Quick One, a film the Stones then shelved until 1996.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tommy came out in May 1969 and sold two hundred thousand copies in America in its first two weeks. Life magazine said it outstripped anything ever made in a recording studio. Roger, with his hair grown long and his shirt open, became the image of the seventies rock singer. That August the Who played Woodstock, after insisting on thirteen thousand dollars up front. They finally went on around five on the Sunday morning and played most of Tommy. As they reached See Me, Feel Me, the sun came up almost on cue, and John joked that God was their lighting man. But they hated the festival. Roger called it the worst gig they ever played, and Pete said he thought the whole of America had gone mad.[1] [2]

They far preferred the Isle of Wight Festival a couple of weeks later. Pete said the field of rubbish left behind by the fans gave him the phrase teenage wasteland. By early 1970 the band were being called the best live act in the world, but Pete could not face sifting through hours of American concert tapes, and ordered them burned. Instead they booked two shows to record, Leeds University on the fourteenth of February and Hull the next night. The bass was missing on some of the Hull tapes, so Leeds became Live at Leeds, released that May in a plain sleeve made to look like a bootleg. Many critics still call it the greatest live rock album. The Tommy tour even took them into the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.[1] [2] [3]

There was tragedy at the start of 1970, too. On the fourth of January, Keith was leaving the Red Lion pub in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, when a crowd outside began attacking his Bentley. Drunk, Keith tried to drive away from them, and hit and killed his friend and driver Neil Boland. After an investigation the coroner ruled the death an accident, and Keith, who had been charged with several offences, was given an absolute discharge. People close to him said he never got over it. The singer and writer Pamela Des Barres recalled that he had nightmares about that night and told her he had no right to be alive. Tommy had made the Who millionaires, but Keith's drinking was only getting heavier.[1]

Lifehouse, Who's Next and Quadrophenia

Pete's next idea was even bigger. Lifehouse was to be a science fiction film and rock opera about a future where people live inside government controlled suits and a rebel broadcasts rock music to set them free. Some of it sounds a lot like the internet. Pete wanted to feed the audience's personal details into a synthesizer to create a single universal chord. The band tried it out in early 1971 at the Young Vic theatre in London, but the crowds mostly wanted My Generation and a smashed guitar. Sessions in New York collapsed, partly because Kit Lambert's addiction to hard drugs left him unable to produce. The strain pushed Pete to the edge of a nervous breakdown, and Roger said the band had never been closer to splitting.[1] [2] [3]

The engineer Glyn Johns rescued the songs. The band started again in April 1971 at Mick Jagger's country house, Stargroves, using the Rolling Stones' mobile studio, then moved to Olympic Studios. For Won't Get Fooled Again, Johns kept the pulsing organ from Pete's home demo. Baba O'Riley was named after Meher Baba and the composer Terry Riley, and Keith suggested the violinist Dave Arbus, whom he had seen play, for the wild fiddle ending. Who's Next came out that August and became the band's only number one album in Britain. The cover shows the four of them walking away from a concrete pillar on a slag heap, apparently having just relieved themselves on it, a joke on the film 2001.[1] [2] [3]

After a long break in 1972, the cracks widened. Roger went through the band's accounts and found that Lambert and Stamp had not kept proper records, and large sums were unaccounted for. Pete, loyal to Lambert as his mentor, resisted firing them. Pete then wrote Quadrophenia on his own, the story of Jimmy, a young mod with a four way split personality, one side for each member of the band. He built Jimmy partly from early fans like Irish Jack Lyons, and even learned the cello in two weeks for the string parts. Lambert drifted out during the sessions, and Bill Curbishley took over the management. Released in October 1973, Quadrophenia reached number two in both Britain and America, blocked by David Bowie and Elton John.[1] [2] [3]

The Quadrophenia tour was a mess. During rehearsals an argument ended with Roger punching Pete and knocking him out cold. On stage, the band played along to backing tapes, and in Newcastle the tapes failed. Pete dragged the sound man Bob Pridden on stage, screamed at him and kicked over the amplifiers. In America, at the Cow Palace near San Francisco on the twentieth of November, Keith had taken sedatives with brandy and passed out twice at his kit. Pete asked if anyone in the audience could play drums, and a fan named Scot Halpin climbed up and finished the show. Days later, after a gig in Montreal, the band wrecked a hotel suite so badly, ramming a marble table through a wall, that police arrested them.[1] [2] [3]

Much of 1974 went into a film of Tommy, directed by Ken Russell. Roger played Tommy, with Ann Margret as his mother, Oliver Reed as his stepfather, and Tina Turner, Elton John, Eric Clapton and Jack Nicholson in the cast. Keith played the abusive Uncle Ernie, and struck up a heavy drinking friendship with Oliver Reed. The film premiered in March 1975. Pete was nominated for an Oscar for the score, and Elton John's version of Pinball Wizard reached number seven in Britain. Behind the scenes, Lambert and Stamp were pushed out and the band sued them over unpaid royalties. The case was settled in January 1977, with Pete receiving one million dollars for his American copyrights and the band winning back their recordings from Substitute onward.[1] [2] [3] [4]

By Numbers, and the death of Keith Moon

In 1975 Roger and Pete aired their differences in the music paper New Musical Express, with Roger unhappy about Pete's playing and Pete feeling trapped by the band. The Who by Numbers was full of Pete's bleak, confessional songs, like However Much I Booze, and it still gave them a hit in Squeeze Box. John drew the cover himself for about thirty pounds. On stage they were bigger than ever. On the sixth of December 1975 they drew seventy eight thousand people to the Pontiac Silverdome in Michigan, a record for an indoor concert. On the thirty first of May 1976, at Charlton Athletic's ground, the Valley, in London, they were measured at a hundred and twenty six decibels, listed by Guinness as the loudest concert ever.[1] [2] [3]

Keith's private life was falling apart. He had married Kim Kerrigan in 1966, and she said he could be violent when other men talked to her. In 1973 she left with their daughter Amanda, divorced him in 1975, and later married Ian McLagan of the Faces. Keith harassed them, and once sent men to break into McLagan's house while Kim hid in a cupboard. He moved to Los Angeles, and his drinking started at breakfast. In March 1976 in Boston he collapsed over his kit after two songs, then wrecked his hotel room and cut himself badly. Manager Bill Curbishley found him and got him to hospital, and doctors said he might have bled to death. His last public concert with the Who was in Toronto that October.[1]

Pete had his own dark night in 1977. After learning that Allen Klein had bought into his publishing company, he went drinking at the Speakeasy club with Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols, then passed out in a doorway. A policeman told him he could go home if he could stand up and walk. That night became the song Who Are You. The recording sessions in 1978 were painful. Keith had put on weight and could barely hold his parts together, and on one song, Music Must Change, his drums were simply left off. In May the band filmed a strong set at Shepperton Studios for the documentary The Kids Are Alright. It turned out to be Keith's last gig with the Who.[1] [2]

Who Are You came out on the eighteenth of August 1978. On the cover Keith sits on a chair stencilled with the words, not to be taken away. He had moved into a London flat owned by Harry Nilsson, where Cass Elliot had died four years earlier. Trying to get sober at home, he was prescribed a sedative called clomethiazole for alcohol withdrawal. On the sixth of September he went with his girlfriend Annette Walter Lax to a party thrown by Paul McCartney for Buddy Holly's birthday. Back at the flat he took thirty two of the tablets. He was found dead the following afternoon, the seventh of September. He was thirty two. John was giving an interview when the phone call came, and broke down in tears.[1] [2] [3]

Carrying on, and the night in Cincinnati

The day after Keith died, Pete said the band were more determined than ever to carry on. Phil Collins offered to leave Genesis to take the drum stool, but Pete had already asked Kenney Jones of the Small Faces and the Faces, who had been with Keith on his last night. Jones joined in November 1978, along with keyboard player Rabbit Bundrick. Just weeks before Keith, their first manager Peter Meaden had also died of a barbiturate overdose, and the Who paid for his funeral. In 1979 came the film The Kids Are Alright, and the Quadrophenia film starring Phil Daniels and Sting, which fed a mod revival led by the Jam. In December the Who became only the third band on the cover of Time magazine, after the Beatles and the Band.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the third of December 1979, the Who played the Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati. Most of the tickets were for unreserved festival seating, where the first in get the best spots. Thousands waited outside in the cold, but only a few doors were opened. When the crowd heard what sounded like the band starting, people surged toward those doors. Eleven fans were crushed and suffocated. They were aged between fifteen and twenty seven. Fire officials wanted to cancel the show, but the band's manager and city leaders feared a riot, so the concert went ahead, and the band were only told afterward. The next night in Buffalo, Roger told the crowd they had lost a lot of family, and that the show was for them.[1] [2] [3]

Families of the victims sued the band, the promoter and the city, and the cases were settled in the early 1980s. Cincinnati banned festival seating for years. Pete later said he felt two things that night, grief and fury that they had been playing while people were dying. For decades he regretted that the band left town and went on to the next show. In a 2019 local TV documentary he said, we should have stayed. In 2018 Roger met victims' families and survivors at Finneytown High School, which lost three students that night, and they said the meeting brought real healing. On the fifteenth of May 2022, the Who finally played Cincinnati again, with Finneytown students singing alongside them.[1] [2]

The early eighties brought Face Dances, with the hit You Better You Bet, one of the first videos shown on MTV, and It's Hard, with Eminence Front. But Pete was in a bad way. He wrote later that he became addicted to cocaine, overdosed and had to be resuscitated, and by January 1982 needed help to get off heroin and prescription drugs, which he got from the doctor Meg Patterson. In April 1981 Kit Lambert died after falling down a flight of stairs at his mother's home, and Pete believed Lambert had been beaten by a drug dealer that night. The Who played a farewell tour with the Clash in 1982, ending in Toronto that December. On the sixteenth of December 1983, Pete announced that he was leaving the band.[1] [2] [3]

Reunions, and losing the Ox

The split did not last. In July 1985 the Who reformed for Live Aid at Wembley Stadium, where a BBC truck blew a fuse and cut part of their set off the air. In 1988 they collected a lifetime award at the Brits, Kenney Jones's last show with them. Pete had revealed he suffered from tinnitus and was losing hearing after years of extreme volume, and in 1989 he helped fund a hearing charity for musicians. That year the Who toured for their twenty fifth anniversary with a fifteen piece band and Simon Phillips on drums. Two stadium shows near Boston sold a hundred thousand tickets in under eight hours, though some critics mocked the huge lineup as the Who on Ice.[1] [2] [3]

In 1990 the Who were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, with Keith's daughter Amanda there to represent her father. In 1991 Roger, Pete and John covered Elton John's Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting, which proved to be John's last studio recording with the band. Pete took Tommy to Broadway in 1993 and won a Tony Award for the score. For his fiftieth birthday in 1994, Roger played two nights at Carnegie Hall in New York, then took the songs on tour with John on bass, Pete's younger brother Simon on guitar, and a young drummer named Zak Starkey. Zak was Ringo Starr's son and Keith Moon's godson. Uncle Keith had given him his first drum kit when he was eight.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1996 the three surviving members staged Quadrophenia in London's Hyde Park, with Phil Daniels from the film narrating and Zak on drums. The night before, Roger was hit in the face by a microphone stand swung by Gary Glitter, who was playing a role in the show, and his eye socket was fractured. He sang anyway, wearing an eye patch. The production went on to tour America and Europe. In late 1999 the Who came back as a lean five piece band, and critics loved it. In 2000 they played the Royal Albert Hall for the Teenage Cancer Trust, a charity Roger championed, and in October 2001 their set at the Concert for New York City, after the September eleventh attacks, was one of the most powerful of the night.[1] [2] [3]

In June 2002 the Who were in Las Vegas, ready to start an American tour. On the morning of the twenty seventh, the day before the first show, John Entwistle was found dead in his room at the Hard Rock Hotel. He was fifty seven. The coroner found he had died of a heart attack brought on by cocaine, in a heart already badly damaged by disease. Pete and Roger posted a short message that said the Ox has left the building. They decided to go on, and on the first of July opened at the Hollywood Bowl with Pino Palladino on bass. At John's funeral, Pete discovered something none of the band had known, that John had spent most of his life as a Freemason.[1] [2]

The duo years and the long goodbye

Early in 2003 Pete Townshend was arrested in a British police operation against online child abuse images, after using his credit card to pay to enter such a website. Police found no illegal images on his computers. Pete said he had been researching for his memoir, which touches on abuse in his own childhood, and for a campaign exposing how banks profited from such sites. On the seventh of May 2003 he accepted a formal police caution and was placed on the sex offenders register for five years. He later said the lead officer told him they knew he was not a paedophile. Through all of it, Roger stood by him, and Pete said John's death had turned their old rivalry into something he could only describe as love.[1] [2] [3]

In 2006 the Who released Endless Wire, their first new studio album in twenty four years, which included a new mini opera. They headlined Glastonbury in 2007, and in 2008 Roger and Pete received Kennedy Center Honors in Washington. In February 2010 they played the Super Bowl half time show in Miami, but Pete's tinnitus got so bad that he feared he would have to stop. Neil Young sent him to an audiologist, and in ear monitors saved his career. In August 2012 the Who closed the London Olympic Games. On their Quadrophenia tour the next year, Zak Starkey hurt a tendon, and a drummer from Roger's solo band, Scott Devours, stepped in with less than four hours' notice.[1] [2] [3]

The fiftieth anniversary tour in 2015 was interrupted when Roger caught viral meningitis and the American dates were cancelled. But they came back. In December 2019 they released an album simply called Who, their twelfth, which reached number two in America and number three in Britain. It was followed by the Moving On tour, played with a local symphony orchestra in each city, until the pandemic shut it down in March 2020. In 2022 the Who Hits Back tour took them to North America again, including that emotional return to Cincinnati. Townshend and Daltrey were now in their late seventies, the two survivors of a band that once promised to die before they got old.[1] [2] [3]

Then 2025 got messy. On the thirtieth of March, at a Teenage Cancer Trust show at the Royal Albert Hall, Roger stopped the last song, complaining that all he could hear was drums. On the sixteenth of April the band said Zak Starkey was out after twenty nine years. Three days later they took him back, blaming communication problems. On the eighteenth of May Pete announced that Scott Devours would drum on the final shows. Zak said he had been fired and asked to claim he had quit, which he refused to do. That year Roger also handed over the Teenage Cancer Trust concerts he had run since 2000, and in June he was knighted, receiving the honour from Prince William at Windsor Castle that December.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The farewell run was called The Song Is Over. It opened on the twentieth of July 2025 in northern Italy, then crossed to North America from the sixteenth of August, ending with an added show in Palm Desert, California on the first of October. Pete said the road had not always been enjoyable, but it was the best job he could ever have had. And the story did not quite end there. In late August 2026, at a solo show in Las Vegas, Roger told the crowd the Who had just rehearsed with Zak Starkey for a possible European leg, and that it sounded great. Zak confirmed it, saying it was good to be home. As of 2026, no new dates have been announced.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The people around The Who

Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend. Roger founded the band and ruled it with his fists, until Pete's songs made Pete the creative leader. For years they fought in the press and sometimes for real, with Roger calling Pete pretentious and Pete calling Roger a money maker. They disagree on politics and religion too. But after John Entwistle died in 2002, Pete said their acceptance of each other's differences had become a genuine, compassionate relationship that could only be called love.[1] [2]

Keith Moon and John Entwistle. In the sixties this was the only real friendship inside the Who. The loudest man on stage and the quietest man off it shared a black sense of humour and a love of London nightclubs. They briefly walked out together in 1966 and talked about a new band with Jimmy Page. John admitted that when Keith was blowing up hotel toilets, he was often standing right behind him holding the matches.[1] [2]

Pete Townshend and Kit Lambert. Lambert was Pete's artistic mentor. He pushed the young guitarist to write longer, more ambitious pieces, coined the term rock opera, typed the script that held Tommy together, and produced the band's classic sixties records. His drug use and the missing money later tore them apart, but Pete kept defending him for longer than the others. In 2018 a new stone on Lambert's grave called him the man who made the Who.[1] [2]

Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp. An odd couple of managers, the posh Oxford graduate and the East End tugboat captain's son. They met as film assistant directors, set out to make a documentary about a band, and ended up running the Who and founding Track Records, home to Jimi Hendrix. Roger called them the fifth and sixth members of the Who. Stamp later got sober and became an addiction counsellor in New York. He died in 2012.[1] [2]

Keith Moon and Kim Kerrigan. Kim was sixteen when she started dating Keith in 1965. They married in 1966, and their daughter Amanda was born that July, a marriage kept secret from the press for two years. Kim said Keith could turn violent when other men spoke to her. She left in 1973, later married the Faces keyboard player Ian McLagan, and endured Keith's harassment. Friends believed he never recovered from losing her. She died in a car crash in Texas in 2006.[1]

Keith Moon and Zak Starkey. Keith was one of Ringo Starr's closest friends and godfather to Ringo's son Zak, who called him Uncle Keith. He gave Zak a drum kit when the boy was eight. After Keith's death, Kenney Jones gave the teenage Zak a white kit that had belonged to Keith. Zak went on to drum for the Who for almost three decades, praised for echoing Keith's spirit without copying him.[1] [2] [3]

Pete Townshend and Meher Baba. Pete never met the Indian spiritual master, who died in 1969, but from 1968 he called himself Baba's disciple. The teachings shaped Tommy and Lifehouse, gave Baba O'Riley half its name, and led Pete to turn against psychedelic drugs. He opened a Baba centre in London and gave to Baba causes in India, and he felt embarrassed that his new wealth clashed with Baba's ideals.[1] [2] [3]

Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix arrived in London in 1966 and went to Marshall's shop asking for an amplifier setup like Pete's. By Monterey the next year Pete was accusing him of stealing his act. Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp then signed Hendrix to their Track label, making the two rivals label mates. Watching him play, Pete said he realised that for him the wildness was an act, while for Jimi it was something deeper.[1] [2] [3]

Roger Daltrey and Kenney Jones. Kenney replaced Keith Moon in 1978 and played on Face Dances and It's Hard, but Roger never felt his tidy, steady style suited the Who. Roger insisted it was not personal, saying it was like putting a great wheel from a Cadillac onto a Rolls Royce. Kenney left after 1988. The friendship survived, and in 2014 the Who played a charity gig at Kenney's polo club.[1] [2]

Bill Curbishley and Keith Moon. Curbishley, a docker's son who had served prison time in the sixties for an armed robbery he denied, came up through Track Records and took over managing the Who in the seventies. In 1976 he found Keith bleeding in a wrecked hotel room and got him to hospital, then told him he would get him well so he could break his jaw. Curbishley went on to manage Robert Plant and Jimmy Page as well.[1] [2]

Roger Daltrey and Zak Starkey. Zak first toured with Roger in 1994 and drummed with the Who from 1996. In 2025 a sound problem at a Royal Albert Hall charity show turned into a public split, with Zak fired, rehired and fired again within weeks, and saying he refused to pretend he had quit. In late August 2026 Roger told a Las Vegas audience they had rehearsed together again, and Zak said it was good to be home.[1] [2] [3]

Glyn Johns and The Who. After Lifehouse fell apart, the engineer Glyn Johns convinced the band to simply make a single album of their best songs and was given free rein to choose them. His focus on sound over image, and his insistence that Keith play tighter, shaped Who's Next. He was credited only as associate producer. He returned for Who Are You in 1978, when he clashed with Roger over the vocals.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about The Who

• Keith Moon's birth year was widely printed wrong for decades, so his notorious Flint party was really his twenty first, not his twentieth. Keith had given interviewers the year 1947, and even an authorised Who biography repeated it. Tony Fletcher's 1998 biography corrected it to 1946, which meant the famous Flint hotel riot really was his twenty first birthday.[1]
• Keith Moon sang backing vocals on the Beatles' All You Need Is Love. Keith became close friends with the Beatles, especially Ringo Starr. In 1967 he joined the chorus on All You Need Is Love, and in 1969 he drummed with John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band at a charity show in London.[1]
• Keith Moon hated drum solos and refused to play them. At Madison Square Garden in 1974, Pete and John stopped playing mid song to force him into one. Keith carried on for a moment, then stopped and shouted that drum solos were boring.[1]
• Keith Moon once drummed on American TV dressed as a cat, on see through drums filled with water and live goldfish. When a studio audience member asked what would happen to the kit, Keith joked that even the best drummers get hungry. Animal lovers phoned the station to complain.[1]
• After the 1975 British tour, Keith Moon's personal profit came to forty seven pounds and thirty five pence. Keith spent wildly on cars, gadgets and hotel damage, and flirted with bankruptcy even after Tommy made the band rich. His spending left him with almost nothing from an entire UK tour.[1]
• Organisers of the 2012 London Olympics asked about Keith Moon performing, apparently unaware he had died in 1978. Manager Bill Curbishley replied that Keith now resided at Golders Green Crematorium. He added that if the organisers had a round table, glasses and candles, they might be able to contact him.[1]
• English Heritage refused Keith Moon a blue plaque, so another group put one up anyway. In 2008 English Heritage declined, saying more time should pass. The Heritage Foundation unveiled its own plaque in March 2009 at a former site of the Marquee Club, with Roger, Pete and Keith's mother there.[1] [2]
• It was Keith Moon who brought the violinist Dave Arbus to play on Baba O'Riley. Keith had sat in on congas with the band East of Eden at a London show and suggested their violinist play on the track. Arbus's fiddle now closes one of the most famous songs in rock.[1] [2]
• Moon kicked over a set of tubular bells at the end of Love, Reign O'er Me, and you can hear it on the record. For the Quadrophenia finale, Pete and engineer Ron Nevison surrounded Keith with percussion. He played it all, then knocked over the tubular bells, and the crash stayed in the final mix.[1]
• John Entwistle secretly spent most of his life as a Freemason. Even his bandmates had no idea. Pete Townshend said he only found out on the day of John's funeral in 2002.[1]
• John Entwistle drew the cover of The Who by Numbers for about thirty pounds. He later compared it with the Quadrophenia cover, which cost around sixteen thousand pounds. John was also a keen painter who held regular exhibitions of his artwork.[1]
• John Entwistle dyed his light brown hair black so that blond Roger would stand out more. The band decided their singer needed to look different from the others. John kept his hair black from the mid sixties until the early eighties.[1]
• The piano on John Entwistle's first solo album was later used by Freddie Mercury on Bohemian Rhapsody. Smash Your Head Against the Wall, from 1971, was the first solo album by any Who member. It was recorded at Trident Studios and was the first engineering job for Roy Thomas Baker, later Queen's producer.[1]
• Pete Townshend coined the phrase power pop, to describe the Who, in 1967. The term later became the name of a whole genre of punchy, melodic guitar music.[1]
• Pete Townshend played bass on the UK number one Something in the Air under the name Bijou Drains. In 1968 Pete assembled Thunderclap Newman from three musicians he knew and produced their records. Their single Something in the Air went to number one in Britain.[1]
• The Marshall stack was born when Pete Townshend asked Jim Marshall to cut a giant speaker cabinet in half. Pete had ordered cabinets with eight speakers each, nearly six feet tall and too heavy to move. Marshall split them into two stackable cabinets of four speakers, creating rock's most famous amplifier look.[1]
• Joe Walsh gave Pete Townshend the guitar, amp and pedal that he used to record Who's Next. The gift was a 1959 Gretsch hollow body, a Fender Bandmaster amp and an Edwards volume pedal. That combination became Pete's main studio setup for years.[1] [2]
• Pete Townshend worked as a book editor at Faber and Faber from 1983. He edited Eric Burdon's autobiography and worked on a book of Prince Charles's speeches. The job brought him friendships with William Golding and the poet laureate Ted Hughes, whose Iron Man he later set to music.[1]
• Pete Townshend said he first wrote the lyrics of I Can See for Miles on the back of a legal affidavit. The document came from Shel Talmy's lawsuit against the band in 1966. Pete said the words were fuelled by jealousy over his girlfriend Karen.[1]
• Behind Blue Eyes began as a prayer Pete wrote in a Denver hotel room after resisting a groupie. After a show in June 1970, Pete went back to his room alone and wrote a prayer. Its opening line, about his clenched fist being cracked open, became the rocking middle section of the song.[1]
• A janitor threw away the tape of the mini opera Rael, so part of the stereo album version is in mono. During The Who Sell Out sessions in New York, the multitrack was binned by mistake. Pete reportedly threw a chair through the control room glass, and the engineer patched in the mono mix to save it.[1]
• Only Pete actually relieved himself against the pillar on the Who's Next cover. According to photographer Ethan Russell, the others could not manage it, so rainwater was poured from a film canister to finish the effect. The pillar is a colliery drain on a slag heap in northern England.[1]
• The original Live at Leeds sleeve came stuffed with copies of memorabilia, including the band's Woodstock contract. The pockets also held a receipt for smoke bombs, an old rejection letter from EMI and a handwritten lyric. The label told engineers not to remove the crackling noises.[1]
• Before he managed the Who, Kit Lambert was arrested in Brazil on suspicion of murdering a friend. In 1961 Lambert joined an Amazon expedition, and his friend Richard Mason was killed by an uncontacted tribe. Lambert was held briefly until a British newspaper campaign won his release.[1]
• Kit Lambert's godparents were the composer William Walton and the ballerina Margot Fonteyn. His father was the composer Constant Lambert, who had an affair with Fonteyn. Kit later owned a palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice, where people called him the Baron.[1]
• Roger Daltrey is allergic to cannabis smoke, and has stopped shows because of it. The smoke affects his voice. At a 2015 concert on Long Island he smelled a joint and warned that the show would be over unless it was put out. The fan obliged.[1] [2]
• Roger Daltrey's memoir is named after the headmaster who expelled him. Published in 2018, it is called Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite. Roger credits the expulsion with pushing him into music.[1]
• Roger Daltrey designed and opened a trout farm in East Sussex in 1981. He built the four spring fed lakes of Lakedown Trout Fishery himself on his country estate. The business is now run by his son Jamie.[1]
• On his fiftieth birthday, Roger Daltrey received a letter from a daughter he had never known. She had been adopted after a brief relationship in the late sixties. Roger later met two more daughters from that period, and he and his wife Heather welcomed all three into the family.[1]
• Each series of the TV crime show CSI used a different Who song as its theme. The original used Who Are You, CSI Miami used Won't Get Fooled Again, CSI NY used Baba O'Riley and CSI Cyber used I Can See for Miles.[1] [2]
• Pete refused to let Michael Moore use Won't Get Fooled Again in Fahrenheit 9/11. Pete said he had watched Moore's earlier film Bowling for Columbine and had not been convinced by it.[1]
• The drum kit Keith Moon gave young Zak Starkey later sold at Sotheby's for twelve thousand pounds. Keith gave the kit to his godson when Zak was eight. Ringo gave Zak only one lesson, hoping he would become a lawyer or a doctor instead.[1]
• In 1989 Pete tripped over his own Rickenbacker on stage and broke it, then turned the pieces into a sculpture. After decades of smashing guitars on purpose, this one broke by accident. He reassembled the wreckage as art, and it was shown at the Henry Ford museum in 2009.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.