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The eighth Who album, and the last with drummer Keith Moon, who passed away a week or two after its release, was partly inspired by Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend’s boredom at the prospect of playing old material again, as directly addressed in New Song. It also has some lingering elements of the failed Lifehouse project Townshend would never truly get over and is The ’Oo’s response to punk.
Keyboard-heavy and experimental – the flagging Moon couldn’t get his head around the odd time signature of Music Must Change – it houses in the unassailable title track possibly their last truly great song, inspired by both an on-stage improvisation and a night on the tiles when a pissed-off and pissed-up Townshend ran into some Sex Pistols and a sympathetic policeman.
This exhaustive edition includes Glyn Johns’s rejected mix (he butted heads with Daltrey – literally) which is preferably guitar- and bass-heavy in places, interesting curios like the band version of the Townshend solo cut Empty Glass, Townshend guide vocals, good-humoured and arse-kicking rehearsal tapes from Shepperton Studios, and a couple of discs from the illfated American tour with unfairly maligned Moon replacement Kenney Jones, who sounds more than adequate at this remove.
While it’s no Quadrophenia or Who’s Next, it’s an interesting record from a band admirably questioning and pushing themselves, and this package, complimented by Matt Kent’s superb sleeve notes, is how all deluxe releases should be done.
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