(Credits: Far Out / Harry Chase / UCLA Library)
Sun 24 August 2025 14:00, UK
It has been over 40 years since The Who’s first ‘farewell’ tour and yet they are still knocking about to this day. However, the extensive timeline of the legendary outfit might have been cut short back in the 1970s, if Pete Townshend had had his way.
Few bands captured the spirit of Britain’s anarchic post-war youth quite like The Who back in their swinging sixties heyday.
Anthems like ‘My Generation’ and ‘I Can’t Explain’ were era-defining in their mod rock power, but The Who were always desperately keen to prove they weren’t a flash-in-the-pan outfit with quick and easy success. A massive part of their enduring appeal sat at the feet of the ever-maturing songwriting of Pete Townshend, a bloke capable of transforming the group from youthful rock rebels to mature masters of rock operas and concept albums.
That key development in their sound, owing largely to Townshend’s endless appetite for artistic evolution, is what kept The Who on the upper echelon of British rock and roll, even after the bulk of their 1960s comrades had fallen by the wayside. In fact, some of the band’s all-time greatest efforts hit the airwaves in the 1970s – their magnum opus album Quadrophenia being one of them.
Nevertheless, the endless onslaught of touring, recording, and living the archetypal life of rock and roll success soon began to take its toll on the group. Each member had their own struggles with drugs and alcohol, it appears to be part and parcel of being a world famous rockstar, but Keith Moon bore the brunt of the band’s addiction struggles as the decade marched on, to the detriment of his drumming ability.
Moon defined the stereotype of drummers being the wildest, more unpredictable members of any band. His endlessly energetic, amphetamine-fueled playing style, and infamous offstage behaviour forged a core part of The Who’s appeal from the offset, but that very same penchant for speed would be Moon’s downfall, too. The extent of his debilitating addiction became clear to Pete Townshend during the recording of 1978’s Who Are You, with every session seeing Moon’s drumming decay further and further.
By the time the band came to record the A-side closer, ‘Music Must Change’, Moon’s drug habit rendered him utterly incapable of performing the track’s relatively simple drum beat. “He played the most fantastic drums [for ‘Who Are You’], which was only recorded about six months before,” Townshend recalled on Audible’s Words + Music in 2022. For the songwriter, the end of The Who was nigh.
“I went back and realised that Keith was just not going to cut it really, at all, ever again,” he revealed. “We sort of lost him. I decided to quit.” Who Are You might have been the last Who album, if Townshend’s decision to dissolve the band had played out, but plans changed after Keith Moon tragically passed away mere weeks after the album was released.
Although the sensible thing to do, in the wake of Moon’s death, would have been to call it a day for The Who anyway, Townshend and the gang decided instead to continue without their fallen comrade, quickly recruiting Kenney Jones to take his place. Given the laughably poor quality of their subsequent album release during the 1980s, however, Townshend probably should have listened to his desires to dissolve the band in the wake of Who Are You.
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