(Credits: Far Out / Dena Flows)
Mon 29 December 2025 19:30, UK
If you want to understand what rock and roll was truly like in the 1970s, there were a handful of bands ready to showcase it. Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones and The Who were all bastions of this modern style of rock, where ambitious ideas were encouraged and unbridled hedonism was celebrated.
The latter band however, represented something a little bit more transitionary. In Roger Daltrey, they had a frontman who was vibrant and charismatic, harking back to the greats of old. Building off the blocks of blues rock legends before him, Daltrey gave the band the gravelly rock undertone they were searching for, and one that was necessary in making them a worldwide favourite. He grounded the ideas of Pete Townshend and injected it with a palpable sense of emotion.
Unsurprisingly, Daltrey took those queues from the man who inspired most of his generation, Elvis Presley. He explained, “It was when I first saw Elvis with a guitar. I thought, well, that looks cool.” Adding he saw The King “Just on black and white, the BBC TV”, yet it was enough to be transfixed by the colour of his performance. He marvelled at the time of him, saying “Wow, wonderful. Just like John Lennon, you know, that’s what I want to be. Everybody wanted to, I’m going to do that.”
Daltrey continued to explain how the work of his bandmate built upon those foundations. Townshend was famously ambitious with his ideas and took The Who into more experimental realms, but Daltrey was convinced that it remained faithful to the bedrock of blues.
“I mean, Pete’s guitar style. It’s so different from anything else that was out there. But you can still hear the fact that we, before we were playing our own stuff, we were playing Muddy Waters and Johnny Hooker and all that stuff, and the Everly Brothers and Elvis. It was all in there somewhere.”
It’s certainly not a lofty comparison from Daltrey, given just how prominent those artists’ influence was on rock in the 1970s. But Townshend was quite simply having none of it, blasting Elvis’s music as nothing more than a reference for what he didn’t want to sound like.
He explained, “To my ear, Elvis sounded corny, a drawling dope singing about dogs.” He added, “I just didn’t get it. Unfortunately, I had missed his first masterful releases like ‘That’s Alright Mama’ and ‘Heartbreak Hotel,’ and had come in directly on ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘Love Me Tender,’ a song that made me want to vomit, especially when Jimpy and Elaine crooned it at one another. In his movies (apart from Jailhouse Rock), Elvis confirmed my view of him as a chump.”
It was indicative of the sort of tension that existed between Daltrey and Townshend. But ultimately, that was the tension that made them one of history’s most beloved bands. The intense pursuit of innovation from Townshend that would flirt with the obscure, only to be brought back to earth by Daltrey’s gritty and soulful vocals.
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