(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sun 4 January 2026 14:00, UK
From day one, Pete Townshend knew that rock and roll was the genre of thieves.
Anyone could have tried to make something original and turned themselves into a jazz player, but even when The Who were blowing down the doors of rock and roll, there wasn’t anything harmonically dissonant that Townshend didn’t pick up on by listening to his favourite records back home. It was all about taking what had come before and making a brand new toy, but some artists knew to take more than their fair share of liberties when copying Townshend’s playbook.
Because for a second, Townshend seemed to be on the verge of a musical breakthrough at the end of the 1960s. Rock and roll had previously been the genre that didn’t have any sort of depth to it, but when The Beatles started changing that with albums like Revolver and Sgt Peppers, Townshend started looking at the art form differently as well. The album was now a medium for anything he wanted, and he was going to spend his time bringing opera to the masses with a guitar in his hand.
While Tommy was nothing more than a half-formed idea when the band began working on it, every single part of the record felt like spending an entire evening in a theatre. There had been the early makings of prog rock in the English rock scene at the time, but the story of this deaf, dumb and blind boy was almost too perfect for the concept album format. So when everything blew up, and the public demanded more, Townshend was more than willing to keep going before falling apart trying to put together Lifehouse.
He simply wasn’t capable of getting the sounds in his head on tape for that particular record, but once he had more operas like Quadrophenia under his belt, the playing field had opened up a lot more. Countless artists were trying their hand at concept albums, and when he wasn’t dealing with his contemporaries like Roger Waters turning his own autobiography into a live spectacle with The Wall, Andrew Lloyd Webber was offering a Broadway-style take on what rock operas could be.
And it’s not like Webber was exactly good at hiding his influence half the time. The main theme for The Phantom of the Opera is clearly ripped from the descending line from Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’, and while Jesus Christ Superstar was a step into more adventurous territory, Townshend couldn’t help but feel a need to bring Tommy to the live stage to stand up for the genre that he helped pioneer.
He wasn’t mad by any stretch, but he did know when someone was taking his model and putting their own spin on it, saying, “Rock and roll needed to be brought to Broadway, and in doing that I always felt that Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, with Jesus Christ Superstar, rode off with part of my inheritance. I wanted to claim it back. Now I’ve done so. And Tommy is my way in. I plan to become more involved in musical theater.”
And listening to the Broadway adaptation of the rock opera, it makes total sense why Townshend fit into that medium. There’s a certain bombast behind every one of the tunes on the record, and whether it’s the common theme of ‘See Me Feel Me’ or the individual moments like on ‘Pinball Wizard’ or the grand finale ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’, the whole thing is designed to have massive choreography behind it.
Considering how much ground was covered here, who’s to say that the next generation of rock stars can’t do the same thing. After all, Green Day have brought American Idiot to the Broadway stage, so why not Waters make a stage adaptation of The Wall or My Chemical Romance put their heads together for a massive Broadway counterpart to The Black Parade?
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