Roger Daltrey Still Surprised By Pete Townshend’s Songs

With the Who's latest album, titled WHO a solid Top Three hit on both sides of the Atlantic, Roger Daltrey credits Pete Townshend's continued strength as a songwriter or scoring another hit for the band. Daltrey told Goldmine magazine, "He always surprises me as a writer. I’m such a fan of his writing. I’ve always been a fan of his musical ability because I’m bored of quite a lot of rock music generally, y'know? It doesn’t seem to have expanded much since the late '70s (laughs). It seems to be stuck, but Townshend some way or another always seems he is able to break the mold. He seems to be able to push it that extra bit further that turns your head. I’ve always, always had incredible admiration for him for doing that."

Despite the raves that he's received for his work on the album, Daltrey would still love the chance to tweak his contributions: "If I could go back and redo a few of the vocals I could still polish them even a little bit more and make them even better. But sadly when we recorded it, it had to be finished by May so I was under enormous pressure."

When pressed about the fact that Daltrey and Townshend are dissimilar in so many ways, yet he remains the perfect vehicle to sing Townshend's material, Daltrey said, "Well, I don’t know if it’s true that there’s no one else that can sing Pete songs better than me. You’d have to spend a long time looking but there might."

Daltrey revealed that its only in the modern era that people are giving him kudos for his vocal chops: "Believe it or not, it’s just starting
to happen. (Laughs) It’s driven me on. (Keith) Moon was always saying, 'We need to change our singer.' (laughs) I wasn’t the kind of guy who liked people blowing smoke up my ass so I really wasn’t joking when I said it’s only been recently in the last few years where I’ve got to grips with my condition in my voice and got it sorted out that people have been telling me, 'Wow! You’ve really got a set of pipes!'"

Roger Daltrey told us that in the years following John Entwistle's 2002 death, he's learned to work as Pete Townshend needs him, while taking on some of the less glamorous aspects of running the band: ["'Just have to be there if he needs you. That's the function. I'm just an instrument for him — and I accept that, I'm quite happy with that. But I do all the other stuff behind the scenes, the business side of it. I deal with the interviews when he doesn't fancy doing them, and a whole raft of other stuff that has to do with Who business that Pete doesn't do, that I do. So, y'know, we do kind of share the load in different ways."] SOUNDCUE (:26 OC: . . . in different ways)

The Who will perform a pair of special acoustic shows on February 12th and 14th at Pryzm in Kingston-Upon-Thames, England.