Sydney Morning Herald review

[theboot]

G'day

I thought Matt might put a link to this up on PT.com but he hasn't, so for a "professional critics" view of the first Sydney gig, to compare to our fan reviews, here's what the Sydney Morning Heralds critic had to say.



Thin, bald wizard ... the Pete Townshend windmill lights up the Entertainment Centre.

Sydney Entertainment Centre, July 28
By Bernard Zuel

There's no embarrassment at the Who. No reason to hide behind your pricey seat and wince at what has befallen one of your childhood heroes. If they were your contemporaries, the chances are they look and move a whole lot better than you do. If they are more your parents' vintage you can feel comfortable seeing they have neither a musical nor style equivalent of a comb-over to pretend they are still "down with the kids".

It's not like the '80s when tragic figures, often hitherto unknown "blues legends" or still rattled casualties of the '60s, were flown (economy class) to Australia to pick up some pin money in the pubs. These days we have higher expectations, and those expectations are in the main met with quality sound, performers who cannot just stand up but give a fair approximation of their original moves and long, hit-filled shows.

The Who, or at least the half-Who - surviving members Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend with a band of some long-term and some recent additions - do that and more. Daltrey's foghorn of a voice still packs some heat, though he is no closer to being someone who can do sensitive or subtle. Townshend windmills his arms, leaps occasionally and, more importantly, can still play with precision and invention. The volume may not be Live At Leeds extremes but you may go home with your ears still ringing.

The least likely trouble spot with a band this rich in material is the songs, and not surprisingly the two-hour show (which unusually on this world tour did not have a second encore of Magic Bus) hit all bases. There was the killer early days opening trio of I Can't Explain, Substitute and Anyway Anyhow Anywhere; there was the synth-flecked mid-period songs such as Who Are You, You Better You Bet and Won't Get Fooled Again; there were Quadrophenia and Tommy brackets, and new songs both excellent (Real Good Looking Boy) and all right (Old Red Wine).

OK, we did have to deal with unnecessary and unnecessarily long (but hardly new) noodling in songs such as Sparks and Won't Get Fooled Again. But as a big rock show it was all professional and hard to find fault with.

Except for one thing, which could well be out of the band's control anyway. There was a curious lack of passion, of drama really, that would pull us into this show emotionally. Compared with tours in recent years by Who contemporaries Arthur Lee of Love, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and Solomon Burke, this was, if not quite sterile, then at least one step removed from completely engaging.

Quibbling? Maybe. After all we got the songs and got them in style. But complete satisfaction remained elusive.

* the boot says - it didn't remain elusive for us Bernard.

[whoareyou]

Their generation
July 30, 2004


They were one of the greatest rock bands, now diminished by death and age, but the Who are back and better than ever, Roger Daltrey tells Patrick Donovan.

On January 28, 1968, there was chaos on a 7am Ansett-ANA flight from Adelaide to Essendon Airport. Two air hostesses were in tears, and the pilot made a radio call 230 kilometres out from Melbourne requesting police meet the plane upon landing.

"I suggested to several passengers that we should try to quell the disturbance," ran a quote from passenger Brian Sandford that appeared in The Age the following day. "But they agreed that any disruption might make it worse."

Passengers were not being threatened by terrorists; the enemy were English rock musicians from bands the Who and Small Faces, along with Australian Paul Jones - or "scruffy little men", as the Who frontman Roger Daltrey recalls being labelled by an air hostess - armed with open bottles of lukewarm beer.

The 19-man party from the Big Show tour were escorted from the plane by police, who were told the musicians had brought beer on board, moved around and used "very bad language".

The musicians denied causing trouble and said they were unaware beer could not be taken on board planes in Australia. After giving assurances during a five-hour interrogation that there would be no misbehaviour, the bands flew to Sydney and on to New Zealand for more shows.

It wouldn't be the only time the Who would be misunderstood on an aeroplane. On July 24, 1970, Pete Townshend was hauled off a plane in Memphis for questioning by police after telling a member of the Who tour crew their album was "going a bomb".

Daltrey now reflects on the Australian incident with a laugh, but says it was locals who had opened the beer bottles.

"It was an Aussie roadie, it wasn't one of us, but as usual we had to jump in and defend him. And then we were called scruffy little men. It all got blown completely out of proportion."

In his autobiography All the Rage, Small Faces keyboard player Ian McLagan said it was Paul Jones's Australian backing group who brought the beer on the plane.

"It was another world. You wouldn't recognise it now," Daltrey says of Australia in the year the anti-Vietnam War play America Hurrah was banned in NSW; Rod Laver beat Tony Roche at Wimbledon; the first hand-held calculator had just been invented; and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey hit the big screen.

"It was so conservative. We thought the English authorities were stuffy until we got to Australia. They didn't seem to have any sense of humour - which is ridiculous, because Aussies are now famous for their humour, thank God."

But the bands did get to show their wares before the fiasco. In Melbourne they played four shows at Festival Hall - at 6pm and 8.45pm over two days. And they certainly made an impression.

Depending on one's sensibilities, the sonic rush from their wall of amplifiers, windmill strumming, microphone twirling and guitar smashing was either exhilarating or horrifying.

"No one had ever seen anything like this before," says fan John Moon, who writes, in a review on the band's website, that he was so inspired by what he saw that he learnt the guitar and became a full-time musician. There were probably many more like him. The shows at the same venue four years earlier by those loveable goofs the Beatles had turned many people on to live music, but these explosive performances were inspiring people to form bands.

But along with Frank Sinatra's ill-fated 1974 tour, the Big Show tour is considered one of Australia's most infamous and did little for our reputation as a touring destination. For the Who it was like being transported back in time. Daltrey recalls the venues as resembling corrugated iron boxing rings, like something from wartime.

In his book The Promoters, Sydney-based Stuart Coupe writes that Townshend called for room service one morning and was told by an incredulous hotel worker: "This is Oz, mate, we get out of bed in the morning here." And things weren't going to improve - New Zealand was next.

Bassist John Entwistle captured the mood in the Who's song Postcard: "There's kangaroos/And we're bad news in Australia/Thrown off the plane for drinking beer/So long on the plane, it drove us insane/So long on the plane."

Upon their return to England, newly elected Australian prime minister John Gorton reportedly sent the band a telegram asking them never to return Down Under. Townshend said he was happy to oblige.

John Gorton died two years ago, and Townshend has softened his stance. The band said they wouldn't be fooled again, but they're (fortunately) breaking their word and returning 36 years later. Daltrey is certainly relishing the challenge.

"It was a different country in '68. It's great to be able to come back and show Australia what we really are like. We're getting better reviews today than we've ever had in our lives. Back in the day, critics were just writing about the smashing of the gear and our clothes and girlfriends. Now they're finally writing about the music, and understanding how our music works. I came back four years ago and I had such a good time."

Daltrey is talking about The Ultimate Rock Symphony, when he and some other ageing rockers, including Alice Cooper and Peter Frampton, played a few old hits with a 40- piece orchestra at Telstra Dome in 2000.

At the press conference for that show, Daltrey - as if embarrassed by the grandiose nature of the tour compared to the raw, stripped-back unit he used to front - played up to his old streetthug image. When the singers were asked by photographers to look a bit happier, Daltrey snapped: "How are we supposed to look happy at 10 o'clock in the morning? This is a f---ing rock'n'roll tour."

Daltrey was clearly out of sorts without his band, in particular his sidekick, guitar-slinger Pete Townshend.

Five years earlier, Daltrey attempted to tour under the Who banner with Entwistle, Ringo Starr's son Zak Starkey on drums and Townshend's brother Simon on guitar. But for the fans, it wasn't the real deal. The tour was cancelled after poor ticket sales.

Like fuel and a flame, Daltrey and Townshend are innocuous in isolation, but explosive when combined. Daltrey, a former sheet metal worker, had the working-class roots and work ethic, the curls, pecs and the voice; Townshend, the former art school student, had the head full of ideas, lyrics and riffs. Their relationship was symbiotic and they weren't terribly effective apart.

"The chemistry between Pete and I, how we play off each other, I don't know how it works, but it does. I just can't explain it. It's another world. This music seems to come out of thin air ... My solo career was just a hobby, something to do when the Who weren't working."

[whoareyou]

Fans certainly won't be disappointed by the tour's set lists. The gig in Birmingham last month opened with their first hit, I Can't Explain, and included most of their hits - Substitute, My Generation, Pinball Wizard and Won't Get Fooled Again - as well as two new songs, Real Good Looking Boy and the band's tribute to Entwistle, Old Red Wine.

"Pete is on fire at the moment," says Daltrey. "He's playing the best guitar I've heard him play since the '70s. There's as much free-form stuff. It's just matured. Our youth used to give it an edge, but now it's got a different kind of edge. I don't know how to explain it, because I've never seen the Who play."

He says Townshend, who was investigated in Britain last year for downloading child pornography off the internet, had recovered from his ordeal. "He's fine, and I'm just really proud that he's been proven to have told the truth and it's all over. He should have known better, and he's been made to look a bit stupid." (Charges were dropped against Townshend, who years ago said he was abused as a child and claimed he was downloading the images for research purposes for a book. He will remain on a British sex offenders' register for five years.)

Some rhythm sections can be replaced, but the Who were greater than the sum of their parts. They were four disparate individuals, each a vital cog in the rhythm of the music.

"You couldn't pick four more juxtaposed people if you tried. For one reason or another the chemistry that it created on stage just went 'bang'," says Daltrey.

Despite the drug-related deaths of the rhythm section - drummer Keith Moon died in 1978 and Entwistle on the eve of a US tour last year - Daltrey and Townshend have continued to play as the Who. Daltrey defends his decision, but says if he or Townshend could no longer play, the Who would be no more.

"We'll do it as long as we can do it well. It will stop us, rather than us waking up and deciding that we don't want to do it any more. We'll just get up there one night, won't be able to do it, and that will be the end of it. We owe it to our generation, because life goes on through those kinds of tragedies.

"It would have been so easy to stop after John's death. Our generation is losing friends all the time now - we're all in the drop zone. We owe it to them to show them how to live, not just to give up."

While there are plenty of new young fans at their gigs, Daltrey says the anthem My Generation, with the line "Hope I die before I get old", isn't for them.

"I'm still singing it for our generation, because we haven't gone away. We're still struggling with our lives."

Moon is irreplaceable as a drummer, Daltrey says, but Starkey fits right in, because he learnt his licks from Moon.

"Keith taught Zak the fundamentals of the drums when he was about four. He's organic to the band. He's not only an incredibly talented drummer, but he understands our music - the way it's structured, and where the drums fit in.

The Who's music is not like normal rock'n'roll; it has classical layers and is very structured. If you put the wrong element in at the wrong time, it just falls apart."

Daltrey is trying to keep Moon's memory alive by making a film about the livewire sticksman. "It's incredibly difficult. I know there's a film there, but I just can't get it in the script. I will get it there. I couldn't just make a normal biopic of Keith Moon. He was too big a personality and too important a rock'n'roll character."

How does one separate the myth from the truth? Did Keith Moon really literally turn a New Zealand hotel room upside down by nailing and gluing the furniture to the ceiling?

"Yes," Daltrey says with a hearty chuckle. "I've got so many stories. I don't want to think about them. I could go on all night about things that Keith did.

"A lot of it did get blown out of proportion, though. But the hotel room stuff was true. What's wrong with a TV out the window anyway? It's a broken pane of glass and a new TV. No one ever got killed or hurt. We had casualties, but in ourselves. Keith and John both overdosed on drugs, so the only people who ever got really hurt were us, I'm afraid."

One of Daltrey's few regrets is not working harder to keep Moon alive - "I don't know whether I would have prevented it, because he had lived nine lives already" - and these days there's no high jinks on the road.

"It's very different. We just live to get on that stage to deliver to the audience. That's the challenge. It's enough for me now. And it seems to be working."

The Who play at Vodafone Arena, Melbourne Park, tomorrow night, with guests You Am I. Tickets available through Ticketek on 132 849.