Pete Townshend has confirmed that The Who‘s farewell tour is indeed their last, and has said he’s now looking to revisit his own music with the help of AI.
Ahead of the launch of ‘Quadrophenia: A Rock Ballet on Broadway’, Townshend appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, who joked that he’d been to multiple farewell tour shows hosted by the band in the ’80s.
“In ’82, I left The Who,” Townshend then explained. “It was my farewell. In ’89, I pleaded with The Who to come back because I was broke, and we did a 25th anniversary tour.”
“This time,” he said, laughing, “the farewell tour is genuine; we are going to end it after we’ve done as many shows as Elton John.” Notably, John’s ‘Farewell Yellow Brick Road’ tour consisted of more than 300 shows and wound up being a five-year undertaking thanks to delays from the COVID pandemic.
“He did 330, we’ve done 22,” Townshend quipped. “So we just have another 308 to do.”
While he added that he hadn’t enjoyed touring in a while, he said the recent run of dates felt different. “I really enjoyed this last tour, it was great,” he said. “I decided I was going to try and make Roger happy, which isn’t easy. Not because he’s a nasty guy or anything, but because he sings, and he sings the way he sings, his whole body and life goes into it.
“I thought, I must forget about myself, and just do this for him, it could be the last thing we ever do together. And it worked,” he added.
Before that, Townshend had reflected on the band coming to an end, saying that he and Daltrey “don’t communicate very well” and “have different needs as performers”. The musician also said the group felt more like “a Who tribute band” now.
The pair had previously confirmed that The Who would still be coming together in the future for the occasional charity gig or one-off event, with Townshend planning to embark on some solo shows too.
Additionally, he had previously opened up about the strain of being on the road for extensive touring schedules, saying he was mentally done with the idea: “I don’t love performing. I don’t like being on a stage… it doesn’t fill my soul.”
Daltrey responded soon afterwards, explaining: “If Pete doesn’t want to tour, I don’t want to be back with The Who on the road, at 81, with someone who doesn’t want [to] be there… if that’s what he’s saying.”
Later on in the conversation, the guitarist revealed aims to use AI technology to refine and finish unreleased songs in his vault. “I’ve got about 350, 450 pieces of music. A lot of it is probably terrible,” he said, admitting he’d managed to wade through “about half of it”.
He continued: “I don’t know what to do with it… I’m also quite interested in AI. I’m quite interested in getting some of my old songs that didn’t quite work because I didn’t quite get them right first time round, and put them up on [generative artificial intelligence music creation platform] Suno or some AI music machine and seeing what it can make of it. It might be some hits.”
As for The Who, it currently seems unlikely that there will ever be a final album. Townshend did express his desire for the band to make another record last year, but said there was “a bit of a river to cross” in convincing Daltrey.
Before then, the guitarist spoke to NME about the possibility of more new music, saying: “I don’t think there is. If there was a need or a place for a Who album, could I write the songs for it within six weeks? Of course I fucking could, it’s a piece of cake. The problem is, I don’t think Roger wants to do it again.”
When NME asked the frontman about the possibility of a new LP in 2023, he laughed: “What’s the point? What’s the point of records? We released an album four years ago [2019’s ‘WHO’], and it did nothing. It’s a great album too, but there isn’t the interest out there for new music these days. People want to hear the old music. I don’t know why, but that’s the fact.”
The band’s last appearances in the UK were at London’s Royal Albert Hall for the Teenage Cancer Trust shows back in March, where Daltrey revealed that he was “going blind” and they played ‘The Song Is Over’ live for the first time, with Bill Murray in the crowd.
In other news, this summer saw Roger Daltrey accuse Zak Starkey of “character assassination” over comments the drummer had made about his firing from the band.