![]() In some ways, "Who Are You" stuck it to the punks, seeing as the Who still had some life left in them. Produced by Glyn Johns and Jon Astley, "Who Are You" was released as a single in July 1978 and became one of their biggest hits, reaching No. ![]() But whatever was happening behind the scenes was very important." It wasn’t because the guys didn't have material – they had written the whole album. There were many days where nothing happened. It wasn't my business to know what they were. The song 'Who Are You' was recorded in an afternoon, minus vocals. "Recording with them was great," Argent recalled to Forbes in 2020. I felt the same as when I saw them as a teenager in Porthcawl. "I never got involved in the madness, but witnessing Pete Townshend in full flow was magical. " Keith Moon was fabulous," Low told The Guardian in 2023. "Who Are You" included backing vocals by Andy Fairweather Low and piano by the Zombies' Rod Argent. When I listen back to 'Who Are You' I can hear that it made me incredibly aggressive." "To me, it was like, 'Well, they think they're fucking tough, but we're fucking tougher,'" he explained. "They were saying how much they loved the Who, that we were the only band they'd leave alive after they'd taken out the rest of the establishment!"īut this admiration occasionally felt threatening to Daltrey. ![]() "We were getting incredible accolades from some of the new punk bands," he recalled to Uncut in 2015. "Roger's aggressive reading of my nihilistic lyric redirected its function by the simple act of singing ' Who the fuck are you?' when I had written 'Who, who, who are you.'"ĭaltrey had also picked up on the thread tying the Who to the younger bands in England at the time. "In one sense the song is more about the demands of new friendship than blood-letting challenge," he said. ![]() When Townshend brought "Who Are You" to the rest of the band, singer Roger Daltrey interpreted the lyrics as something more confrontational, but Townshend explained that was not his intention. Got drunk (well, I did) and I have to say to their credit, for a couple of figurehead anarchists, they seemed sincerely concerned about my decaying condition at the time." "Steve and Paul became real 'mates' of mine in the English sense," Townshend noted in those liner notes. "You've got to take over where the Who left off, and this time, you've got to finish the fucking job." "Rock 'n' roll's going down the fucking pan!" he said. Townshend connected the lines between the music of the Who and the music being made by punk bands like Sex Pistols and the Clash. He reportedly told Cook and Jones that it was their duty to carry the torch. From what Townshend can remember, after drowning his sorrows in booze at London’s Speakeasy club, he stumbled into the night and woke up in a Soho doorway, with a policeman who knew his name standing over him, just as the song's opening lines say.īy 1978, punk music was all over the U.K. Sex Pistols had released their only album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, the previous fall. The Who guitarist chronicled that evening of frustration and debauchery in Who Are You's title track. (It wasn't the first time Klein had been accused of taking advantage of his clients.) ![]() Townshend had recently learned that Klein had bought a stake in the Who's publishing without telling the band and was upset that someone he thought he could trust would make such an aggressive move. ![]()
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