Pete Townshend on The Who’s Future: ‘I Don’t Know What’s Gonna Happen’

Pete Townshend has admitted that the future of his band, The Who, is uncertain, but he’s hopeful that he and bandmate Roger Daltrey could continue performing together and even release new music.

In a recent interview with The Daily Beast, the 79-year-old guitarist addressed what’s next for the iconic band while marking the release of his 14-CD box set “Live in Concert 1985-2000.”

“I don’t know what’s gonna happen with The Who. I’m hoping Roger and I can find some common ground and find some way to work again, possibly without an orchestra, because I think we’ve done that,” Townshend said.

“But also, there’s this sense that we’re in the last tour period of our career. …I’m encouraged by seeing what Roger’s doing in his solo tour. It seems to me that if we put a small band together and just decided to throw s**t at the wall, it might be great.”

However, Townshend shared that things aren’t really in a good place between him and the band’s singer, so it’s hard to tell if they could find time to work together again.

“Roger and I don’t converse. We don’t talk. So, it might be difficult to land on something that we both share an interest in. But it’s there for the taking, I think,” he said.

Formed in London in 1964, the English rock band has seen members come and go throughout its 60 years of existence. The classic lineup consisted of Townshend, Daltrey, bassist John Entwistle and drummer Keith Moon. Unfortunately, Entwistle and Moon have passed on.

While explaining why he won’t push Daltrey into working with him in the studio if the latter doesn’t want to, Townshend recalled the time he “bullied” his bandmates into working on their studio album “Quadrophenia.”

“I’m not gonna try to bully Roger to do anything. I don’t want to have the job that I used to have around the time of ‘Quadrophenia,’ which is bullying everybody in The Who to do exactly what I want to do,” he said.

"It worked, yeah. But it was no fun. And at the end of that, Roger knocked me out. I asked for it, but he knocked me out. Anyway, I’m hopeful. I’m certainly not saying that we won’t do anything, but Roger and I do have a bit of a river to cross. And once we cross that river, we’ll see what happens."

Tags

The Who, Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend