The Who's Pete Townsend recently sat in on a recording session by the London Oriana Choir and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra who were performing tunes from his band's 1973 classic Quadrophenia. The choir's website confirmed that the orchestral version will be available in 2015.
"Now that it's in the can, we can drop the secrecy and make the big announcement: the big studio session we did last night was with the legendary Pete Townshend, recording the backing vocals for an orchestral version of Quadrophenia to be released in the new year!" the announcement reads.
Townsend was there to provide "artistic guidance," and he relayed that he was "surprisingly pleased" with the arrangement. There will be an album launch performance on July 5, 2015, the choir tweeted.
Quadrophenia was the band's second rock opera, with 1969's Tommy being their first. While the album did well in the U.K., it only made it to 110 on the Billboard 200 albums chart. It contained the singles "Love Reign O'er Me" and "The Real Me."
"Quadrophenia is The Who at their most symmetrical, their most cinematic, ultimately their most maddening," Rolling Stone wrote about the album. "Captained by Pete Townshend, they have put together a beautifully performed and magnificently recorded essay of a British youth mentality in which they played no little part, lushly endowed with black and white visuals and a heavy sensibility of the wet-suffused air of 1965."
It may be a little difficult for Roger Daltry and Townsend to make the concert, though, because the band will be on their exhaustive 50th anniversary tour. The trek begins at the end of next month and the band will play gigs until November 2015.
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