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new record?




Who Plan To Record Album While On Summer Tour

Staff Writer Brian Hiatt reports
Sonic.net

Legendary British rockers the Who have gone nearly 20 years without 
releasing new songs, but they plan to break that streak
 this summer by recording new material live in concert, singer Roger 
Daltrey said.

 "I'm hoping it will be just another live album, [but] with new
songs," 
Daltrey said last week, relaxing in a chair in a
 Manhattan hotel room. "We might not make this record in the studio. 
I'm hoping we don't."

 The 56-year-old singer's famous curly hair was cropped short, but 
intact. His face showed wear, but his blue eyes were as
 bright as ever, even behind a professorial pair of gold-rimmed 
glasses.

 Not only does the band hope to record new material live, but they
also 
plan to write songs through onstage improvisation,
 according to bassist John Entwistle.

 "Maybe a lot of songs will come out of stage performances 
we'll go 
into a bit that could be a new song. A lot will come just from 
listening," he said, sitting in
 a room down the hall from his bandmate the same afternoon.

 Entwistle, 55, who damaged his hearing years ago in the recording 
studio  not during the band's notoriously loud shows, leaned in
close 
to hear questions. He
 wore a denim jacket bearing a Hard Rock Cafe logo.

 'We Need Communication And Honesty'

 Before the band embarks on its reunion tour in June, its three 
surviving original members  guitarist Pete Townshend, Daltrey
and 
Entwistle (drummer
 Keith Moon died in 1978)  will join together in the bassist's
home 
studio to listen to three new songs written by Daltrey.

 "We're hoping to get together ... to chat and mix and talk," Daltrey 
said. "What we need is communication and honesty, really. Let's see 
what their feelings are
 about what I've written and see if it inspires them."

 The singer is hesitant to flesh out the material he's written, he 
said, instead hoping that Townshend, who has always been the band's 
primary songwriter, will
 help shape the songs, with Entwistle.

 "I don't want us to get back to the situation we used to have with 
Pete in the latter days, where he would come up with such a perfect 
demo that you'd end up just
 trying to copy it," Daltrey said. "I want them to be organic from
the 
band."

 In a press conference the day before, Townshend, the author of 
countless rock classics, including "My Generation" and "Won't Get
 Fooled Again," said it was high time that he and Daltrey collaborate 
on songs.

 "Roger and I have never written a song together, and that's what
we're 
going to try to do," he said. "We're in our mid-50s  if we can't
do it 
now, we never
 will."

 For his part, Daltrey said he hopes to help Townshend rise to the 
challenge of writing new Who songs that reflect the current lives of 
the band and many of their
 fans.

 "It's always perplexed me that rock 'n' roll writers can write about 
the angst of adolescence so easily, and yet give up when it comes to 
all the f---ing problems of
 getting old and middle-aged," Daltrey said, so intensely that he
began 
to stammer. "There's an awful lot of people [our age] out there that 

could do with the same
 help in their lives now as they got from Quadrophenia when they were 
that age."

 Returning To Their Roots

 After years of live shows in which they were backed by armies of 
musicians, the Who rediscovered themselves in several stripped-down 
performances last year,
 Entwistle said. Some of those performances are captured on The Blues 
to the Bush, the band's new Internet-only live album.

 "We always had an orchestra to hide behind  we never really
felt like 
the Who back then," Entwistle said. "It's much more like the old Who
 
we're actually
 playing together."

 Before those scattered dates last year, the Who last toured in 1997. 
The band hasn't recorded a studio album since 1982's It's Hard.

 This summer's reunion tour will begin June 25 at Tinley Park, Ill.'s 
New World Music Theater.