Daily Telegraph reviews RAH night 2

[Brian Cady <brianinatlanta2001@yahoo.com>]

Thanks to Ian Clarke at alt.music.who for posting this
as it isn't yet on line:

Too much meddling by former guitar hero
(Filed: 11/02/2002)

David Cheal reviews The Who at the Royal Albert Hall

THIS would have been an infinitely more enjoyable and
satisfying show but for the meddlings and twiddlings
of one man: Pete Townshend. The Who's guitarist and
songwriter is renowned for his brilliance as a rhythm
player; his chords are the fulcrum around which the
group's music is constructed. But he has also got it
into his head that he is a towering genius in the art
of lead guitar, when he plainly is not; his solos
were, almost without exception, aimless, shapeless,
tuneless and self-indulgent. The result was a
sporadically brilliant but ultimately frustrating
evening.

The event was the second of two performances by the
Who in a short season of concerts organised by the
group's singer, Roger Daltrey, in support of the
Teenage Cancer Trust. Earlier in the week, Oasis had
put in a performance that led to accusations that they
were living off past glories. The same thing could, of
course, be said of the Who, who, by Townshend's own
admission, haven't made a decent album for a quarter
of a century. But the difference lies in the quality
of those past glories; whereas Oasis have but a
handful of songs of genuine class, virtually
everything the Who played on Friday night was a
gleaming nugget.

But whenever they'd managed to build up a good head of
steam, Townshend would allow it to dissipate by
whirling around and thrashing another solo out of his
Fender. In comparison, John Entwistle's bass solo (a
phrase usually guaranteed to strike dread into the
heart of any seasoned pop fan) on 5.15 was a paragon
of economy.

Daltrey's voice, meanwhile, was in remarkable shape,
inevitably diminished in range but still a thing of
awesome power. And Zak Starkey is now unquestionably a
drummer in his own right rather than a Keith Moon
soundalike, although not everyone in the audience
appreciated his new-found confidence: on Won't Get
Fooled Again, in the famous bit with thundering
tom-toms Starkey strayed from the score, prompting an
outraged Who obsessive behind me to shout in horror,
"No! No! No!"

For me, though, this was an evening in which the
problem was not fidelity, but boredom.


=====
-Brian in Atlanta
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