Roger interview from Daily Express

["Brian Cady" <cadyb@home.com>]

Available online at:
http://www.express.co.uk/00/10/16/features/f0100splash.shtml

Why we'll never fade away
FROM TOBY MOORE IN NEW YORK

Roger Daltrey, lead singer with The Who, is wailing again about his g-g-g-generation with
the rest of the band - an occasion which owes much to the grim state of British
agriculture. Still boyish at the age of 56, it is hard to believe that Daltrey has fallen
victim of the farming crisis sweeping Britain. But after years of being a farmer in
Sussex, he is now paying the price for being one of rock's landed aristocracy. Cattle, it
seems, are proving a harder job than the moody, angry music which made his fortune.

"We're just hanging in," explains Daltrey. "Fortunately, my income is so huge from over
here in America that I can support the farming for a few years."

Daltrey, who has already had to end a trout-rearing venture, persuaded The Who's
curmudgeonly lead guitarist and songwriter Pete Townshend to hit the road again 18 years
after their farewell tour. It was a carefully wrapped plea.

"I'm a farmer, so I've had some really terrible years," he says. "So I said to Pete, 'If
you ever want to do anything, we've got three years to do it. We ain't getting any
younger."

Daltrey can hardly stop speaking about "his generation", 36 years after the band formed.
And the man who sang about teenage wastelands in the Sixties is finding middle age equally
troubling.

"I've never felt so frustrated in my life," he announces suddenly, reaching for words.
"I've never known the country before with so many disillusioned middle-aged and
pre-middle-aged people. I get this incredible feeling of hopelessness from England at the
moment. I feel totally misrepresented. As a country, we just seem to have gone in the
mist."

He offers a tour through his fields of euroscepticism: "I was very heartened by the Danish
vote"; the sunken valleys of the NHS: "let's be honest, it's a liner with a huge hole in
the bottom and they keep building decks while it's sinking"; and the open spaces of New
Labour: "Shallow. And I'm in the business of shallow in certain ways."

In a borrowed penthouse above Manhattan, at the end of a hugely successful US tour - the
20,000 seat Madison Square Gardens sold out for four nights among 20 dates - Daltrey is
full of home thoughts from abroad. He finally concentrates on the band which allowed him
to indulge himself with a farm in the first place.

"When we started, we never imagined it going on 'til the end of the week, honest. Even now
it's day to day," he suggests, rather improbably, as The Who are about to tour Britain
with an energetic blast through their greatest hits.

Daltrey and Townshend, who have known each other since they were London teenagers, have a
fractious relationship which neither has disguised over the years. Townshend in a
characteristically acerbic moment described them as "codependents". But, for now, things
are going smoothly.

"I think it's because we're opposites," Daltrey suggests, explaining one of the most
enduring on-off-on again relationships in rock. "He comes from the head and I come from
the heart. But we are like brothers - there's an immense affection there. I really care
for the guy. We've gone through the old ego battles, we enjoy each other's company.
Really, we're like recovering alcoholics - it's one day at a time."

Another fruit of The Who's rediscovered fraternity - the third surviving sibling is John
Entwistle, its bass player - is talk of an album. Daltrey thinks the group is being
discovered by a whole new generation. Out there, among the sea of grey heads and male
pattern baldness singing along to Won't Get Fooled Again, My Generation and Pinball
Wizard, he spots younger people as he struts and prances and flings his microphone high
into the air, a choreography unchanged by the passing years.

"These are people who weren't even born when the songs were written. They seem to be
really getting off on the music and they know every word," he says. "There's a hankering
to get back to real music and real musicians playing off one another, which you don't get
with the music that's out there at the moment. It's all produced and pre-conceived."

The Who are grand visiers of rock 'n' roll, emerging in the Sixties as a powerful force by
honing in more firmly on teenage angst than any of their rivals. They were there at
Woodstock and were pioneers of the smashing- hotel-rooms school of publicity, a particular
skill of their late drummer Keith Moon, who died from an overdose in 1978.

Between the mayhem, the posturing the drugs and the drink, the band produced, at the
height of their pomp, the grandiose rock operas Tommy and Quadrophenia as well as some
astonishing conventional albums.

They have rediscovered their musical vigour after years of spluttering along with
occasional reunions, often muted by the vain addition of orchestras. Not this time. The
ferocity of sound and dexterity of musicianship is a jolt, even if the band - pioneers of
rock as spectacle - are more measured in their presentation (Daltrey has dodgy knees from
jogging and Townshend worries about going deaf). "The energy and joy makes it better than
ever," says Daltrey.

Their drummer is now Zak Starkey, Ringo Starr's son. Moon taught him to play. "Zak is an
incredible replacement. He's kind of organic because he was taught by Keith. When I
listen, it could be him - it's uncannily similar, although obviously you can't replace
that personality, that humour. But it is true that the band hasn't been this raw since
Keith died."

Daltrey says hotels used to clamour for The Who, especially favouring their room clearance
expert. "They'd pick the room they wanted smashed and give it to Keith, who would promptly
destroy it. He'd pay for the damage in cash and they claimed off the insurance."

Who music, with its desolate lyrics and endless guitar solos, is now more likely to be
heard in a TV ad than on a radio station these days. Not that Daltrey minds. "I don't give
a s*** how they use our music. If they use it to try to sell a car, I know that most
people aren't going to buy the car, they're going to buy the record. It's very easy to be
pompous about all this stuff."

But the band that sang "Hope I die before I get old" are not amused by those who wonder
why they didn't. "It's a stupid journalistic cheap trick," says Daltrey. "Pete never wrote
those songs when he was a teenager anyway. They were a reflection about what it's like to
be a teenager and you can reflect on that whenever you like through your life. But the
beauty of the songs is that he struck a nerve. They were so true to the anguish of
adolescence. They still speak to generations coming through."

The tour in Britain will raise money for the Teenage Cancer Trust, which works to put
specialist wards in hospitals for young sufferers. Each costs £500,000. About one in 320
boys and one in 440 girls will get cancer as teenagers.

"Having the disease on top of all the other things you go through as an adolescent makes
things worse," said Daltrey. "These units keep teenagers separate in hospitals. They can
have MTV, play video games, make noise and laugh. When they haven't got that facility, the
kids get stuck with old people who are dying or in wards with little kids and bunnies on
the wall."

The Who, it seems, can still spot a teenage wasteland.
by Toby Moore
Daily Express

        -Brian in Atlanta
         The Who This Month!
        http://members.home.net/cadyb/who.htm