RAH2 review

[thewho rocks <leb905@yahoo.com>]

Review from the Daily Telegraph, thanks to Ian at alt.music.who:

>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.

=====
Don't meddle in the affairs of dragons, because you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.
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