Daily Telegraph review of 2nd RAH

["Ian Clarke" <gai67@dial.pipex.com>]

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.