The Who has announced a new, months-long North American tour that will kick off in Florida this April.
The iconic British band will return to the States and Canada for The Who Hits Back! tour, for which some shows were originally meant to take place in 2019. However, frontman Roger Daltrey needed to undergo a throat operation at the time, meaning the gigs had to be postponed.
The new tour, which will take place between April and May, and October and November, will see the band joined by local orchestras at each stop. They will help Daltrey and guitarist Pete Townshend recreate classic songs from the likes of Tommy, Quadrophenia, and Who’s Next, as well as tracks from the 2019 record Who.
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Other personnel that will perform at the shows include drummer Zak Starkey, bassist Jon Button, guitarist-singer Simon Townshend, keyboardist Loren Gold, backing singer Billy Nicholls, orchestra conductor Keith Levenson, lead violinist Katie Jacoby, lead cellist Audrey Snyder, and keyboardist Emily Marshall. Tickets will go on general sale at 10am local time on Friday (February 11) and will be available to purchase here.
Speaking to Rolling Stone, Townshend promised the concerts aren’t part of a long goodbye. “Roger is of the opinion that he wants to sing until he drops,” he said. “That’s not my philosophy of life. There are other things that I want to do, still want to do, and will do, I hope. I hope I’ll live long enough to do them.
“But it’s not a farewell tour. Apart from anything else, we still have people who have tickets for the UK 2019 tour. We’re very, very keen to do that tour and we’ll be doing that tour in 2023, I think. But I’m talking about stuff I don’t really know about. I don’t have any guarantees, like everybody else. I don’t really know for sure what’s going to happen next month.”
In other The Who news, a long-discussed biopic about the band’s former drummer Keith Moon is planning to begin shooting in June. The film will be executive-produced by Townshend and Daltrey and is being made under the working title The Real Me.
Some of the shows were originally booked for 2019 and delayed because Roger Daltrey was suffering from a vocal ailment, while others were scheduled for 2020 and postponed due to the pandemic. They have added several shows to the itinerary, and they’re calling the whole tour “The Who Hits Back!”
They first tried out the orchestra concept on 2019’s Moving On! tour. Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey were joined for that run by their longtime drummer Zak Starkey, bassist Jon Button, guitarist-vocalist Simon Townshend (Pete’s brother), keyboardist Loren Gold, bassist Jon Button, background vocalist Billy Nicholls, orchestra conductor Keith Levenson, lead violinist Katie Jacoby, and lead cellist Audrey Snyder. That same team is back this time around, though they’ll be joined by additional keyboardist Emily Marshall.
Townshend says the presence of the orchestras gives him a focus he doesn’t have at traditional Who concerts. “It gives me a chance to make sure what I play, what I do, where I look, how I behave on the stage, is more connected with the people around me,” he tells Rolling Stone, “and with the audience, and with, to get prosaic about it, an inner sense.
“In other words,” he continues, “I don’t lose myself the way I did when I used to jump around, have a big adrenaline rush, and then come off the stage and someone would say, ‘Great show,’ or someone would say, ‘Terrible show,’ and I wouldn’t really know what I had done, to be honest, since I was like someone running a marathon. So the orchestra gives me space.”
Notable shows on the tour include a headlining set at the New Orleans Jazz Fest, a return to the original Woodstock site in Bethel Woods, New York, and the band’s first concert in Cincinnati, Ohio, since the 1979 gig where 11 Who fans died in a stampede shortly after the doors opened.
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“At last, we can close the loop on the disaster that happened back in 1979,” says Townshend. “We’ve done a lot of work on that. There’s been a documentary [The Who: The Night That Changed Rock] about it. This has been in the air for a while.”
And even though Daltrey is 77 and Townshend is 76, they’re not billing this as the band’s final tour. “Roger is of the opinion that he wants to sing until he drops,” says Townshend. “That’s not my philosophy of life. There are other things that I want to do, still want to do, and will do, I hope. I hope I’ll live long enough to do them.”
“But it’s not a farewell tour,” he continues. “Apart from anything else, we still have people who have tickets for the U.K. 2019 tour. We’re very, very keen to do that tour and we’ll be doing that tour in 2023, I think. But I’m I’m talking about stuff I don’t really know about. I don’t have any guarantees, like everybody else. I don’t really know for sure what’s going to happen next month.”