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JOHN: Well, y’know, none of us can really understand why people will like queue up in thousands to buy tickets to a concert, I mean we’ve got no idea of what that is.
PETE: The Who in a sense has always been the crowds band as it were. There’s still a fantastic amount of irreverence that goes on around The Who. I mean our audience don’t treat us reverently, y’know with a certain amount of respect obviously and affection, but I mean with no adulation. At least not real who fans don’t.
KEITH: The attitude towards the audience has pretty much always been, it’s always been the same in my case anyway, I always go out with the intention of making them leave the theatre or whatever saying what a great drummer. I mean that’s the way I think before I go on stage. I want to please the audience, I want the audience to like what I’m doing. At the same time I don’t want to sort of bend to the audience’s whim, you know I’m not going to let the audience dominate me, I mean if they don’t like it then they can leave. It’s not so much fun with an audience that sits there with a dour expression and says okay, I’ve paid me quid, I’ve paid me buttons, now entertain me. If you get that kind of audience it’s hard graft. If you get the sort of audience that is there to have a good time, to have a night out, to ah, become part of an event, it’s much easier and much nicer to work with that kind of audience, because you’re not working to it, you’re working with it.
PETE: We all used to live in the Acton area, you know, and used to play mainly in Acton, Shepherds Bush and ah it was later, I mean the reason that it became known that The Who came from Shepherds Bush was that our first really fanatically loyal audience actually came from a club called the Goldhawk Club which was near Shepherds Bush.
JOHN: We got to the stage where the audience, directly as we walked on, was shouting “smash your guitar smash your guitar”. And we decided that there were, you know, a lot of people in the audience were coming to see the guitar smashing part and not the music.
PETE: I’ve always, like, struggled. And I think The Who as a band, perhaps, less consciously maybe, have struggled to keep the real sort of strong roots with it’s audience. It gets more and more difficult, there’s no doubt about it. As the band gets involved in grandiose projects like Tommy films and you know, god knows what. I mean, it does tend to make one aloof from the public. Not by any want of our own, but it does tend to happen. The star making machine gets in process and it’s no way round, you can get around it.
PETE: Roger is a very ordinary bloke, right, so by writing things for this ordinary bloke I happen to be getting a lot nearer the man in the street. Getting a lot nearer to the kind of things that they want to say.
PETE: We just realised it was about time we started to act like mature human beings. And it’s not really for any other reason than we’ve started to realise on a much broader level the kind of responsibility we have to our audience, and that more than ever before we want The Who to continue.
PETE: From the stage you know there’s something that a lot of people don’t realise, they just look up at a stage and they think well there’s the artist up there and you know he does his thing and we watch it you know. In actual fact you can see a lot from the stage you know, particularly in ballrooms, you can spot fashion changes much more quickly than you can eye level you know. You can spot a new dance more quickly than you can at eye level, and you get to know playing regularly at a place like the Goldhawk Club or the Notre Dame in London or The Scene Club or Carpenters Park, Watford Trade, South London. We used to play that whole sort of ring of places, which were all mod strongholds, ah, you get to know who the Faces are, in other words the key people that would set the trends, and all. It would be much more easy to identify who the trend setters were from up on the stage than down in the audience in a way. You could keep a close eye on the trend setters and then merely mimic them, and thus the majority of the audience because they were looking up on the stage would think that you were actually setting the trends. And then after a couple of months of doing that you could of course start to set trends anyway. You know you could invent a dance on the stage and everybody would say oh that’s The Who doing ah, what’s obviously going to be next weeks dance. And ah they start doing it y’know.
PETE: You know I thought there was a great encouraging sign about a year ago when I noticed that a lot of people were starting to sort of choogle about in audiences again y’know. Seems to have gone back to square one again, but I mean you know, if the audience ain’t gonna dance then I’m gonna do their dancing for ‘em, they can watch me have a good time.
PETE: There are the obvious singles you know which come up again and again and again which people constantly refer to, like My Generation or Anyway Anyhow Anywhere, but a lot of songs, like I Can’t Explain for example, the first song I ever really wrote, songs like that a lot of people I see, you know Who fans and Who biographers breaking it down into what it really means. I mean when I wrote it, it was about a guy who couldn’t explain his love for his girlfriend.
PETE: There’s a great distinction between the conscious things that we’ve done, and I’m sure that Who fans could tell what the conscious things were, like pop art for example.
JOHN: The Germans are like, as notorious as we were for smashing up equipment for smashing up auditoriums you know. I mean, they just seemed to every time we played in front of an audience they’d imitate the smashing of a guitar by smashing chairs.
JOHN: You know, the mods took us over as their own band, for completely different reasons. I’d like to think mainly because we were a good live band. And we played in Brighton during the great mod uprising, the mod-rocker war, and that’s what really got us into it. Well Pete wrote songs about teenagers and people stuttering because they’re on, you know, taking leapers and pills, and the mods could identify with us
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