Pete Townshend has taken to his discussed with Billboard.com prior to the tour and Entwistle’s death, Townshend says, “I still don’t think I can write new songs for this thing we all call the Who. The Who is a brand name, and two old guys called Roger and Pete. I think I’m going to stick with the two old guys and let the brand name look after itself. It [has] done pretty well without my help — and despite a huge amount of my active interference — for the 20 years since 1982 when I did my last studio session with the band.”
“I do not want to write with Roger so we can pass ourselves off as a ‘new’ Who,” Townshend stresses. “I want to see whether we can write together, and if he and I have anything we can say together, that we could not say separately. I am not shying away from the usual division of labor — Roger is more of a singer than a writer, and I am claiming to be a more of a writer than a performer. What I am shying away from is trying to pick up the Who recording legacy where it was dropped in 1976. Whether we call an album a Who album is not the point. We can call it what we like. It is how we approach it that matters.”
As Townshend mentioned, the Who has not released an album since 1982’s “It’s Hard.” Townshend wrote several pieces for its intended but never realized follow-up, “Siege,” some of which later surfaced on his archival “Scoop” releases.
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