“It used to frustrate me”: The one element of The Who that Roger Daltrey never liked

Posted On June 10, 2025June 10, 2025

The Who were always a beautiful mess whenever they took to the stage. While they may not have been doing anything that their contemporaries hadn’t done before when they were still playing R&B covers, hearing Pete Townshend’s guitar blaring out of Marshall stacks was all anyone needed if they wanted to feel some excitement whenever they went to a live show. But when looking at the band as a whole, Roger Daltrey always had a handful of issues that didn’t sit well with him as time went on.

Because, really, Daltrey had every right to criticise what he would be singing every single night. He was the vocal mouthpiece of the group for a reason, and if he was performing a certain song, he wanted to make sure he believed in it before anyone bothered to hit ‘record’ on the console. But if he was singing words by Townshend, that meant playing different characters along the way as well.

Throughout every one of the band’s operatic ventures, they were always looking to do something more that pushed rock in a different direction, and that meant Daltrey having to play everyone from the deaf, dumb, and blind boy to the role of his mother or handing off vocal duties to Townshend or Keith Moon to get the right tone for the song. But as far as he was concerned, everything was fine as long as it fit in the parameters of rock.

Then again, Townshend wasn’t looking to be a rock and roller for the rest of his life, He only ever considered that one facet of his career, and since he was an art-school student, he wanted to take bits and pieces from every part of the creative spectrum and make them a part of The Who, and if the amplifiers weren’t enough, he would have to make do with the massive synthesisers that he had on hand.

While the synthesisers were nothing but a novelty at the time, the true artists knew how to use them correctly. George Harrison had introduced his new toy to The Beatles when they were making Abbey Road, and The Doors used it to open up Strange Days, so when Townshend started sequencing the basis of Lifehouse, he made sure that the keyboards would be front and centre when ‘Baba O’Riley’ came blaring out of the speakers.

It may have sounded like music from the future, but Daltrey admitted to not being a fan of their transition into the world of synthesisers, saying, “Synthesisers were all droning in the back. I didn’t like it taking over the lead instrument when we have what I consider to be one of the best guitarists in the world in the band. It used to frustrate me a bit.” But looking at what Townshend could do behind the scenes, he was equally talented with the keyboards as with a guitar.

There are admittedly pieces that sounded a little too synthesised on the band’s later albums, but since the piano has a broader range to work with, Townshend squeezed a lot more depth out of his material. A song like ‘Love Reign O’er Me’ works just as well when being played on a guitar, but there are pieces that sound like they were meant to be played on a massive piano on a grand stage, rather than have the windmill take over everything.

It’s not the optimal setup for the traditional rock and roll band structure, but it was a move in the right direction. Because if the band decided to stay stagnant and keep making songs in the same vein as ‘My Generation’, perhaps we wouldn’t have had a chance to hear what they could do when Quadrophenia came out.

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