The Who vocal Roger Daltrey has “had enough of”

Posted On August 21, 2025August 21, 2025

No singer can claim to have the same voice that they did when they were in their 20s. The human voice can only take so much before it’s begging for mercy at the end of every show, and while many people have tried and failed to make their voices work, Roger Daltrey actually made the most of his whenever he worked on Who records.

For one thing, Daltrey was always keeping himself in shape during the band’s prime. No singer can spend their time getting drunk and high every single time they get offstage, and while Daltrey did have his fair share of bad habits when working with the group, he knew everyone would be relying on him to hit those insane high notes in songs like ‘Love Reign O’er Me’ whenever bringing the show to a close every single night.

But the band was never the kind of group to give out pleasantries or anything when singing. It was always about whose voice suited the song, and while Daltrey had the power to make any song sound as powerful as possible, Pete Townshend’s more tender voice was always perfect for some of the more downtempo stuff they would do. ‘Love Ain’t For Keeping’ is a fine song for Daltrey, but that voice would have never done justice to ‘Going Mobile’.

As Who’s Next began, though, Daltrey had started finding his feet as a frontman a little bit more. The entire journey the band took on Tommy led to him being the grand storyteller for Townshend whenever they went out onstage, and since the initial vision for Lifehouse was preparing itself to be an even more ambitious undertaking, Townshend seemed to have higher expectations for everyone before he eventually scrapped the whole idea.

Although Daltrey was willing to put his voice through everything he could to get the right takes down, some of the pieces are high even by his standards. ‘Getting in Tune’ sees him singing at the top of his range before breaking into his signature scream, and ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ is a great test of his musical endurance, but everyone knows that it was all building up to that scream in ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’.

All memes aside, the scream is still insanely powerful for the time, but don’t ask Daltrey to recreate it again, with him saying later, “I’m not gonna do the scream. I’m gonna get the f–king audience to do the scream. I’ve done that scream for 55 years, and I’ve had enough of it. I don’t even want to try it now; it’s brutal on the vocal cords. They can do the scream, and I’ll do everything else. I’m more into singing these days. At the age of 80, I think I deserve to be.”

That’s bound to disappoint fans, but it’s simply a case of being realistic these days. There’s no one who could feasibly keep that up for that many years, and had Daltrey kept doing the scream for years on end, it would have become either too tiring or completely wrecked his voice on more than a few occasions when he played the tune live.

And considering the kind of shows that The Who put on, he’s probably better off making the most of the voice that he still has. There are many opportunities for him to still stretch himself as a vocalist, but it’s better to have to sacrifice one important note than to spend the rest of his days wondering if he can even produce another note again for the rest of his life.

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