Roger Daltrey Casts Doubt on His Future With The Who

The Who’s Roger Daltrey says it’s time he and bandmate Pete Townshend get together and discuss the band’s future and whether or not they want to get back on stage.

“I don’t write the songs. I never did. We need to sit down and have a meeting, but at the moment I’m happy saying that part of my life is over,” Daltrey told The Times recently. Daltrey and Townshend are the only surviving founding members of The Who, which began performing in 1964 and played their most recent show last summer at the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk, UK.

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Townshend Agrees They Need to “Have a Chat” About the Band

Townshend seems to hold the same opinion as Daltrey. He stated the two need to have a meeting to decide the band’s future. “I think it’s time for Roger and I to go to lunch and have a chat about what happens next,” Townshend told Record Collector in December. “Because Sandringham shouldn’t feel like the end of anything but it feels like the end of an era.”

“It’s a question of, really, what is feasible, what would be lucrative, what would be fun?” he continued. “So, I wrote to Roger and said, come on, let’s have a chat and see what’s there.”

Last October marked the 50th anniversary of The Who’s 1973 rock opera Quadrophenia. To celebrate, Townshend and Daltrey released a newly refurbished Dolby Atmos version of the album. Longtime The Who collaborators Bob Pridden and Richard Whittaker produced this new mix, which is available on streaming platforms. (The pair also worked together on mixing Quadrophenia in 5.1 surround sound about a decade ago.) The album was a great undertaking to produce in Dolby Atmos, according to Whittaker. Because it is one continuous piece of music, the individual tracks had to be isolated and remastered one by one, he said, adding the entire album was loaded into an “enormous Dolby Atmos Pro Tools session” for the project.

Meanwhile, Daltrey recently stepped down from his position on the Teenage Cancer Trust, a UK children’s cancer charity and support organization. He has also been openly critical of high-powered executives in the National Health Service (NHS), claiming the execs earn “£400,000 or £500,000 a year of public money.” Speaking to The Times, he said, “I’ll tell you how to pay the nurses more: cut down on executive pay. That’s my opinion. I’ll get slaughtered for saying it, but you’ve got to be tough. They [the political parties] make the NHS this political football in elections. They’re using us and it needs to stop.” 

Photo by Rick Kern/Getty Images for The Who