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| Designed by Richard Evans; released by Polydor/Warner Bros |
Why is one of The Who’s most diverse, most accomplished
albums, so unknown and so often disregarded? Perhaps because it wasn’t
understood in the time it was released in. Townshend was decidedly out of favour
with rock’s self-appointed literati who saw the band as a middle-aged rock
stadia irrelevance. Yet listening without prejudice reveals some of their best
ever songs; songs with relevance then and arguably even more now. Who, in the
realm of popular music at least, has ever tried to take on the subject of
manhood (‘A Man is a Man’) and successfully captured the absurd expectations,
contradictions and, sometimes, quiet bravery that it can encompass? ‘It’s so
hard’, as a line in the title track notes, to be true to yourself, to be
honest, to be consistent.
Perhaps if men (and this is a man’s record) could
adopt Townshend’s advice in the song ‘Cry If You Want To’, then failure could
really be success. This track is part male rock bombast (check out the sonic
guitar solo) and part emotional advocacy. Cry, because your childhood illusions
have been destroyed – as we now know Townsend’s were – and the sloganising
political simplicities of adolescence cannot capture global complexities. In a
further example of the song-writing thread running through this album, ‘I’ve
Known No War’ contrasts the then (and still) very topical abhorrence of nuclear
weapons with experiencing war, and in whose wake The Who and others railed
against the very notion of gratitude for past sacrifice. This song (and ‘The
Green Fields of France’) should have found a place amongst the war
memorialisation that recently marshalled the masses in an echo of 1930s
regimes but with even less historical or political context. There are a few
non-classics too, though the danceable 'Eminence Front gets close while ‘Cooks’
County’, ‘Dangerous’, etc. ain't filler. One of the most extraordinary tracks
is the short but overwhelming ‘One Life is Enough’. It could have been an
imagined Townsend/Lloyd-Webber partnership in its stagey-ness, but is almost
operatic in the lyrical and vocal ambition that Townshend-Daltrey bring to bear.