WHO’S BEST?
WHAT’S FOR TEA, MUM?
The Who Sell Out was, is, and will always be Pete Townshend’s finest hour. Other albums might routinely pip it to the finishing post when readers poll time comes around, and Who’s Next certainly packs a stronger start and finish. But excise the bookends and what do you have, but a gaggle of bantam-weight ditties, while Tommy was always far more concerned with concept than content. Quadrophenia comes close, but it goes on too long, and the rest of the repertoire simply sits on the hearth and scratches itself.
, on the other hand, is everything an album should be, even in a year that history insists was dominated by the furrowed-brows and self-conscious statements of The Beatles and the Stones. It was at their most wide-eyed and breathless, at their silliest, at their poppiest, without making a laborious virtue of any of those things. For the last time in
