"It's quite a wonderful feeling - actually very, very intense."īut then something odd happened. "I've had many experiences of standing onstage in front of audiences and feeling that this could be the last time," Johnson says, laughing. So the duo decided to take the show on the road, including a performance at London's Royal Albert Hall. It was voted album of the year by Classic Rock magazine. The album did remarkably well in both the U.K. "There's a 70-year-old singer and a dying guitarist it's got so much energy, it's ridiculous!" Daltrey says, laughing. We did it very simply and I think that's reflected on this album."ĭaltrey thinks the album's title track says it all: The experience captured the spirit of going back to the vitality they had four decades ago.
The two recorded Going Back Home in a mere eight days, which Daltrey says is one reason the album is so special: "A lot of today's music is made ponderously where people dissect it and they spend hours overdubbing and all this stuff. I'll have a bit of a retrospective of my songs.' "
"But under the circumstance," Johnson says, "when we finally got to record it, I'm thinking, 'Right, well, this is the last thing I'll do. "You know Wilko," Daltrey says, " 'Let's not worry about what we're going to record, let's just go and record anything!' The most important thing of all if you have a year to live is to have some fun."Īt first, Johnson envisioned recording covers of American soul hits from the 1960s. When Daltrey heard, he called Johnson immediately. Soon after, news of his diagnosis began to spread. Johnson opted against chemotherapy, deciding to just let the cancer take its course. "I went out the hospital in this beautiful winter's day, the trees against the sky and that and I just felt so elated and just thinking, 'You're alive, you're alive.' " "I wasn't freaked out when the guy told me," Johnson says. In January 2013, he was given less than a year to live. "And we kind of threw it around a bit and talked a lot about doing it and never got around to it."īut things changed when Johnson got a severe and inoperable form of pancreatic cancer. "So we said, 'Let's make a record,' " Daltrey says. Listen to the best of Roger Daltrey on Apple Music and Spotify.A few years back, Johnson found himself at a music awards show reminiscing about the good old days with another famous British rocker, Roger Daltrey of The Who. Thursday 2nd – Bournemouth International Centre
Tickets will go on sale on Friday (10) at 9am BST. He will dip into a solo catalog that includes nine albums in his own name, his much-acclaimed Going Back Home collaboration with Wilko Johnson, and he’ll also reinterpret some classics and rarities by The Who. The show will embrace the many styles of Daltrey’s career both with The Who and as a solo artist, including blues, rock, country, soul, and metal. This pandemic has brought home to me what an important part of me singing is and it’s made me determined to get back onstage asap.
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“It’s also clear that live music is an important part of all our lives, something to free us from the groundhog days that life has become. “It’s important to get our road crew working again, without these guys the halls would go silent,” he goes on.