The Who will do their first two shows of the year this Thursday and Sunday as part of the annual Teenage Cancer Trust week-long concert series at London's Royal Albert Hall, and Pete Townshend is "nervous."
Speaking to Rolling Stone, he said, "It’s going to be a stripped down band. It’s going to be me, my brother [Simon], a keyboard player, a bass player, [drummer] Zak [Starkey], and Roger [Daltrey]. That’s it. And we don’t really know what we’re doing... I’m hoping to keep it simple. We shall see.
"I’ve got no idea what it’s going to be like. I’m actually nervous. And I think Roger’s nervous as well. We’re both in our eighties, beyond our eighties, in Roger’s case. I’m 80 in May. And I’ve just had a knee transplant, which it was nothing to do with being young or virile. It was to do with having an accident years ago.
"That kind of stuff gets harder as you get older. It gets harder to recover from surgery, to recover from taking loads of codeine and all of that stuff, the brain fog that’s involved in it. So we’ve got a list of songs. We’re looking at them, and I’m going, 'Which are the easy ones?' But it’s sold out. I could go out and just play a kazoo. I’ve made the money for the charity."
As for what's next for The Who, Townshend said, "I think we’re at an interesting time. And I think for The Who, it’s probably not as interesting as it is for some other people. I think what we call The Who is just Roger and me. And we can exchange emails and we can sit and nag at each other about various political things on which we agree or disagree. But the fact is that we have this legacy, and it’s a Black Swan legacy, which is that we’ve been lucky."
On a more personal note, Townshend feels he has "maybe 10 years left as a creative. So I’m doing all kinds of interesting things, theatrical projects, art projects, book projects, working. I’ve done four record productions in the past couple of years. I’ve just done a song cycle about Woody Guthrie called Fire and Dust. I did an album with the Bookshop band. They write songs about books. I produced an album with a young indie band called the Wild Things.
"I’m really active on music and doing stuff and trying to keep myself fueled up. I think if I was a journalist…I’m not suggesting I want the job because I hate deadlines…but if I was, [screw it] I wouldn’t know where to begin"
After the Albert Hall shows, The Who have two more in Italy in July, with Daltrey touring England in between.