Pete Townshend’s “After the Fire” was supposed to be part of the Who’s Live Aid performance. Instead, it became the highlight of Roger Daltrey’s emotionally unbound 1985 solo album Under a Raging Moon, where the song has been largely forgotten.
Presented amidst a lean, polyrhythmic cadence (courtesy of Big Country’s Mark Brzezicki), Roger Daltrey’s take on “After the Fire” is blessedly free of the gimmicks that so quickly date much of the music of this era. Yet, even in its moment, “After the Fire” could get no higher than No. 48 on the Billboard Hot 100. It’s a shame, because this track is in many ways the match of Townshend’s far more celebrated “Slit Skirts” in the way it deals with the wounds that time conveys — and the weird mixture of anger and regret that remain.
A telescoped rehearsal schedule before the Who’s stop at the internationally televised Live Aid might have earned it wider notice, or perhaps an appearance on the track by Pete Townshend himself. Robbie McIntosh, between gigs with the Pretenders and then Paul McCartney’s band, is instead featured on guitar, while producer Alan Shacklock is at the piano.
Certainly, you can’t blame Roger Daltrey. Always the perfect foil, he completely inhabits Townshend’s lyric (“I’ve got to stop drinking. I’ve got to stop thinking!), broiling it in searing emotion. They’ve rarely been paired to greater effect in the post-Keith Moon era, even if so very few ever heard it. “After the Fire” remains perhaps their best should’ve-been Who hit.
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The Who ended with Moon’s death. There was no Who after Moon. But man, when the band was intact, it was an amazing thing, an extraordinary quartet. It seems that such bands are formed by Divine Providence.
Like Led Zeppelin, the odds seem astronomically against four such musicians coming together in the same place, at the same time, to create a chemistry that defies explanation. A real band is a team, and if one member is subtracted, it is not only no longer the same band, it can never reproduce the same sound.
Daltry and Townshend were well aware that their subsequent drummers could in no way reproduce or replace Moon’s beats and rhythms, as were the replacement drummers themselves aware of this, even though Starkey could echo Moon’s style.. It’s no insult to Jones or Starkey, it’s just that all drummers, all musicians, have their own style.
Had Daltry, or Townshend, or the amazing Entwistle left the band in 1978, I don’t think anyone would argue that the Who would’ve ceased to exist in that case as well.
Another woulda coulda shoulda Who song that wasn’t, is Townshend’s “Gonna Get Ya”, from 1980.