Sam Rkaina
THE problem with doing a gig based around performing an entire album is you've got to pick the right one.
Legendary frontman of The Who Roger Daltrey is the latest performer to take one of his back catalogue on the road, and he had plenty of classics to choose from.
Unfortunately he went for the over rated rock opera concept album Tommy from 1969.
Unfortunate because – and some will consider this blasphemy – Tommy is and always has been a terrible record.
Overlong and overblown, the rock equivalent of Andrew Lloyd Webber represents all the worst excesses of 1960s psychedelic indulgence.
The 74 minute, 24-song slog made up the first half of his two-and-a-half hour show at Colston Hall.
With the obvious exception of Pinball Wizard, it was a pretty uninspiring exercise.
It didn't help that, presumably to preserve the flow of the album, Daltrey didn't speak between songs.
It wasn't looking great. That was until the last song – an epic, climactic We're Not Gonna Take It.
Finally the band came alive, and the audience rose to their feet as the rock star of old was unleashed.
From then on it was like watching a different performance. Once the Tommy endurance test was over, Daltrey became very chatty, f-ing and blinding with the best of them.
The 67-year-old looks fantastic, and apart from a few slips here and there his voice still stands up.
The last hour of the show was something of a career retrospective, and a real reminder why Daltrey is so revered.
It began with a blinding I Can See For Miles and for the rest of the show he barely put a foot wrong.
An increasingly ironic Young Man Blues was even better but it was his former band's crowning achievement Baba O'Riley that tore the house down.
It's been said before but Colston Hall really needs to stop putting on all-seater shows because when everyone is one their feet for a rock gig like this it becomes ridiculous.
With little more than a ukulele, Daltrey finished with an understated and touching Blue, Red and Grey from The Who By Numbers.
In a nice touch, he stayed to shake the hand of everyone in the front row.
A game of two halves then, but as the man himself said, "there's life in the old bugger yet".
8/10
