The Who - Endless Wire

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Rspaight
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The Who - Endless Wire

Postby Rspaight » Sun Sep 17, 2006 11:33 am

Sheesh, I figured SOMEONE ought to create a thread for this. You guys are slipping.

Here's Townshend and Daltrey on Letterman. I was pleasantly surprised by "Wire & Glass", and this is also pretty solid stuff. Whatever else this record is, it doesn't seem to be a cash-in or Stones-esque "going through the motions" excercise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArEKZZho4Ao

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Postby lukpac » Sun Sep 17, 2006 11:44 am

I've heard/seen a few versions of Mirror Door so far, which I actually really like.

It might be a good idea to save the Letterman clip from your cache before it gets pulled...
"I know because it is impossible for a tape to hold the compression levels of these treble boosted MFSL's like Something/Anything. The metal particulate on the tape would shatter and all you'd hear is distortion if even that." - VD

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Postby stevef » Thu Sep 21, 2006 2:00 am

Hmm... I was going to start an Endless Wire thread, but I was going to put it in New Releases where it probably should be.

Luke, shouldn't we move this thread there?

BTW... I've been away for a while but I wanted to say I thought Pete and Roger's appearance on Letterman was great. didn't expect just the two of them to come out and play something acoustic, but they were awesome together. And both of them were really into the new material.

Steve

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Postby stevef » Thu Sep 28, 2006 5:22 am


More Details About the New Who Album Revealed

The Who's Pete Townshend discusses each of the 19 tracks from the band's long-awaited Endless Wire album in a new online post. "This is not the old Who, we never said it would be," the guitarist-songwriter says of the disc, which hits stores Oct. 31. "It is something else." Meanwhile, a limited-edition version of Endless Wire will be packaged with a bonus DVD titled Live at Lyon.

Click here to listen to two songs from the album:

http://testing.universalmotown.com/thew ... blast.html


from Pete Townshend's Official Site--


27 September 2006
Endless Wire official press release



THE WHO
‘ENDLESS WIRE’

Released 30th October 2006 on Polydor Records


London, September 2006.

It’s been said before but ‘long awaited’ doesn’t even begin to describe ‘Endless Wire’ the new album by The Who, the band’s first in 24 years.

Recorded, as Pete Townshend puts in the album’s sleeve notes, ‘discontinuously’ over the past four years, the nineteen tracks on the record reflect a band still pushing the boundaries of rock music and unafraid to experiment.

Alongside nine new Townshend compositions, half of the album is the full- length version of the mini opera ‘Wire And Glass’, a taster for which was released earlier this Summer.

The band are currently undertaking a sold out US tour before returning to the UK for their last European show of the year at London’s Roundhouse as part of the ‘Electric Proms’.

Talking about the album Roger Daltrey commented, "John Entwistle died and that changed the balance in the band. Pete and I are at two opposite ends of the globe, if you like, and John was the equator. Now it's very, very, different. Not sure what it is but something's happening - and it's giving us a whole new edge."

Pete Townshend – ‘This is not the old Who, we never said it would be, It is something else’.

Whatever that something else and whole new edge are, the new album has the unmistakable power and sound of a band with some unfinished business.


The tracklisting for ‘Endless Wire’

1. Fragments (Townshend/Ball)
2. A Man In A Purple Dress (Townshend)
3. Mike Post Theme (Townshend)
4. In The Ether (Townshend)
5. Black Widow’s Eyes (Townshend)
6. Two Thousand Years (Townshend)
7. God Speaks of Marty Robbins (Townshend)
8. It’s Not Enough (Townshend/Fuller)
9. You Stand By Me (Townshend)

Tracks 10 – 19 comprise the full length Mini-Opera ‘Wire And Glass’.

10. Sound Round (Townshend)
11. Pick Up The Peace (Townshend)
12. Unholy Trinity (Townshend)
13. Trilby’s Piano (Townshend)
14. Endless Wire (Townshend)
15. Fragments of Fragments (Townshend/Ball)
16. We Got A Hit (Townshend)
17. They Made My Dream Come True (Townshend)
18. Mirror Door (Townshend)
19. Tea & Theatre (Townshend)

The following are notes written by Pete Townshend about each of the tracks on ‘Endless Wire’.


FRAGMENTS

This song is based on one of the very first experiments by Lawrence Ball, a composer I commissioned to create a system, and software, that would recreate the ‘Method’ music (music accurately reflecting an individual via a website) described in my three interlocked rock-opera projects: Lifehouse (The Who 1972); Psychoderelict (Pete Townshend solo 1993); The Boy Who Heard Music (Weblog Novella 2005-2006).
In The Boy Who Heard Music a group of three young people form a band – The Glass Household – and their first big hit is this song.

MAN IN A PURPLE DRESS

After watching Mel Gibson’s harrowing 2004 film The Passion of the Christ I immediately wrote three songs. This was one of them. It is not so much a rail against the principles of justice through the ages, but a challenge to the vanity of the men who need to put on some kind of ridiculous outfit in order to pass sentence on one of their peers. It is the idea that men need dress up in order to represent God that appals me. If I wanted to be as insane as to attempt to represent God I’d just go ahead and do it, I wouldn’t dress up like a drag-queen.

MIKE POST THEME

Who songs have been used recently for TV shows. I thought a lot about why there are people who feel that isn’t a cool thing to do. Mike Post is a man who has written a number of TV themes that I feel have created a kind of regular sparkle in my life – they have reminded me that life comes one day at a time, and that it is truly the little things in life (like Soap Operas on TV) that help ease the big troubles. The larger theme in the background of this song is the statement that we are no longer strong enough or young enough to love. In a very real way, movies, novels and TV series do help us to express selfless emotions as we once did when we were in love. Men cry quietly watching TV and movies, women maybe a little more openly, but when we do that we are reconnecting with our innocent and free-flowing feelings. If only we could still do that with the principle lover in our lives.

IN THE ETHER

In my Novella The Boy Who Heard Music the narrator is Ray High, a rock star whose drug-abuse has led him to a sanatorium. While there he learns to meditate and begins to sense that someone is interfering with his quietude up in the place where he allows his mind to go. It seems almost as though they are using a Ham Radio, and old fashioned long-wave radio that was the specialist precursor to the modern internet Chat-Room. He may sense another presence, but this song reinforces how lonely it is to be ‘spiritual’. If the intention of the spiritual aspirant is to ‘become one with the infinite’, and yet life is almost the universally finite antidote to the infinite, isn’t he likely to get very lonely?

BLACK WIDOW’S EYES

A love song. We sometimes fall in love when we do not want to, and when we do not expect to. Suddenly. Foolishly. This song is about the man holding a child in the Beslan massacre who described the female terrorist who blew herself up, killing the child he held, as ‘having the most penetrating and beautiful eyes’.

TWO THOUSAND YEARS

This is one of the three songs I wrote after watching The Passion of the Christ. This one is about the fact that Judas may not have been acting to betray Christ at all, but precisely following his instructions. He waits two thousand years for us to consider this a possibility. We wait two thousand years for the New Christ. We need a lot of patience.

GOD SPEAKS, OF MARTY ROBBINS

Very simple song. God is asleep, before Creation – before the Big Bang – and gets the whim to wake, and decides it could be worth going through it all in order to be able to hear some music, and most of all, one of his best creations, Marty Robbins.

IT’S NOT ENOUGH

Watching Mepris, the ‘60s film by Lean Luc Godard starring Bridget Bardot, I found myself wondering why it is that we choose people to partner who we feel aren’t quite right. Bardot asks her lover, ‘Do you adore my legs?’ He nods. ‘My breasts?’ He nods. ‘My arms?’ He nods. She goes over her entire body. He nods every time. When she’s finished she gets up and tells him, ‘It’s not enough’.

YOU STAND BY ME

I wrote this a few minutes before appearing on my partner Rachel Fuller’s In The Attic Live webcast show from my studio in London. I had nothing new to play, and decide to write a song. This just came out. It is for her, and for Roger, for believing in me, and standing by me when I have been completely out of order. It could be for many of my family, friends and fans who have done the same. I have often been a very tricky man to live with.


Tracks 10 – 19 comprise the full length Mini-Opera ‘Wire And Glass’.


SOUND ROUND

The first song from Wire & Glass, a ‘Mini-Opera’, ten songs that comprise the principle music composed so far for the novella The Boy Who Heard Music. A young man (the young Ray High) is driving a large camper bus with extreme air-con around an Estuary close to a large Power Station. He can see that the sea is swarming with a plague of jellyfish encouraged by the over-heated sea water (this is based on something that happened around 1971 in the Blackwater Estuary in Essex). He stops and looks at the water, throws a stick for his dog, who he has to rescue. In the sky he sees the future – nothing ecological or apocalyptic, more a vision of a society strangled by wire and communications.

PICK UP THE PEACE

Ray High, now an old ‘60s rocker, is meditating in what looks like a cell in a secure hospital. He sees three teenagers from his neighbourhood getting together as kids do, playing, flirting, talking, and forming a band. Then he has an intuition that they are going to become stars. They are Gabriel, Josh and Leila. (They call their band The Glass Household). In striking contrast he sees scenes from his own childhood in the same neighbourhood, bombed buildings and old soldiers.

UNHOLY TRINITY

The three kids are from very different families. Gabriel is from a show biz family of lapsed Christians. Josh is from a fairly devout Jewish family (they observe Sabbath) who have suffered a tragedy, the loss of their father in an incident in Israel. Leila, from a Muslim family who have also suffered a loss: that of her beautiful and charismatic mother who died when she was very young. They each share fantasies, and afflictions, gifts and ideas, and become deeply committed friends. Like urchin-angels they share their secrets: Gabriel hears music; Josh voices; Leila can fly.

TRILBY’S PIANO

Josh’s widowed mother vests all her hopes in her brother Hymie becoming a great man. He falls in love with Trilby, Gabriel’s goofy blonde Aunt. Trilby is the one who has nurtured Gabriel’s great musical talent, unnoticed by his precoccupied mother. The kids decide to put on a musical play at Leila’s father’s studio featuring this song, and it finally breaks Josh’s mother’s resistance to the love match. The song is sung by Gabriel. The play is a naiive children’s effort, but with a grand proscenium stage (like a large Victorian puppet theatre) a stairway and a cherub and angel filled backdrop.

ENDLESS WIRE

At some point in their rehearsals for the play, the three teenagers unearth documents that turn out to have belonged to Ray High, Leila’s father’s old studio partner. The documents refer to a crazy scheme to use the global wire network Ray saw as a young man to spread unifying music to everyone. (This matches my own vision for the Lifehouse Method, a computer-driven website through which people can commission their unique musical portrait.) They pore over the plans and realize that his scheme might be something they can make happen.

FRAGMENTS OF FRAGMENT

An instrumental version of FRAGMENTS. An example of the Method music.

WE GOT A HIT

In a series of intense discussions the three metamorphose from kids to adults and expert media and internet manipulators and we see them performing a hit on TV, radio and stage. The hit referred to in the lyric is FRAGMENTS.

THEY MADE MY DREAM COME TRUE

Still in his cell, Ray High can observe the kids’ rise to fame while meditating. He foresees a tragedy, someone at the band’s biggest ever, and last, concert will die. He rues the fact that the rock industry seems unable to change. What is never clear is whether the concert he foresees ever takes place in reality, or actually remains a dream forever.

MIRROR DOOR

The three pursue their own dream: to perform an extraordinary elaboration of their children’s play in Central Park in New York that is webcast to the entire world for charity, and during which they demonstrate Ray’s idea to ‘turn everyone into music’. Where there was once a small puppet theatre stage, there is now a massive one; where there was once a small stairway to the back of the stage, there is now a stairway hoisted by blimps that seems to reach into the heavens. The band play, it becomes clear that there are terrorists on the streets trying to distract from the celebration, but the show goes on. At the top of the stairway appear gathered a series of legendary singers from popular music, all dead. A shot rings out and the tragedy is established. Josh, a paranoid schizophrenic, has stopped taking his medication and grabbed a pistol from someone and shot Gabriel. We cannot help our own. He ascends the stairway to join the dead. Even now, it is not clear whether this particular series of events actually takes place.

It will be noted that one of the listed names of deceased singing geniuses (Doris Day) is still alive. In show-biz heaven, behind the ‘Mirror Door’ no one ever really dies (it is rather like an after-show pub gathering). FRAGMENTS, the kid’s biggest hit, becomes a moment to look back and celebrate life, death, breath, creation, science, physics, maths, literature and growth.

TEA & THEATRE

Years later Josh and Leila – now old - take tea together. Coincidentally Josh’s protective sanatorium cell is next to Ray’s and they have just – together – revived once again the children’s play, this time with the inmates of the sanatorium. They reflect on their career and lives together. The inference here is that perhaps, just maybe, Ray (the narrator) has confused the play he just saw in the Sanatorium with the one they all hoped to see happen one day in New York, in the sky, and up into the universe.


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Postby stevef » Thu Sep 28, 2006 5:28 am

A sweet solo performance from Pete...


from petetownshend.co.uk--


21 September 2006
Unplugged Endless Wire...



Another something special for you today with Pete performing "Endless Wire" from his solo set at the Joe's Pub Attic Jam on September 14th. All shot and edited for us by Mr Justin Kreutzmann.
Enjoy.

Hamish


http://www.petetownshend.co.uk/media/en ... emovie.mov

Pete performing Endless Wire at Joe's Pub (QuickTime movie: 17.37MB)
You will need the Quicktime player to view this clip.

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Postby krabapple » Sun Oct 01, 2006 10:03 pm

I heard "It's Not Enough' on the radio today. Not bad. Very 'Who'.
"I recommend that you delete the Rancid Snakepit" - Grant

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Postby stevef » Sun Oct 29, 2006 5:06 am

Listen to Endless Wire in its entirety at this link:

http://music.aol.com/songs/new_releases ... faultTab=5

And it's in stereo.

Good stuff... "Fragments", "Mirror Door", "Man In A Purple Dress", "Sound Room". "It's Not Enough", "We Got A Hit", and "Mike Post Theme" all stood out on the first run-through. But on repeated listens, this album proves to be consistently strong and *memorable* - definitely an entertaining listen all the way through. And to my ears... far more entertaining than the Stones' last effort A Bigger Bang, which I still can't retain in my head.

Roger and Pete are in fine form here, and will likely remind you why you're a Who fan...even if a good portion sounds more like solo Townshend. But a good portion also sounds like vintage Who. In any case... enjoy. Roger's vocals and Pete's guitar licks are exeptional!

Steve

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Postby lukpac » Sun Oct 29, 2006 8:46 am

stevef wrote:And to my ears... far more entertaining than the Stones' last effort A Bigger Bang, which I still can't retain in my head.


My thoughts *exactly* - ABB wasn't bad, but in the end nothing really inspired repeated listenings. EW, on the other hand, does have a number of tracks that stuck out to me on first listen - and make me want to listen again. I'm not sure what it sounds like exactly, but it's generally good.

I'd say it's because I wasn't expecting much, but I don't think I was expecting anything with ABB.
Last edited by lukpac on Sun Oct 29, 2006 11:09 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby Rspaight » Sun Oct 29, 2006 10:51 am

Consumer note: get the version Best Buy is offering. It contains the 21-track version of the album (with the extra extended versions of "We Got A Hit" and "Endless Wire"), the US bonus DVD *and* the UK bonus CD all for $9.99.

Ryan
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Postby lukpac » Sun Oct 29, 2006 11:12 am

Rspaight wrote:Consumer note: get the version Best Buy is offering. It contains the 21-track version of the album (with the extra extended versions of "We Got A Hit" and "Endless Wire"), the US bonus DVD *and* the UK bonus CD all for $9.99.


Since I haven't been paying attention, what's that about?
"I know because it is impossible for a tape to hold the compression levels of these treble boosted MFSL's like Something/Anything. The metal particulate on the tape would shatter and all you'd hear is distortion if even that." - VD

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Postby Rspaight » Sun Oct 29, 2006 5:06 pm

Pete says:

I had to mix two extra tracks there for the forthcoming Who CD that were intended for radio, but which both the American and European record companies wanted to add as 'bonus' tracks. These were extended versions (full-length songs) of two of the shortest Mini-Opera tracks Endless Wire (which now has a middle part and a repeat verse at the end); and We Got A Hit (which has a new middle and a completely new verse at the end).


http://www.petetownshend.co.uk/diary/di ... zone=diary

Ryan
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Postby Alexander Keith » Mon Oct 30, 2006 10:05 pm

Rspaight wrote:Consumer note: get the version Best Buy is offering. It contains the 21-track version of the album (with the extra extended versions of "We Got A Hit" and "Endless Wire"), the US bonus DVD *and* the UK bonus CD all for $9.99.

Ryan


That is a great deal :shock:

Man - it is a shame we Canadians cannot order this title via BestBuy.com. It appears Best Buy Canada is not carrying this exclusive edition. :roll:
Barry

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Postby Rspaight » Tue Oct 31, 2006 12:06 pm

That is a great deal :shock:


Apparently lots of people think so -- I swung by to grab it at lunch, and the thing was flying out the door.

(BB's also running a buy-one-get-one-free deal on various 2- and 3-disc DVD special editions that's worth looking at.)

Ryan
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Postby lukpac » Tue Oct 31, 2006 12:12 pm

Rspaight wrote:Apparently lots of people think so -- I swung by to grab it at lunch, and the thing was flying out the door.


Really? Some people on O&S were saying sales seemed to be flat. I won't be able to get there till after work.
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Postby Rspaight » Tue Oct 31, 2006 1:24 pm

FWIW, I saw at least ten people buying it in the 15 minutes I was in the store. (Or, put another way, about 2/3 of the people I saw carrying merchandise around or checking out had a copy.)

Ryan
RQOTW: "I'll make sure that our future is defined not by the letters ACLU, but by the letters USA." -- Mitt Romney