Tour by The Who | |
Start date | 15 December 1977 |
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End date | 25 May 1978 |
Legs | 2 |
No. of shows | 2 |
The Who concert chronology |
The Who performed only twice between their 1976 and 1979 tours, both as specially arranged dates to provide more recent concert footage for their rockumentary The Kids Are Alright.
After touring extensively in 1976, the band took an extended break (the longest in their career thus far), only reconvening in late 1977 to begin recording the Who Are You album. At that time the band were also involved with Who fan and amateur filmmaker Jeff Stein in preparing The Kids Are Alright, a rockumentary featuring interviews and performance clips dating from 1964 to 1975. However, Stein also wanted to include more recent footage, resulting in a special concert being scheduled on 15 December 1977 at the Gaumont State Cinema in Kilburn, London. This was the band's first show since 21 October 1976, when they concluded their last tour at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. Unfortunately the group proved rusty and this performance was considered unsatisfactory and ultimately not used in the film, save clips of a brief Pete Townshend speech and of the band leaving the stage. Although the Kilburn footage was largely scrapped, "My Wife" did appear on the film's soundtrack and eventually most of the performance was released many years later in 2008 as The Who at Kilburn: 1977. The failure of the Kilburn show to provide usable performance footage necessitated a second concert on 25 May 1978 at London's Shepperton Studios. This show yielded the versions of "Baba O'Riley" and "Won't Get Fooled Again" that appear in both the film and its accompanying soundtrack, although some studio touch-ups were done to both the audio and film for the finished products (slight differences between the film and soundtrack versions of "Won't Get Fooled Again" are evident).