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Pete Townshend remains hard at work on delving through his demos for Who’s Next in preparation of an upcoming box set. Townshend revealed to Mojo thaxt the Who had planned to have the the Who’s Next/Lifehouse box ready in time for the 50th anniversary, but it was delayed due to covid. Townshend joked, “Three days working until five in the morning trying to keep up with some Who demos. If I am looking a bit shattered, it’s because I am.”

Townshend revealed he been trying to repair the demo for an unused track — and longtime fan favorite — “Ambition”: “This is a song we’re trying to recover.” No release date for the box set has been announced.

Like he had done for Tommy, Pete Townshend recorded one-man-band versions of all the Lifehouse songs for the Who to use as sonic blueprints for the actual sessions. Townshend admitted to us that his heart and soul can always be found in his home demos as opposed to the Who’s proper studio recordings of his songs: “I put more energy and more passion and more intensity in the recordings that I made at home of the songs that I was writing than I would put into the recording studio sessions with the band — which seemed to me to be mainly, kind of boozy evenings with the lads talking about, y’know, what they’ve done the year before, y’know? And there’s a line in Quadrophenia — ‘You remember that hotel where the doors we smashed.’ It was all about that kind of thing. And we would sit in the studio and the actual recording would interrupt the reminiscences.”