The Who: Sell Out

The Who Sell Out

Best song: I Can See For Miles

Worst song: Relax

Overall grade: 6

It feels strange, rating this album so high when it hardly has the weight of later efforts in their career. It’s hardly any kind of grand statement. But somehow this is the moment when everything came together for the band, and particularly for Pete Townshend, who, it seems, can write songs really well here. Maybe that’s due to the focus that having a concept to work around gives him. Of course, there’s not really a concept: the album is a fake broadcast of a pirate radio station show, so the songs can be – and are – about anything.

I think it’s a great idea though, and the group make the most of it. There’s not just a token jingle to start things off, they’re all the way through, and they’re all different. I guess you could argue that they get annoying, but how can they be any more annoying than when you’re listening to an actual radio station? Besides, the music is still good even on the adverts for things like ‘Heinz Baked Beans’ (the adverts are all Entwhistle’s baby, by the way, while Townshend concerned himself with the full length songs.)

The variety of songwriters on the previous album made it feel schizophrenic at times, but here we have consistency not previously seen on a Who album, yet all the songs still have their own distinct personalities. This is definitely the band’s poppiest and most easily accessible album, and while it’s not overtly psychedelic, it does take influences from the Summer of Love and fit in with what the Beatles and maybe also Cream were trying to do at the time, in that it’s very much inspired by the happier and brighter side of the genre.

For the first time, none of the songs are awful! Even the cover,  John Keene’s ‘Armenia City in the Sky’, is a great power pop tune featuring lots of guitar feedback that they perform really well. ‘Relax’ probably comes the closest to being unimportant because it doesn’t make a huge impression on you, but it’s alright while it lasts.

‘I Can See For Miles’ is the album’s true classic, one of the harder rocking songs on the album with soaring vocals, crazy drumming and that intro (yes, the bit everyone talks about, but it’s just so amazing). But I also have a serious soft spot for ‘Odorono’ because it’s a brilliant satire of product placement, something that’s so prominent in our society today.

John Entwhistle does contribute one proper song to this, ‘Silas Stingy’, one of those ones where he creates a character, only this time it’s a man and not a spider. Unsurprisingly it’s bass driven and a little sinister but mostly the story is way over the top, but still entertaining. It’s good, but not quite as good as his original masterpiece ‘The Ox’. And while we’re talking about these songs that tell stories, I also like ‘Tattoo’. If you just listen to the tune it’s all innocent with lots of nice little harmonies, but it’s actually about guys who get tattoos of naked girls and then get told off by their mothers… quite a shock really. It’s probably the song that’s most ‘typical’ of the band in style, I’d say.

So yeah, the subject matter of a lot of these songs is frankly ridiculous (I haven’t even started on ‘Mary Anne with the Shaky Hand’) but I wouldn’t say that about every single one – ‘Sunrise’ is a tender love song, basically just Pete and his guitar, atmospheric and sincere, while closer ‘Rael’ is the same kind of proto-prog operatic rock that the band would focus on with their followup. It rolls in at nearly six minutes and has an ‘epic’ feel that isn’t quite in keeping with the down to earth style of most of the album, but it holds my attention and it’s better as a closer than it would be if it were awkwardly halfway through.

Overall, I don’t know where this came from as it hardly seems a logical progression from ‘A Quick One’, but I’m extremely glad they made it. Radio London should have done more broadcasts. If they did, I’d be tuning in.