On the hottest day of the year, five thousand people made the questionable decision to gather inside a packed concert hall with no air conditioning and spend two hours singing, dancing and sweating. The reason was simple: The Who were in town.
The evening had already acquired a slightly bittersweet quality before a single note had been played. Originally scheduled as two sold-out performances, the band's Paris visit was reduced to a single date after one show was cancelled to accommodate an appearance at Glastonbury. The result was a capacity crowd squeezed into one increasingly sweltering venue. Conditions became so extreme that the large door behind the stage remained open throughout the entire performance in a desperate attempt to circulate some air. Having attended dozens of concerts in this room over the years, this was the first time I had ever seen it happen.
The show itself began with a surprise. Rather than opening with the customary "I Can't Explain," The Who launched directly into "Who Are You." It worked well enough as an opener, but the omission of their first single was difficult not to notice. Thankfully, that was the evening's only real disappointment.
What followed was a reminder of why this repertoire has endured for more than half a century. The setlist largely avoided deep cuts, unless one chooses to count "The Seeker," which remains something of an outlier in the catalogue due to its non-album origins. Instead, the band concentrated on the songs that built its reputation, performed with confidence, conviction and a professionalism born from decades of experience.
Comparisons with the ferocious live recordings of the early seventies are inevitable, but they are also somewhat beside the point. This is not the band that recorded Live at Leeds. Keith Moon and John Entwistle have been gone for decades and time has inevitably transformed both the musicians and the music. Yet reducing today's Who to a nostalgic shadow of its former self misses what makes these performances worthwhile. Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend remain the custodians of one of rock music's greatest catalogues, and they continue to present it with remarkable commitment.
By the end of the evening, the audience had long since forgotten the heat, the cancelled show and the lack of ventilation. What remained were the songs. In the end, that has always been The Who's greatest strength. Not mythology, not nostalgia, not comparisons with past glories. Just an extraordinary collection of songs, still capable of filling a room and making five thousand people forget their discomfort for a couple of hours.
