The Who Live

The Who Live
2000, Genesis

Image from Genesis Website

Was out of my price range when it cam out but looks amazing. A few reviews.


Mark Blake, Q, 5 star review


The wallet busting price tag will deter all but the moneyed insane, but this is a genuine labour of love.Rock photographer and ardent Who fan Ross Halfin has collated the best images of the band performing live (from the 70s onwards), rounded up eyewitness accountsfrom other photographers and even roped in Pete Townshend to pen a candid forewood. Ultimately it is the pictures that speak loudest: A perennially windmilling Townshend; Keith Moon disintergrating before one’s very eyes; Roger Daltrey morphing from rock satyr to John Pertwee lookalike circa 81 Face dances. Ludicrously expensive, but essential browsing.


Mick Wall, Classic Rock, 5 star review


An exhaustively researched compendium of mostly never-before-seen photographs of the Who at their very peak in the 70s, if you saw our exclusive feature commenorating the publication of these historic pictures last issue, you’ll already have some idea just how good this book is. But it’s not until you get the full A4 size deluxe coffee table edition in your hands and take time to pore over its entire 184 pages that you realise just how magnificent this collection actually is.

If, like Classic Rock photographer Ross Halfin who spent two years putting this book together, you are a major Who fan, there is little more to say than go get it. Now. But a truer reflection of it’s worth might be to add if like me you were never a major Who fan, but merely an aficionado of 70s rock culture, this is still a book you will surely find fascinating.

Focussing exclusively on that rollercoaster period that ensued with the huge international success of Tommy through various landmarks like the 73-4 Quadrophenia tour, up to the OD of drummer Keith Moon, in 1978 with the first tours with his barely tolerated replacement from Rod’s Faces, Kenney Jones, and including suprisingly insightful essays on those times from both Pete Townshend and the band’s manager Bill Curbishley, as well as Halfin himself and a handful more of the several photographers whose brilliant work illuminate these pages (many of them like Robert Ellis and Barry Plummer, now familiar to Classic Rock), the book proports not so much to tell the story of those times as to simply throw you headfirst into the prevailing maelstrom, whether it be on stage at their record breaking Day On The Green show at the mammoth Oakland Coliseum in 1976 or revelling in the mud at the communist backed Fete De L’Humanaties festival in Paris in 1972. But to single out individual shots is to diminish the impact of turning page after dizzying page of this stuff - most of which, says Townshend I can honestly say I’ve never seen before.

Published as a strictly limited edition of 1500, signed by Halfin, with the first 250 in red leather bound covers and signed by Pete Townshend, it’s practically a collectors item before it’s even out of the box. Yes £182 is a stiff price to pay (£365 for the special leather bound, but think what they’ll be worth 10 years from now?

One last thing: originally Ross had wanted to call the book The Greatest Rock n Roll Band In The World - Ever. But the publisher wouldn’t let me do it he says because he’s obsessed with the bloody Beatles! Who cares about them? Spoken like a true Who fan.


Andy Neill, Record Collector


A luxurious new photobook captures the raw energy of The Who perfectly

“There’s something about The Who’s sound – it’s kind of bigger than any of us individually. When we get together and make the noise that we make, it’s something more than sound. There’s an energy and I honestly feel that we’ve never captured it on record but the stage always accommodated it”. (Roger Daltrey, 30 years of Maximum RnB live)

Bearing witness to the fact is The Who Live - a lavish, leatherbound 180 page volume containing over 400 mostly unpublished images of the Shepherd’s Bush wonders, compiled by renowned rock photographer Ross Halfin.

The latest of Genesis Publications signed, numbered limited edition fine art books, The Who live is a breath taking testament to the bands unparalleled reputation as the ultimate rock experience. The bulk of the images concentrate o the decade between 1968 to 1978, when The Who were quite rightly hailed as the greatest live rock n roll band in the world.

Halfin, responsible for a similar limited edition volume - The Photographers Led Zeppelin - feels the book is long overdue. “The idea came from Chris Murray of Genesis Books in America,” he says. “He knew I was a big Who fan and suggested it as a follow up to the Zeppelin book. People like myself who are now in their early 40s don’t remember the early Who - we grew up with the band in the 70s. A lot of Who experts talk about the first time they saw them down the Marquee in 1964, but I wanted to show The Who at their height, which for me was the early 70s. I thought if we’re going to start there, we might as well bring it up to date.”

In his specially written foreword, Pete Townshend expresses his immense gratitude to “the devoted and hard working photographers”. Who rose to the mystical energy of The Who with their own talent and captured some of the extraordinary moments

These top notch smudgers include such familiar names as Robert Ellis, Jim Marshall, Terry O’Neill, Barry Plummer, Michael Putland, Barrie Wentzell and Halfin himself. As well as an exclusive introduction from band manager Bill Curbishley, the archives of The Who’s own company, Trinfold, have been opened to produce a remarkable visual documentary, stretching up to Pete Townshend’s recent Lifehouse shows in London.

Text comes in the form of candid reminiscences from the lensmen in question, plus on the spot accounts from fans who succeeded in bringing many pioneering never to be repeated shows back to life. Despite the title there are a selection of off stage moments including a Quadrophenia recording session the Who Are You sleeve shoot and Pearly King Pete serenading his garden gnomes on the occasion of the birth of his second daughter Aminta.

Being a photographer does Ross have a personal favourite set of images? “I think the Whos Next era and the Fete d’Humanite 1972 concert in Paris was when the band looked fantastic. But then you’ve got the balcony shots Robert Ellis took of Pete smashing a guitar at the Edmonton Sundown in 1973 or the band onstage and backstage at Oakland in 1976 taken by Michael Zegaris so its hard to pick any particular one out”

If that is not enough incentive to plan a meeting with your bank manager, an added bonus comes in the form of an accompanying CD containing a gold edition of the classic “Live At Leeds” album.

A reconstituted Who are playing the UK this autumn but the glory days of a powerful four man machine firing on all cylinders and feeding off the energy of their audience are now a distant memory. “Its only now that people are starting to realise how good The Who really were in their prime,” says Ross. “This book isn’t designed as a history - I want people to pick it up, look at it and think this band were amazing I wish I could have seen them. Unfortunately, they can’t see the real thing any more but that’s the whole idea for doing it.”