The Who’s Roger Daltrey recently stepped down as curator of the annual Teenage Cancer Trust charity shows after 24 years, and he’s now opening up about why he decided to retire from the position.
“I have to be realistic. I’m on my way out,” the 80-year-old rocker wrote in a backstage diary for U.K.’s The Times. “The average life expectancy is 83 and with a bit of luck I’ll make that, but we need someone else to drive things.”
Daltrey isn’t stepping away from the charity completely but will stick to working behind the scenes.
For his final year, The Who headlined two of this year’s shows at London’s Royal Albert Hall, and Daltrey headlined a third show with a series of guests to celebrate his tenure as curator.
The rocker revealed that before taking the stage for those shows, he was actually worried “about how many words” he needed to remember for them.
“We haven’t done anything for seven months and this winter’s been brutal. I’ve been in hibernation. For the whole of January, I lost my voice completely,” he wrote. “I live like a monk and if I went on tour for a week I’d be fit as a butcher’s dog again, but tonight, for the first time in my career, I think, ‘Blimey, this is hard.’”
While Daltrey seems ready to hang it up, his bandmate Pete Townshend has indicated he was up for at least one more tour. In a recent interview with The New York Times, he shared, “It feels to me like there’s one thing the Who can do, and that’s a final tour where we play every territory in the world and then crawl off to die.”
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