THE WHO: Playhouse Theatre 1967

Still unable to resist the allure of a Who LP I hadn’t seen before, I gave in to temptation the other week and parted with £15 at a record fair in Cranleigh for this 12” vinyl disc on the Expensive Woodlands Recordings label. It comprises 12 tracks purported to have been recorded live in 1967 at the 1,200-capacity Playhouse Theatre on Northumberland Avenue close to the Embankment tube station in Central London. It was probably a mistake. 

        No such gig took place, at least not according to Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere by Andy Neill & Matt Kent and the (almost as reliable) Who Concert File by Joe McMichael and ‘Irish’ Jack Lyons, though the theatre was used by the BBC for recording radio sessions between 1951 and 1976. This led me to believe that the songs that appear on the LP were recorded for shows on Radio One or its predecessor the Light Programme, as confirmed when I played the record which, as it happened, was more than somewhat warped, though by no means all were recorded at the Playhouse Theatre. No details beyond the song’s titles appear on the disc or its sleeve, which is a gatefold featuring this group shot, photographer unknown, on the front cover and photo taken on stage at the Monterey festival across the fold-out interior. 

        From side 1, ‘Run Run Run’, ‘Boris The Spider’, ‘Happy Jack’ and ‘See My Way’, were recorded at the Playhouse (on 17 January, 1967), and are followed by ‘Pictures Of Lily’ and ‘A Quick One (While He’s Away)’, recorded at De Lane Lea Studios on 15 October, 1967. All six tracks are included on the BBC Sessions CD released in 1999. 

        Side 2, however, features six tracks recorded for the BBC not included on the Sessions CD, though one of them, ‘Happy Jack’, is a repeat, albeit a slightly different mix. The remainder I heard before on a cassette tape I was given many years ago by George McManus, then the back catalogue marketing manager at Polydor, who was seeking information from me about The Who’s BBC tracks, and which I wrote about here: https://justbackdated.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-who-bbc-sessions_17.html

        The other five on side 2 are ‘I Can’t Reach You’, ‘I Can See For Miles’, ‘Summertime Blues’, ‘So Sad About Us’ and ‘My Generation’, none of which were included on the Sessions CD, no doubt because – as I reported in that post of 17 July, 2015 – they are virtually identical to the studio recordings. The performances are exemplary, as you would expect, and there are some slight changes to the mix, including a more prominent bass here and there, which suggests John might have been asked to oversee remixing the tracks for BBC use. The reasons for this are explained in my earlier post. 

        I still have the C90 cassette that George, who died in 2014, gave me, and it includes all the tracks on this LP, which means I spent £15 on something I already had – not the first time in regard to The Who. Still, it looks nice alongside my other Who vinyl records of questionable legality.