Sunday, September 09, 2018

The Who: A Legal Matter



Coming across this record the other day, I was confused. Surely A Legal Matter was a Rolling Stones single?

Convinced I was right about this, I spent some time searching YouTube for the Stones' version before I accepted it does not exist.

Chalk another one up to the Mandela Effect.

But it does sound like a Rolling Stones record and even has their regular collaborator Nicky Hopkins on piano.

Most notably it is sung, not by Roger Daltrey, but by Pete Townsend.

Stewart Mason writes on AllMusic:
As if "My Generation" hadn't been enough of a clue, "A Legal Matter" proves conclusively that Pete Townshend was working on a different plane than just about every other songwriter in London in 1965. Where John Lennon was writing coded odes to infidelity like "Norwegian Wood," Townshend wrote perhaps the first pop song to be explicitly about divorce.

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