Rock band The Who have announced UMR will release Who’s Next/Life House as a lavish, multi-format super deluxe edition on September 15.
Featuring 155 tracks, of which 89 are previously unreleased and 57 feature fresh remixes, the set will delight longtime Who fans with its long-sought, complete picture of Pete Townshend‘s incredibly prescient songwriting, while captivating a new audience with his visionary description of a future that has come true.
The super deluxe edition features all of Townshend‘s songs, in their many stages of development, from the abandoned, audacious Life House project, started in 1969 as a follow-up to The Who’s epic Tommy and from the undisputed rock classic of 1971 that it evolved into Who’s Next.
Across the course of 10 CD and multiple vinyl sets, Who’s Next/Life House sets out Townshend’s extraordinary vision of a world beset by climatic catastrophe and pollution, leading to a curtailing of personal freedom that will be all too familiar to the pandemic generation.
Decades ahead of his time, the musician details how the population is then seduced and sedated by access to an entertainment “Grid,” piped into every home through the use of virtual reality experience suits.
Townshend describes Life House as “a portentous polemic about the coming of a nation beaten down by climate issues and pollution.” He then explains how “an opportunist and autocratic government enforce a national lock-down in which every person is hooked up to an entertainment grid.”
Music itself then becomes an inconvenient diversion, “a very real distraction to the subjugation of the population in suits,” with fascinating consequences. Songs that depicted a dystopian world in which faceless corporations control our lives may have been fiction at the time, but they have come to be more like documentary.
The Super Deluxe edition of Who’s Next/Life House will contain 10 CDs, all remastered from the original tapes by longtime Who engineer Jon Astley, plus a Blu-ray Audio disc with newly-created Atmos & 5.1 surround mixes of Who’s Next and 14 bonus tracks by in-demand artist and producer Steven Wilson.
The album will also be available as limited edition four LP and three LP sets which features the first-ever complete release of the San Francisco concert from 1971 and vinyl replicas of Townshend’s original Life House.
The original Who’s Next album will also be available as a one LP half-speed remaster completed at Abbey Road Studios and in other exclusive single vinyl versions.
For more information visit: shop.thewho.com.
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