Just about a month after his 70th birthday, Roger Daltrey has scored his highest charting album outside of his duties with The Who. His collaboration with Wilko Johnson called ’Going Back Home’, has entered the UK album charts at number 3.
Previously, Daltrey’s most successful non-Who effort was his debut solo album which got to number 6. Recorded last November over the course of eight days, ‘Going Back Home’ is especially poignant for Johnson, who some months prior to the recording, had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer.
Johnson says ‘’This whole experience has been great for me..rather weird a lot of it, because I was supposed to have been dead last October, and I’m not dead and the very first thing I did after, with my extra time was to make a record with Roger Daltrey. So the whole thing was a bit surreal.’’
‘Going Back Home’ is the first album released on the newly re-launched Chess Records label. The 11- track album features new renditions of Wilko Johnson songs written for his Dr.Feelgood and various solo projects over the years.
He describes the songs as ‘straight ahead rock ‘n’ roll,. The album features a cover of ‘Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window,’ a Bob Dylan outtake from his classic album , Highway 61 revisited, and all in all is some classic 12 bar boogie!. We will have to wait a little longer for a new album from another legend though. Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. ‘Hypnotic Eye ‘, will be out sometime this summer, and Petty has promised that it is a return to the classic sound of their earliest work.
Petty told Rolling Stone magazine that he wanted to make a hard rocking record, from beginning to end, for a long time. Petty goes back to basics with not a Wilbury in sight. I can’t wait!
Til the next time….
Greg Gaughran. Weekdays from 10am, on Radio Nova.
