Recently I put right a forty two year old wrong. When I look back on my teenage years much of it is a mixture of embarrassment and regret, and that’s just with girls! Every teenager does something stupid which haunts them sporadically for the rest of their lives and for me, this album by The Who represents a moment of madness that still irritated me until this very day.

In 1982 I bought The Story of The Who, a double compilation album by The Who. I couldn’t afford to buy their records singularly other than My Generation and Face Dances, bookends of their discography at that time with the latter being bloody awful save the single You Better, You Bet. So this was perfect and it came with inner sleeves and a stack of information which anyone born before the internet will appreciate the importance of.

I had liked the band since Quadrophenia, there had been a significant Mod Revival movement at the turn of the Eighties and the film/album was a key driver in the resurgence of Mod fashion and music and subsequently a new wave of Ska artists affiliated to the 2Tone label. The Who, were of course, the ‘Modfathers’, the originals from the first Mod movement of the early Sixties despite their transition into a symphonic rock band by the early Seventies.

So I LOVED this album. Hearing tracks for the first time such as Magic Bus, Bargain, Baba O’Reilly and especially Won’t Get Fooled Again, this was rarely off my turntable. This album was more than just a compilation to me. It meant that I could like both Mod and Rock at the same time, which, in England in 1982 was not something you ever said in public. Music was incredibly diverse back then but also very tribal. You were expected to pledge your allegiance to one particular genre and/or band. Liking Black Sabbath AND LED Zeppelin was acceptable in some quarters but you had to be prepared to choose one above the other. I couldn’t. So this album was my guilty pleasure. And then I swapped it….

Inexplicably I swapped it for a single Ted Nugent album called Free For All. I swapped a double album with a inner booklet for a single vinyl album which contained not a single ‘classic’. Why I did that is beyond me and why I waited four decades to replace it is also beyond me.

I found this cheap copy today with a price sticker of £4.95 on it. Most new albums today for non-Uk readers retail between £30 and £60 so you can see how it’s changed. I have not seen a copy since I swapped mine so it was such a memory blast. Both this and the Nugent album were released in 1976, The Who album went Gold in the UK and little wonder with its track listing…

This is now back on the turntable where it belongs and I am back to the days of a fishtail parka with a Who patch sewn on the sleeve and beer towels sewn on the back (don’t ask, it was a ‘thing’ back then with the new Mods) walking the streets with nowhere to go wishing I was old enough to ride a Lambretta.

The band, particularly bass player John Entwistle did not feel the compilation was as reflective of their catalogue as it should have been but they were tied to only being able to feature songs they owned the rights to. Personally I feel this perfectly encapsulates their music up to that point. Listening to this it’s hard to fathom why, despite the album sales and sellout tours they were never truly considered ‘top tier’ a la Zeppelin or The Stones and I wonder how fair that is. There will be many who disagree and feel they were better than the aforementioned but are they revered in the same way?

Either way, for this once confused teenager it’s a reminder to celebrate diverse tastes rather than hide them. Maybe I was too hard on myself, I should have paid more attention to The Kids are Alright…