The Who – Who Are You (Promo Video)

The Night Pete Woke Up In A Soho Doorway And Asked The Question That Defined An Era

What you’re watching was filmed at The Who’s own Ramport Studios in Battersea on May 4, 1978, by director Jeff Stein for his documentary The Kids Are Alright — and there is something quietly devastating about it. Keith Moon, his body swollen from years of alcohol abuse, sits behind the kit and holds it together with a precision that had been failing him in the studio for months. He is commanding, funny between takes, and visibly deteriorating. It is one of the last sustained performances he would ever record. “Who Are You” was released on July 14, 1978. Moon was dead by September 7.

The single peaked at number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 — The Who’s highest US chart position since 1970 — and number 18 in the UK, with the album simultaneously climbing to number two on the Billboard 200, blocked from the top only by the Grease soundtrack. It went double platinum in the US and Canada, gold in the UK. In the 21st century, its opening riff became the theme for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, introducing it to an audience that dwarfed anything the charts had managed.

The song’s origin is one of rock’s great dark-comic stories. After a 13-hour meeting with manager Allen Klein on Denmark Street — “the awesome rock leech-godfather,” as Townshend later described him — Townshend wandered into the night, found Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols at the Speakeasy club in Soho, and proceeded to drink himself into a stupor. Jones and Paul Cook were reverent, telling him The Who had paved the way for everything they were doing. Townshend reportedly kept calling them both “Johnny” — assuming he was speaking to John Lydon. He eventually stumbled out into the street and woke up in a Soho doorway with a policeman standing over him who, recognising him, offered to let him sleep at home rather than in a cell — if he could get up and walk away. He wrote the lyric the following morning, while still in the grip of the hangover. “I’d like to think that where the song came from wasn’t the fact that I was drunk when I did the demo,” he said, “but the fact that I was fucking angry with Allen Klein, and that the song was an outlet for that anger.”

The recording at Ramport Studios in October 1977 had its own complications. Moon arrived unable to play in 6/8 time on one track — drums were simply removed from it entirely, replaced with footsteps — and engineer Jon Astley often had to stand up and conduct him mid-session. For “Who Are You” specifically, Rod Argent of the Zombies was brought in to play piano; Andy Fairweather Low sang backing vocals. Townshend had unearthed a synthesiser riff from 1971 to anchor the track, and Roger Daltrey made one critical decision that changed the song entirely: where Townshend had written “Who, who, who are you,” Daltrey sang “Who the fuck are you” — a reading Townshend later credited with redirecting the song from introspection to confrontation. The Ramport promo video itself involved the band re-recording guitars, drums, backing vocals, and piano, leaving only Entwistle’s bass and the synth track intact from the original session.

The album Who Are You arrived on August 18, 1978, and on its cover Moon sits behind a chair — positioned that way by photographer Terry O’Neill specifically to conceal his distended stomach. Stencilled on the chair’s back, in block letters: “Not To Be Taken Away.” Three weeks after the album’s release, he was gone. He had taken 32 clomethiazole tablets — prescribed for his alcohol withdrawal — at the same London flat where Mama Cass had died four years earlier. He was 32 years old.

Townshend’s fury at Allen Klein, the punk kids who worshipped him while his own confidence was collapsing, the policeman in the doorway, the tube ride home in the dark — all of it collapsed into a single question that still echoes. Phil Collins auditioned to replace Moon; Townshend had already asked Kenney Jones. The band carried on, as bands do. But the footage from Ramport tells its own story — Moon behind the kit, cap on, grinning between takes, not yet aware the answer to the song’s question was running out of time.

Daltrey put it simply to Uncut years later: “It was only a few years after that I realised what a great favour punk did the business.” Townshend had written a song in a hangover about a night he could barely remember, built on a riff he had filed away in 1971, and handed it to a singer who made it sound like a fist. Watch this Ramport footage and you can feel the whole era balanced on the edge of something — not quite knowing it’s about to end.