Endless Wire Fan Edit
Endless Wire is 20 years old this year and I’ve been listening to it a lot and giving it a reappraisal. In short: I think it’s an excellent album let down by a few terrible songs (cough, cough, In The Ether) and it’s a few cut tracks and a revised track listing away from being a classic.
So I’ve done that. And to be clear, this is the only Who album I see needing this treatment. No one needs to go messing around with anything else. But Endless Wire could stand a refresh and I think in this form it’s the comeback it was meant to be.
The album now opens with ‘Mike Post Theme’, which means it opens with one hell of a bang and one of the album’s finest tracks. I also think that fits Who tradition (Who Are You opened with a very self-aware song about music) and I think it’s ballsy to open the album with a song that uses another musician’s name and seems designed to force google searches to stumble across Endless Wire.
Some stranger and more meandering tracks have been cut, but even with plenty of cuts, the album is 41 minutes and would comfortably fill side 1 and 2 of a vinyl recording. Yes, Wire and Glass is cut down and no makes no sense in this form (it wasn’t super clear anyways and psychoderelict is kind of required reading to understand it at all) but now Wire and Glass feels more like the mini opera in ‘A Quick One’ rather than an awkward 3/4 of an opera with some parts that drag.
I’m sure people will disagree with my choices; but I think Endless Wire just has some magical stuff on it and its length and some of the poorer songs scattered throughout did it a disservice and it’s criminally underrated as a result. So, I hope you enjoy and can just see the best of this album rather than the whole awkward affair of it.