“Face the Face” by Pete Townshend

"Face the Face" sits third on White City: A Novel, the 1985 concept album that was Pete Townshend's fifth solo studio record, and it got pulled out of the story to stand on its own as a single. Townshend wrote it alone, Chris Thomas produced it and Bill Price recorded it. For the single edit, on both sides of the Atlantic, Townshend handed some of the vocal parts to his daughter, Emma Townshend.

America took to it. It climbed to number 26 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 3 on the Mainstream Rock chart, and went top 20 in Australia, New Zealand and several European countries, which makes it Townshend's most recent solo trip into the American top 40. Britain shrugged: at home it stalled at number 89.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.