“Who Are You” by The Who

"Who Are You" is the title track of the Who's 1978 album, and it comes with a long shadow attached: that record was the last the band released before Keith Moon died in September of the same year. Pete Townshend wrote it out of a night that reads like a punk-era parable. Fresh from a grueling 13-hour meeting with Allen Klein, a man he called a leech on the whole business, he went out drinking with Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols and wound up in a Soho doorway, where a policeman who knew his face offered to let him go if he could walk off on his own steam.

Townshend later insisted the song was less a showdown with the new breed than a look at what a new friendship demands. Either way it churns and swaggers, a big, restless rocker that keeps hammering its title question as if the answer might finally shake loose. Glyn Johns and Jon Astley produced it, Rod Argent of the Zombies and Argent sat in on piano, and Andy Fairweather-Low added backing vocals.

Paired on a double A-side with John Entwistle's "Had Enough", it became one of the Who's biggest hits in North America, reaching number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 7 in Canada, and it has been a fixture of their concerts ever since.

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