You start with two sure shots off Get Happy!! and you then delve into This Year’s Model and My Aim Is True, with a couple of Armed Forces hits, a Punch The Clock and a cover from the headliner’s catalog. Trust me, that is the recipe for a brilliant set.
The band were tight alright but overdone, both Townsend and Daltry were tremendous for men in their late 60s, the “5:15”, without Entlewhistle’s bass but still, was pretty excellent. and while I am so sick of “Love Reign O’er Me” i can’t listen to it anymore, it is still half the Who
Comfortable with metal but truly the definition of a hard rock band, it was an amazing performance. Whether dedicating a cover of “I Only Want To Be With You” to his wife, or dedicating “Fallen” to all of us who have lost someone, Poulsen performed a masterclass in how to sell rock and roll in 2012.
His guitar playing is excellent, on “Whose Life (Is It Anyway)”, he is fast, he is fluid, and he plays the bottleneck like a champ, trilling out notes like a prog rock Jesus. On the aptly name “Guns Booze And Drugs” he makes you wonder why he doesn’t use back up singers more often and throughout, the sleep, too short and not loud enough set he makes sense of a “Dave Mustaine Is God” tee-shirt I noticed.
The set was 15 minutes of Goth beauty and two singers trading off in spirals of dark notes and black chords as they chased each up and down the Theater’s wide stage. They ended with “Heaven’s A Lie” and managed the thankless job at hand with a hard, dark, emotional deep waters
The set was everything you could ask for except I’d hoped he’d have thrown in “Ramones”. Two killer tracks off Ace Of Spades” and terrific straight up no chaser “Going To Brazil”, a distant Lemmy who peers out over his cat to tell us he wants to hear us shout our esophoagus through out throat
