The Who Announces Farewell U.S. Tour
Throughout the decades, The Who changed the sound of rock music and delivered some of the most critically-acclaimed and commercially successful singles and full-lengths in the genre. The group has split up and reunited multiple times, and only two original members typically associated with the act remain. As both Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend enter their 80s, the musicians are ready to hang it up for good — but not before one last hurrah.
On Thursday (May 8) the band announced one final concert tour, which the group is calling The Song Is Over. The venture will feature 16 dates — at least as of now—in both the United States and Canada. It's highly likely that, due to what is sure to be incredible demand for a goodbye tour, more dates will be added.
The run begins on August 16 in Sunrise, Florida. The two musicians will visit major markets across North America, including Madison Square Garden in New York City, Toronto, Chicago, and a pair of dates at the Hollywood Bowl. For the moment, the slate is scheduled to finish on September 28 in Las Vegas.
The band announced the tour during a press conference at a gallery in Piccadilly, London. Roger Daltrey appeared on via Zoom, while Pete Townshend was on hand to pose for photos.
The Song Is Over Tour gets its name from a tune on The Who's album Who's Next. That full-length was released in 1971, and the project features what may be the band's most famous track, 'Baba O'Riley.' Though 'The Song is Over' wasn't pushed as a single, and it isn't remembered as one of the more famous cuts from the act, the title is perfect for this occasion.
In a press release announcing the tour, both Townshend and Daltrey, English musicians, talked about their love for American audiences. Daltrey commented, 'Every musician's dream in the early 60's was to make it big in the US charts. For the Who, that dream came true in 1967 and our lives were changed forever." His bandmate Townshend also stated, 'Well, all good things must come to an end. It is a poignant time. For me, playing to American audiences and those in Canada has always been incredible."
Townshend also casually addressed unrest in the group, saying that 'although the road has not always been enjoyable for me,' the upcoming goodbye trek 'will be about fond memories, love and laughter.'
Tickets will go on sale next week, though there are different offerings available for specific credit card holders and members of The Who's official fan club.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Fox News
an hour ago
- Fox News
Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson pays tribute to 'immortal' Hulk Hogan: 'A childhood hero'
Wrestling legend Hulk Hogan died Thursday at the age of 71, and another WWE icon paid tribute to one of his heroes. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson posted on social media an emotional ode to "the immortal" wrestler, whom he called "a childhood hero." "In 1984, I gave you your 'HULKSTER' headband back, in the locker room in Madison Square Garden - I was the lucky kid [that] caught it when you threw it in the crowd. You were wrestling 'Mr Wonderful', Paul Orndorff that night in the main event," Johnson recalled. "You were shocked and so happy after the match because you told me that was your very last headband and if it weren't for me, you'd have no way of getting that exact one made again. You promised me that you would get more made and give me a Hulkster headband of my own as a thank-you gift. A month later in Madison Square Garden, you did just that. You kept your word, with a handshake and a 'thanks kid'. And that meant the world to that little 12-year-old boy." Johnson then reminisced on their legendary match at Rogers Centre at WrestleMania X8, a match that Johnson said "was to decide who would go down in history, as The Greatest of All Time." It remains one of the greatest matches of all time and one that has defined wrestling history. The post featured the fight on a small television, reminiscent of that of the late 90s and early 2000s. "When you kick out of my Rock Bottom finisher - just listen and FEEL that crowd go ELECTRIC…all for you. I've never felt anything like that in my entire wrestling career. It takes two to tango, but that historic crowd reaction was all for you," Johnson wrote. "You may have 'passed the torch' to me that night, but you, my friend….you 'drew the house' meaning you sold out every arena and stadium across the country in your prime as Hulk Hogan, on your way to becoming the greatest of all time."From deep in my bones, and on behalf of this wild and crazy world of professional wrestling that we love, I say to you now, and forever…Thank you for the house, brother… Thank you, for the house. RIP Terry Bollea aka Hulk Hogan." WWE paid tribute to Hogan on Friday night's edition of "SmackDown!" with a 10-bell salute, with many of its current superstars, and some of Hogan's old foes, on the stage. The tribute included clips of Hogan's decorated wrestling career and his entertainment ventures outside the ring. The SmackDown crowd erupted in applause and a chant of "Hogan! Hogan!" after the video concluded.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Hulk Hogan was ‘being run into the ground' before he died with work schedule while dealing with 25 surgeries in 10 years
Hulk Hogan admitted he was struggling with his health in the year before his sudden death Thursday and some of those close to him thought he was taking it too far, The Independent has learned. But others close to him said it was just his way, and that he insisted on being on the road and showing up to meet fans because he was 'running the show'. Jimmy VanderLinden — who goes by "Jimmy Van" online and founded the professional wrestling publication Fightful — alleges he spoke with people close to Hogan who were upset at his heavy work schedule. "People close to Hulk Hogan had told me they weren't happy that his management team was 'running him into the ground,' promoting his beer brand over the last year," VanderLinden wrote in a social media post. The 71-year-old wrestler, whose real name was Terry Bollea, had been promoting Real American Beer, which used his likeness for its branding, in the last few months of his life. The company provided The Independent with the following statement: 'Hulk Hogan wasn't being 'run into the ground' — he was running the show. As the co-founder of Real American Beer, this brand was his vision from day one. He led by example, insisted on being on the road and showed up because he wanted to. Not for money. Not for press. For his fans. He built this for them — and no one was going to stop him from showing up and shaking every hand. That's what being a Real American meant to him.' A spokesperson for Empire Agency, which repped Hogan but had no involvement in Real American Beer or its marketing push, told The Independent they also thought he was pushing too hard before he fell ill. 'We also thought that he was going too far with his health, but we couldn't do anything, because of his deal with the promoter and some other representative dealing with this beer business,' the spokesperson said. Rumors swirled on social media in the weeks before his death that Hogan had health issues. Last month, Todd Clem — otherwise known as "Bubba the Love Sponge," a radio show host with a long and sordid history with Hogan — told his listeners that "allegedly Hogan is in the hospital and I've heard people say that he might not make it." Hogan's management and family denied the claims. The wrestler's wife, Sky Daily, said at the time that he'd only undergone neck surgery. His friend, former WWE personality and longtime in-character manager Jimmy Hart, insisted in a post that Hogan had recently been singing karaoke. The post has now been removed. A spokesperson for Hogan told The Independent last week that Hogan's surgery had "indeed been successful" and that there was "no reason to panic." "He just needs from time to time a medical check up," the spokesperson added. But by July, Clem hadn't changed his tune, warning listeners that "I don't know if we'll ever see Hogan again." On July 21, just days before the WWE icon's death, Clem wrote an update on X, citing people close to Hogan, that the wrestler had been moved from a hospital "to his home in a hospital bed with private doctors." "Transfer was done in secrecy — unmarked ambulances, garage entry, middle of the night," Clem wrote. The Clearwater Police Department said during a brief press conference that Hogan was "experiencing a serious medical related issue" when they arrived. He died after he was transferred to a hospital. Hogan addressed his health when he last September appeared on an episode of fellow WWE star Logan Paul's "Impaulsive" podcast. Hogan noted at the top of the show that he'd been up until 3:30 am the night prior, and mentioned he'd only gotten two hours of sleep another night that week. When asked by Paul's co-host, Mike Majlak, if he needs sleep, Hogan says he does, and noted that when he doesn't get enough sleep, it hurts his back. 'Oh God yeah bro, if I don't man, my back and everything..." Hogan says, implying his back will hurt if he doesn't get enough sleep. He then told the men about all of the surgeries he's needed in the last decade. 'I've had like 25 surgeries in the last ten years. Ten of them were back surgeries,' Hogan told Paul. 'Nobody told me this gimmick stuff was fake. I've had 10 back surgeries, both knees and both hips replaced, shoulders — everything.' Hogan was active in professional wrestling across a number of companies from 1977 to 2012. Despite the staged outcomes, the slams and slaps and chair shots were real, and took a toll on his body. He recalled advice he received from the legendary Andre the Giant about protecting his body in his early career. 'Andre used to tell me, 'Boss, don't fall down. You won't get back up,'' Hogan said. 'It was like a 22-foot boxing ring that had lumps in it, boards sticking up—it was horrible.'
USA Today
3 hours ago
- USA Today
'Happy Gilmore 2' is absolutely wonderful
The legacy sequel has transformed itself into one of the ugliest reanimations in modern Hollywood, the crass puppetry of a once-beloved corpse dancing to the same song-and-dance that made it so cherished in the first place. Shame-soaked nostalgia dollars flutter about like ugly butterflies in a trash garden, destined to put on the same "dead dog and dead pony" show for fearful audiences afraid of any ounce of originality until the unforgiving entertainment machine runs out of caskets to mine and the whole movie world falls off a cliff. And then there's Happy Gilmore 2. Leave it to Adam Sandler, perhaps the most beloved American entertainer this side of Mickey Mouse and Tom Hanks, to putt the golf ball through the most byzantine mini-golf fun house from Hell and nail the shot to keep himself under par. Happy Gilmore 2 is just baked with too much love to reek of what dooms its colleagues. In one way, you could view Happy Gilmore 2 as a triumph of affable stupidity, a sequel so awash in the hallmark Sandler rage-man physical comedy that it manages to feel fresh... if only because Hollywood has practically abandoned the genre entirely for "comedic" superhero movies that smirk at the screen as if any insinuation of comedy at all is some sort of naughty cooke jar-snatching that big daddy corporation didn't see while reading the newspaper... the kind that would make even Wade Wilson blush. Last summer's Deadpool and Wolverine actually owned its identity of being a straight-up comedy as opposed to something dreadful like Thor: Love and Thunder (shutters in Zeus), but even then, it was still a Deadpool and Wolverine movie. Marvel putting out the biggest comedy of the decade so far just feels wrong, even if the movie was indeed funny. Yes, a Happy Gilmore Netflix movie in 2025 replete with countless cameos from golf professionals, Sandler regulars, podcast hosts and sportscasters plays to the broadest audience possible. The humor is wack-a-mole wide, the callbacks to the original so plentiful and obvious that you can almost count this as a double-bill on Letterboxd with just one sit on the couch. However, everything feels hand-stitched, as if an entire community of people who love Happy got together and crafted a big quilt to wrap themselves in nearly 30 years later. The warmth radiates from the screen. Unlike a big-budget Hollywood legacy blockbuster where nostalgia cuts the checks and the corporate "reverence" for what came before feels AI-generated to appeal to the most shameless part of our brains' art-processors, Happy Gilmore 2 feels pleasantly overstuffed out of adoration. Sure, most of the film is flatly ridiculous, the lowest-hanging fruit basket being passed around for everyone to take one and pass it down. Characters punch and choke each other out of sheer glee; another drinks hand sanitizer to get a buzz. One man on a beach thinks he's watching a Happy Gilmore golf match on television, but in reality, it's just a rock in a makeshift box. One character goes to the bathroom in a mailbox. Like all of Sandler's movies, the cheap joke is the best joke, and the school cafeteria belly laughter is real and wonderful. Think about the star for a moment and where he is now. After years and years of pushing it away, Sandler's recent forays into auteurism have fulfilled the tantalizing promise of Punch-Drunk Love and Funny People. Even in his screwiest of comedies, he showed off the volcanic range and crestfallen heart of a truly generational actor. Uncut Gems in particular felt like an answered prayer. Watching the Sandman getting sandbagged down with heartless 2010s Netflix comedies made you question if he had finally just settled. The grand pleasure is that Happy Gilmore 2 shows that even a new Sandler Netflix comedy can make you scream-laugh to the point of waking up your dog and bothering your neighbors. By plowing shamelessly into the original film beat-for-beat but still awakening something oddly profound on the passage of time with how so many of the 1996 film's actors have departed from this golf course for the other, Happy Gilmore 2 plays as both a Happy Madison fan convention smorgasbord and a group hug for the past, present and future. Happy Gilmore 2 also arrives like a godsend in a world where studio comedies have fallen to the wayside. Consider that modern comedy has mainly shifted into other genres and into the indie space, where witty banter and situational ironies tend to rule the day. They're incredibly funny, but the other side of the spectrum, the kind that studios used to pump out in the summer with the Sandlers of the world for mass appeal, have nearly gone extinct. Perhaps that makes a big, doofy Happy Gilmore sequel all the more commendable with its themes of mourning the people we've lost and saving the traditions we care about while we have them. The film's villain is a tech-bro who wants to turn golf into a glitzy rizz-fest with color-run fireworks and brash stunts to appeal to the TikTokers and Twitch streamers who don't have time for the love of the game. As much as you absolutely cannot read any supremely deep text in a movie where a honey-drenched Travis Kelce gets attacked by a bear in Bad Bunny's "happy place" dream, you feel the Sandler-dad wisdom trying to slap around the young'uns a bit to appreciate the old ways and cherish the familial bonds that keep them aflame. Happy Gilmore 2 is the funniest movie of the year so far by default, if only because no other movies really try to go for laugh-a-minute comedy like this any longer. The new Naked Gun movie will surely challenge it, but why can't the audiences of today get their own Happy Gilmores and Frank Drebins to cherish anew? It's an unfortunate irony that the surest bet at getting a major comedy project off the ground in 2025 is to dust off an old character and put a new shine on them to appeal to nostalgic business sense. No, Happy Gilmore 2 can't stand shoulder-to-shoulder with its predecessor because that's outright impossible. However, it can bundle in the laughter in equal measure and mess around so much with the very nature of a legacy sequel that some of its most shameless callbacks feel inspired, almost a parody of its serious brethren. Yes, there is infinitely more integrity with Chubbs Peterson having a son who works at a mini-golf course who also has a fake hand than whatever the Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning hook was with Shea Whigham being Jon Voight's kid out of nowhere. Those two movies mirror each other. Tom Cruise's sacrifice-for-the-movies adrenaline and Christopher McQuarrie's James Cameron/Brian De Palma-tinged set-piece excellence go blow-for-blow with Sandler's ageless comedic timing and immaculate facial expressions and his and co-writer Tim Herlihy's masterful ability to mine nonstop gags out of the most ludicrous visuals. Watching Cruise's underwater submarine ballet in the latest Mission: Impossible is incredible; watching golfer John Daly try to drink booze out of an antique cuckoo clock is, too. Where Happy Gilmore 2 succeeds and the latest Mission: Impossible fails all has to do with the approach. The latter is bound to sincerity in its most cringey throwbacks because it's downright, well, impossible to wink a bit at the audience at how silly this all is. A Sandler comedy has the freedom to have its nostalgia cake and throw it across the room to instigate a food fight. During a scene at a graveyard, headstones of characters long gone from the original start popping up in spades. A few of those would have induced eye-rolls; a bunch of those, even of the most random side characters, makes for great meta-humor. Comedies give you the ability to check yourself a bit, as the wedgie-giving ombudsman comes in to readily acknowledge a lot of this is looney tunes. A streak of sadness dyes the current, as the reason Happy falls off the golfing map is the kind of shock revelation a Happy Madison production probably doesn't aim for 10 years ago. The world kept spinning while Gilmore was swatting golf balls with a hockey goon's might, and it wasn't always kind to our favorite golfer like we might have hoped. Dad-Sandler has always been the most sentimental version of himself, and his kids aging right in front of his eyes and starting to leave the nest seems to weigh on him and his renewed take on Gilmore. This and Wes Anderson's excellent The Phoenician Scheme both dive into similar subject matter with equal gusto, of a father reckoning with his children and his place in providing for them. There's a world-weariness to Happy this time around in the way Sandler carries him that both compels the film's most jarring narrative choice and grounds some of the film's far, far sillier antics. That approach gives Sandler's performance added gravitas and the entire film around him a paternal watchfulness that would've played as unearned earlier in his filmography. There is no doubting Sandler's commitment to the project as you might could have in the past; he's all in, and so is everyone around him. The older Sandler has gotten, the more his traveling-theater approach to making movies has taken on new meaning. Even in his biggest comedic misfires, the community Sandler keeps with him on his Happy Madison projects has always endeared. He takes care of his own, and that love shows through here more so than in any other project he's ever worked on. The rampant cameos would be gratuitous if the people staffing them didn't seem so genuinely thrilled to be there. Christopher McDonald's Shooter McGavin getting dragged back into the fold would feel forced if McDonald didn't treat the role like it was the true opportunity of a lifetime. There's no way in heck Verne Lundquist wears that blazer in the film's third act if he's not tickled to be back in this world. Heck, all of the brand-name golfers in the cast seem to relish the chance to act with Sandler and actually buy into the material. Do you know how much of a comedic achievement it is that three of the funniest people in this movie are Daly, Scottie Scheffler and Will Zalatoris? Daly plays with the kind of comedic fire that we sometimes praise to the extent of pushing them into awards talk; he's really that inspired with his fearlessness to be as zany as possible. Sure, Happy Gilmore 2 is still a legacy sequel at its core, replete with brand endorsements and adorned with Super Bowl-commercial rascality. However, it's the rare legacy sequel that feels purposeful and human-driven. The film reaches for real profundity, as much as you can find in a Happy Madison movie. It's a movie with a good soul, as affably crude and dingy as Sandler's landmark works and operating with the same level of zeal. Does all of it work as well as it could? Nah. Does every joke land? Probably not. Is it messy? Most certainly; all of Sandler's comedies have been to a degree. However, it's still so much better than so many other films like it. The world is a better place when Sandler is making comedies like this. Hubie Halloween felt like a nice change of pace, and Happy Gilmore 2 feels like the grand return to that high-wire fire hydrant style of Sandler funny business. It's painfully fully and surprisingly wistful for its place in time. We need Sandler to keep tapping into his dramatic potential; it's why his decision to work with Noah Baumbach again on Jay Kelly is so encouraging. However, we also need Sandler firmly planting his feet in the comedic worlds where he's the smartest idiot in the room with a heart of gold, and we all love him for it. Watching Sandler succeed with everyone cheering him on as those signature Happy Gilmore needle drops hit might make you just a wee bit misty... and not because it's an uncaring algorithm programming "Nostalgic Feelz" for the most basic audience possible. When it's earned and it's real, there's nothing like going back to your happy place with the people you love.
