Director: Jeff Stein, 1979
Stars: The Who, Ringo Starr, Steve Martin, a very young Jeremy Paxman

Struggling to explain The Who for American television in 1966, a young Pete Townshend, obviously fizzing with amphetamine, gazes blankly offscreen and murmurs, like a mantra: “Power and volume, power and volume . . .”

Er, yes. As a pocket description of this epochal band, that’s pretty evocative, but it doesn’t even begin to do justice to such a complex group. Swinging like Townshend’s windmill guitar arm between the brutal destruction of their live show and the emotional erudition of their rock’n’roll, The Who were thuggish Mods who also happened to be sensitive, visionary artists.

Only 16 years old when he began work on it, the director and devoted fan Jeff Stein captured perfectly the visceral, contrary magic of The Who with The Kids Are Alright. Avoiding an explicit narrative structure, he opted instead for a vibrant warts’n’all montage of archive footage (back when nobody archived footage on a subject as disposable as pop music), with a few specially shot vignettes along the way.

The result is thrilling and inspiring, a near-symphonic rapture of chaos and great rock’n’roll. Erupting with a (quite literally) explosive My Generation for the 1960s American TV personalities the Smothers Brothers, closing with Keith Moon’s last recorded performance with the band, it takes in Townshend clumping the Yippie-leader Abbie Hoffman with his guitar onstage at Woodstock, The Who stealing the Rolling Stones’ Rock’n’Roll Circus from under their noses, and a great deal more besides. It easily justifies Stein’s claim on the audio commentary that it is “the world’s first rock’n’roll disaster movie”.

Stein isn’t exaggerating either; as the exhaustive extras explain, compiling such a welter of original material was a Herculean task for the director and his editors, and this DVD release sees every frame scrubbed clean and the soundtrack reupholstered for modern systems. There is even multi-angle footage and an isolated track dedicated to John Entwistle’s bass-playing.

So you see and hear it all clearer than before: Townshend pricking the pomposities of hippy culture, Moon carousing drunkenly with Ringo Starr, Daltrey seemingly not ageing a day over the movie’s 15-year span. Iconic, violent, contemplative, hilarious, everything The Who ever were is encompassed, brilliantly, here. The power, the volume, and a whole lot more besides.

DVD extras Restoration featurettes, commentary by Stein, multiple camera angles, slideshow, games, interactive tour of The Who’s London

Stevie Chick

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