It has been announced that The Who will be releasing a massive music catalog consisting of 10 CDs and 1 Blu-ray on September 15. The catalog, titled Who’s Next/Life House Super Deluxe Edition, will feature 155 tracks. The Who may have released many extensive catalogs throughout their career, but never as massive as this.
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Of the tracks on The Who‘s upcoming catalog, 89 have never been released before. Who’s Next/Life House Super Deluxe Edition will also feature spatial audio and surround mixes.
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The new offering, which will cost $299.98, contains countless other special features. Out of the 10 CDs, two of them hold the title Pete Townshend’s Life House Demos 1970-1971.
One of the discs serves as an album of outtakes from the Record Plant sessions in 1971. Other discs include two full of alternate mixes, as well as CDs containing full live performances from concerts at Civic Auditorium in San Francisco and Young Vic in London.
All of the discs inside of the catalog will be accompanied by a 100-page hardback book. That hardback will feature an introduction from Townshend and essays written by The Who enthusiasts Neil and Matt Kent. The box set will also contain “Life House – The Graphic Novel,” which is 170 pages and serves as a comic book that tells the origin story of the band. Also included in the set are replicas of gig posters, concert programs, and autographs.
A recent press statement regarding Pete Townshend’s work on Life House describes the music as “an extraordinary vision of a world beset by climatic catastrophe and pollution, leading to a curtailing of personal freedom that will be all too familiar to the pandemic generation. Decades ahead of his time, he details how the population is then seduced and sedated by access to an entertainment ‘Grid,’ piped into every home via the use of virtual reality experience suits.”
In his own introduction, Townshend calls Life House, “a portentous polemic about the coming of a nation beaten down by climate issues and pollution” that allows “an opportunist and autocratic government (to) enforce a national lock-down in which every person is hooked up to an entertainment grid.”
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