The Who released Endless Wire in the UK on October 30, 2006, ending the wait for a new studio album that had stretched back to It’s Hard in 1982. Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey returned with a record that paired nine individual songs with a ten-part mini-opera, drawing on a story Townshend had been publishing online.
Townshend traced part of that return to “Real Good Looking Boy.” In a 2010 fan interview on The Who’s website, he recalled spending much of the preceding period playing music at home, improving his piano skills and raising his son, without writing many songs. Finding himself singing “Real Good Looking Boy” changed his outlook, and Daltrey’s response mattered: “Roger was quickly able to make the song his own.” The track appeared with “Old Red Wine” on the 2004 compilation Then and Now, giving listeners new Who recordings before the full album followed. Townshend later summed up what drew him back toward The Who as “friendship, drama and trouble.”
The album took shape through intermittent recording at Townshend’s home studio and Eel Pie Oceanic between autumn 2002 and summer 2006. Townshend produced it, with Bobby Pridden and Billy Nicholls handling production of Daltrey’s vocals. Some songs emerged from more immediate circumstances. “You Stand By Me,” for example, came together minutes before Townshend appeared on Rachel Fuller’s In the Attic webcast. In his liner notes, he described it as a thank-you to Fuller, Daltrey and others who had stood by him.
The larger story came from The Boy Who Heard Music, Townshend’s novella about an ageing musician, Ray High, and three young people who form a band called The Glass Household. Its ten-song adaptation, Wire & Glass, occupied the album’s second half. The teenagers discover High’s plans to connect people through music using the world’s communications network, then try to realise his idea.
Townshend’s earlier Lifehouse project also fed into the opening track, “Fragments.” As he explained in notes quoted by The Guardian, it grew from experiments with composer Lawrence Ball in creating music from information supplied by an individual. The aim was a personal musical portrait. “Fragments” also served a purpose inside the fiction, becoming The Glass Household’s breakthrough song. A track placed before the mini-opera was already introducing the music of its imagined band.
Listeners received an advance introduction through the six-track Wire & Glass EP in July 2006. It presented selections from the developing opera, while the album allowed the story more space. The EP’s “Mirror Door” differed from the album version, giving that earlier release its own variation on the material.
The story eventually settled on “Tea & Theatre,” in which two surviving characters look back on their lives together. That small scene found a place beyond the album’s fiction: during the 2006–2007 tour, Daltrey and Townshend performed the song alone together as the concert closer.
