6 Jan 2026
Brian Kehew’s 2025 Video Blog
Backstage Blog: The Video Report
Personally, I was quite curious how the video content came about for this tour. Video has long been integral to everyone’s enjoyment of the shows. It enhances without overwhelming the show.
I remember discussions before the 2006 Endless Wire tour: At the time, Roger felt that this band was “big enough” to project onstage without videos (one of the few that could!) and always has been a good show from any part of the room. Windmills, jumping, microphone swinging, crazy drum fills – lots to see. I think Pete was leaning more artsy – so they hired one of the old Hipgnosis team, Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell, who had done those amazing album covers for Pink Floyd, Scorpions, Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney & Wings etc.
Video courtesy of StuffOMine of The Who at Pengrowth Saddledome, Calgary, AB on October 5, 2006
So that tour brought the start of touring video with The Who, but pre-recorded films are mixed with live stage action – and now it’s basically essential to our shows. It’s so “normal” now – you probably don’t realize how much it helps you enjoy the shows – you see the smiles and laughs close up when they are talking, fingers moving on a guitar string, Roger’s sweat as he belts it out. Sure – they could do without video – but not as well. We have two kinds – pre-recorded films of images and effects that plays during certain songs. And IMAG – Image Magnification – when you see someone live onstage but their image is also shown up on the big screens. The idea of IMAG is – there is no bad seat in the house, no matter when you are, if you can see the screens, you will enjoy the show – maybe even better than a front row seat. With shots always carefully chosen, you always see the most-exciting moment coming up on the big screens; a drum part, keyboard solo, guitar trick. Our video director, Mathieu Coutu does the selection of which shots you see; he knows the show as well as anyone ever has.
Video courtesy of Johnny Snapps at Fenway Park, Boston, MA on August 26, 2025
Video content is another way to communicate with the audience – to send a message or create a mood behind a song. Video content is interesting because it can be more creative, more interpretive. What does ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ or ‘Who Are You’ look like? Some of it has been around before, like a “Greatest Hits” of what’s been used on other tours, but since we had almost no video content in the last half-decade of touring, it’s a cool thing to focus on briefly here, post-tour.
The orchestral touring we did was costly – and really difficult to set up. As mentioned here previously, many tours use an orchestra – but they are fake; they’re real musicians playing along, but the orchestral parts are already-recorded, they are just playing along to a track, no microphones, no mixing . . . That’s SO much easier than what we did – having microphones and mixer channels for nearly every damn instrument onstage. But there’s also the cost of the musicians and the time needed to rehearse. SO – the big video wall behind the band was cut out, mostly for cost-saving, but also acoustically better to have a big drape behind us, not a big wall of plastic screens.
Now – it’s all back. The LED video wall is huge, stage-wide. Plus we have the IMAG video screens on each side – those are dedicated to giving a live view of the performers at all times. It’s practically necessary nowadays to have that. But the creative mood of each piece is changed when a video plays behind the band. Let’s look at those . . .
Video courtesy of Devin Creisler Studios at the Climate Pledge Arena, Seattle, WA, on September 25, 2025
Some you would know, the best ones were kept from previous tours – like ‘You Better You Bet,’ a superb piece of photographic animation with Mod scenes, the band, ‘Legs’ Larry Smith from the Bonzos with Keith, HiWatt amps, John playing bass in his mom’s living room. All kinds of work and the result was worth keeping again. Some of the Tommy stuff was familiar from before, ‘See Me, Feel Me’/’Listening to You’.
I had a good chat with Des Murphy – longtime creator with The Who for many video needs. He did the videos for the Quadrophenia And More tour in 2013 and The Who Hits Back! in 2015. Des tells me he was contracted to create video “content” for the shows in a rather short time – there’s never enough time or enough budget – and so they did a big job in just a few weeks before we hit the road. Despite the pressure, we all felt that the video work this year really made the shows a step up from the previous years.
Des fills us in: “Luckily, I get to create everything from scratch. We wanted to go back and use all the old iconic artwork themes: It’s such a joy to do, there’s so much to delve into. In the early Mod days, you’ve got all the Pop-Art stuff to use. The chevrons and the roundels/targets, so really graphic and with those colors – everything’s really good to use. And it’s very recognisable as The Who! So that’s great fun. Then you get to look at the Tommy artwork, obviously Quadrophenia the movie . . . I’m given a free reign which is great, but it’s a bit scary as well, because – as you know – no one sees it ‘til the first show! It’s like – if you don’t like it, we haven’t got much time to fix it . . .”
I’d mentioned to him that although the core ideas are pretty vintage, this presentation on the screens doesn’t just look ’old’ . . . “Well I grew up in West London, the same area as Roger and Pete, so we used lots of West London imagery. The Goldhawk Road tube station. You’ve got the tower blocks (White City Estate and Shepherd’s Court) from Shepherd’s Bush Green. I’m younger, but I recognise their reference points. And we sort of wanted to play with the graphics, sort of a nod to Terry Gilliam, with a bit of the ‘60s feel because you know – they don’t take themselves too seriously!”
I asked about mixing the live performance cameras with pre-purposed visuals: “Yeah, with IMAG (the big pair of projected screens on each side of the stage – they show the players onstage) it’s a difficult one. For me, the screen visuals should be part of the live show, to complement and not distract you away from the actual performance onstage. But people now expect the IMAG closeup shots and I thought “Well if you are just gonna stare at that screen, we want it to be part of the performance . . .” So now we have some ways to mix the cameras showing the band with the images on the main screen, and also there are some cool graphics that show along with the band shots shown on the side-stage screens, too.
Speaking of screens – the big one is a giant screen made up of smaller panels; they can be brought in and attached to each other to make up a MUCH larger screen – however big the show requires. (We can even reduce it down if the venue has a size issue.) When connected, all the small panels become interconnected to become one large mega-screen, bright and sharp. It’s expensive; one of the greatest costs of our show – but we had flawless results with it this year!
On the sides, each day the video crew suspends two large white IMAG screens over the seats on the left and right. Projecting up to each screen are two huge Barco projectors that shoot from behind; they send the same signal to the one screen so the images overlap and make the picture twice as bright/strong so the image can be seen anywhere clearly.)
Video courtesy of Johnny Snapps at Fenway Park, Boston, MA, on August 26, 2025
Some of the best moments are just visual imagery rather than a specific thing. ‘Eminence Front’ has cool green patterns, semi-tech looking but also organic – sort of like a medical computer display or a laboratory oscilloscope for sound. ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again ‘has a complex series of generated images that don’t really have any meaning – nothing political or rock-based – but are more in tune with the spacey sounds of the backing track. Sometimes it looks like space, other times waves or something from 2001 A Space Odyssey. Again, something just to add to the music, rather than take attention.
Video courtesy of Nunupics Zomot at United Center, Chicago, IL, on September 7, 2025
I mentioned ‘My Generation’ to him because on the screen, we see a vintage poster of the band at the Marquee, then the screen shows vintage black/white film of them playing the song there. Then it changes to a modern poster of tonight’s show, then to colour footage of the band onstage tonight – it’s a nice contrast and comparison, artfully done. Des continues; “That was Mitch’s suggestion (Mitch Gee, our touring Production Manager, a brilliant idea.) We have to give Josh Townshend credit (Simon’s son, a brilliant graphic designer) He’s done some incredible stuff and it looks new, but it’s got that authentic vintage Who thing about it. So it’s not retro, it’s refreshing it all. One thing about the ‘My Generation’ thing; it’s got then and now; and Rog and Pete are still here and they’ve got the same energy, still feeding off the crowd. It’s one of my favorites! (My favorite of the new video pieces was ‘The Song Is Over,’ with a huge stage set of 60s-era graphics a la Tommy, a nice reference to the many shows and stages over the years.)
Video courtesy of Rick Kaz at the Acrisure Arena, CA, on October 1, 2025
I asked about referencing Pete’s graphic novel from the big Life House box set during the close of the show: “That was something that we really wanted to do as well. I was in a bookshop in Brighton, and I went into the music section and I saw this book; ‘Wow, what’s this?’ and when I looked it went ‘Wow, it’s Life House!’ and I was immediately drawn to it. And then we approached the publishers and said we’d really love to use some of it for ‘Baba O’Riley’, because it’s lyrically, it’s just a perfect set of images. They kindly sent us all the original artwork. For ‘Baba’, we’re working with a great studio based in California – Hidden Road Studios/Tom Kirk and Rowan Glenn. (John Pearse and Kyle Surety did work on the starting film, ‘I Can’t Explain’, and ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’.)
So we thought we’d play on that side of things and also the Life House story. It’s great, because obviously Life House is something that Pete keeps going back to – ‘cause I read the graphic novel and I was like ‘yeah, I get it . . .’ There’s so much relevant stuff in there; lockdowns, people being sick in a room, not leaving, etc.”
The Life House graphic catches the person inside their “spacesuit” connecting them to the worldwide grid. So far, despite VR glasses and laptops – we still go to our concerts in person!
Well, hopefully, there will be more Who shows someday – even if not a “tour” some live performance being who they are. We’ve heard nothing about it – and I don’t expect there are any real plans soon. Too close to the end of all this, and resting and moving on is what life holds for us all. I do miss my road crew family already – but we have our memories and a few cool photos, too.
Special thanks to our video crew, Mathieu Giroux, Louis Buxin, Ken Hoffman, Simon St.Louis, Martin Provost and to Des Murphy for all that they do to make our Who shows just that extra bit special.
Onward! . . . Maybe? But I have a bit more to post coming up . . . looking back at the tour rehearsals.
Brian
Video courtesy of hejiranyc at Madison Square Garden, New York, NY on August 30, 2025