Townshend's follow-up to Tommy, Lifehouse, was intended to draw on both those strengths, but this time the concept was too complicated for The Who's management, audience or other members to follow.

Everybody agreed, however, that Lifehouse had some great songs, and eight of them, plus bassist John Entwistle's My Wife, were selected for an album that abandoned Townshend's original narrative altogether, but still stood up effortlessly without it.

Widely considered The Who's best album, its closer - Won't Get Fooled Again - became the band's live finale and the highpoint of their set for the rest of their career. With an irony its composer could not have foreseen, this song was used in 1997 as a campaign anthem for Tony Blair's New Labour - or, given the line 'Meet the new boss, same as the old boss', perhaps he did.

An expanded 'Deluxe' edition just released adds 20 tracks from the Lifehouse sessions, but only one - Pure And Easy - is truly a peer of the original nine. All the classic Who elements are there - Keith Moon's powerhouse drumming at its most fluid and inventive, Entwistle's thundering but melodic bass work, Townshend's crashing power chords and Roger Daltrey's vocals just reaching their commanding peak.

However, new ground was also being broken. Townshend's pioneering synthesiser work on Baba O'Riley and Won't Get Fooled Again anticipated Stevie Wonder's first steps into the area with Music Of My Mind a year later, and remains equally influential.

Powerful, questing, sophisticated and superbly recorded by engineer and associate producer Glyn Johns, Who's Next remains the essential Who album, and more than 30 years on it still packs a hell of a punch.