ARE THEY or aren’t they — disbanding, that is?

Who? That’s right, The Who.

Singer Roger Daltrey says no, that the British quartet “just won’t do any more tours” after a series of “farewell” concerts in “every country where we’ve been successful.” One of those concerts will be at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday in the Civic Arena.

Guitarist Pete Townshend takes a dimmer view. “I don’t see The Who going on for very much longer,” he told Rolling Stone’s Kurt Loder earlier this year. “I think that with this next album (“It’s Hard”) and with the next protracted period of work we do, we’re really gonna throw ourselves into it 100 percent. And then we’re gonna stop. I’m pretty sure of it.

“It’s not because we want to but because we’ve come to the point where we don’t really want to go through all these periods when the public and our fans and the record company and even we don’t know what the (deleted) gonna happen next. The tension is just too much.

“I like the richness of what I do in other areas. That’s become almost as important to me as being in a band, and I think when you get to that point you have to think very seriously about what it is you’re doing it for.”

This isn’t the first breakup rumor in The Who’s stormy history. When drummer Keith Moon died of a drug overdose in 1978, insiders were betting the group would either disband or get together only to record. Many fans of The Who insisted at the time that they couldn’t imagine Daltrey, Townshend and bassist John Entwistle on stage without the clowning, manic Moon.

But The Who recruited a new drummer, Kenney Jones, and returned to the United States in 1979 and 1980 for tours that showed the group was more popular than ever.

Noted Townshend at the time, “It’s amazing in a way how things have turned out. Keith died at a time when The Who really were finished. We were at the end of an era because we (had) learned to enjoy ourselves. Up to that point, we were about something else. We were about struggle and we stopped struggling.”

The Who first reached American ears in the mid-’60s after a long string of hits in Britain, such as “I Can’t Explain,” “My Generation,” “Substitute,” “Happy Jack” and “Pictures of Lily.”

But they never had the commercial clout here that other “British Invasion” groups, notably the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, had. “I Can See for Miles” reached No. 9 in ’67 and remains their only Top 10 hit in this

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