Who are you?

Death isn't an absolute prerequisite for a band to become or stay interesting, but it does seem to help.

Tonight, God willing, an ageing army of fans will fight their natural scepticism at Earl's Court and try to love The Who, minus Moon. It sharpens the experience that there is loss in the air.

There aren't many concept albums that are worth recreating. Nor many operas that depend almost exclusively on one voice.

Quadrophenia is both. Its author, Pete Townshend, The Who's main songwriter and presiding genius, is, of course, a royal pain. Never mind as a person; as an author he's deeply flawed. A bit like Dennis Potter, he is open to the charge of only being interested in nervous collapse and the idiot as saviour, themes too easy to be entirely satisfying.

Quadrophenia was released as an album in 1973, but came again to prominence as a film in 1978, when its themes of drug-destroyed youth and alienation seemed all the more apposite considering we were in the punk era, which had done for bands like The Who.

It also coincided with a fashion among middle-class pseudo-intellectuals for bending over backwards to celebrate violence. When filmed, it joined Scum and something long-forgotten called Rude Boys as extremely nasty items.

Now that Quadrophenia – the story of a wasted Mod – is being revisited, these things are past.

We can take it as a curiosity, perhaps as having an element of amiable absurdity. It is Retro, cubed; it is three removes from its subject matter.

After all, The Who weren't Mods in the 60s; their Quadrophenia celebrated 60s Moddery in the 70s; and now in the 90s it's back out for our delectation.

Townshend has never made claims to be anything really like the kids he wrote about. He probably never was much like them.

In the booklet that goes with Quadrophenia, he has his little punky hero say of The Who: "They were a Mod group. Well, Mods liked them. They weren't exactly Mods, but Mods did like them."

More important, it wasn't an easy