Sticking with legendary figures and ‘orrible ‘oo singer Roger Daltrey takes a trip down R&B memory lane on As Long As I Have You, his new solo album which drops on June 1. There’s also room for a somewhat unlikely cover of Nick Cave’s ‘Into My Arms’, which Daltrey rates as one of his favourite songs of recent times, and additional takes on Stevie Wonder’s ‘You Haven’t Done Nothing’ and Stephen Stills’ ‘How Far’.
“This is a return to the very beginning, to the time before Pete started writing our songs, to a time when we were a teenage band playing soul music to small crowds in church halls,” he says. “That's what we were, a soul band. And now, I can sing soul with all the experience you need to sing it.
"Life puts the soul in. I’ve always sung from the heart but when you’re 19, you haven’t had the life experience with all its emotional trials and traumas that you have by the time you get to my age. You carry all the emotional bruises of life and when you sing these songs, those emotions are in your voice. You feel the pain of a lost love. You feel it and you sing it and that's soul.
"For a long time, I've wanted to return to the simplicity of these songs, to show people my voice, a voice they won't have heard before. It felt like the right time. It's where I am, looking back to that time, looking across all those years but also being here, now, in the soulful moment..."