The much bootlegged ‘Goodbye Summer’ concert at a London cricket ground gets an official release. “Howzat?!” asks Pat Gilbert.

Bowled over: The Who (from left) Keith Moon, John Entwistle, Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend, The Oval, Kennington, south London, September 18, 1971.

Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns

The Who

★★★★★

Live At The Oval

UME. CD/DL/LP

SEPTEMBER 1971 wasn’t a happy time in Who world, even by their remarkably narky standards. Pete Townshend had lost the battle to turn his abandoned Lifehouse concept album into a movie, and a filmed band meeting to discuss where The Who should go next ended testily. Mercifully, relief suddenly arrived in the form of an invitation to headline a British version of the Concert For Bangladesh, George Harrison’s all-star fundraiser staged at Madison Square Garden the previous month. So the group stopped bickering, moved their new

£20,000 PA system in Wandsworth cinema, began rehearsing for a September 18 show at the Oval cricket ground, also set to feature the Faces, Atomic Rooster, Mott The Hoople, Lindisfarne and more.

The ‘Goodbye Summer’ Oval appearance has gone down in history as one of The Who’s most memorable – a rowdy 35,000 crowd, Keith Moon hitting his drums with a cricket bat, the group parrying footballs kicked into the crowd by Rod Stewart – but until now only poor-quality bootlegs have circulated. The problem was that, though the whole concert was taped by Glyn Johns on the same Pye mobile studio that gave us 1970’s Live At Leeds, due to over-zealous security the crew were unable to re-position dislodged mikes and correct dodgy feeds. But modern technology has finally enabled the original recordings to be rescued: and, boy, what a delight they are.