
The Who frontman Roger Daltrey is defending his comments after saying the chances of the band returning to the United States are “very doubtful.”
Daltrey says even though he’s 79 years old, it’s not his age that’s keeping off the road in America; it’s the cost of insuring a tour.
In a recent interview, Daltrey blamed increasingly hefty costs and high financial risk for the decision saying, “I don’t know if we’ll ever come back to tour America…I never say never, but at the moment it’s very doubtful.”
“We cannot get insured,” he says. “And most of the big bands doing arena shows, by the time they do their first show and rehearsals and get the staging and crew together, all the buses and hotels, you’re upwards $600,000 to a million in the hole. To earn that back, if you’re doing a 12-show run, you don’t start to earn it back until the seventh or eighth show.”
Apparently, the high cost of touring is restricted to the United States because The Who kicks off a world tour that doesn’t include the U.S. on June 14th in Barcelona, Spain.