Who Are You
by The Who
- 152
- BPM
- D minor
- Key
- 7A
- Camelot
- 66
- Danceability
- 26
- Acousticness
Pete Townshend wrote "Who Are You" after a night of drinking with Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols. A policeman found him in a Soho doorway, recognized him, and said he could go if he could walk away safely. It followed an awful 13-hour encounter with Allen Klein. Townshend wrote that Jones and Cook, for a couple of figurehead anarchists, seemed sincerely worried about his state. He had written "Who, who, who are you," but Roger Daltrey sang the line with an expletive. That changed what the song did. The last verse, he explained later, came from an earlier trip: the day before the first show of the Who's 1971 tour in Charlotte, North Carolina, he visited the Meher Spiritual Center in Myrtle Beach.
The song became the title track of the Who's eighth album, released in 1978, the last before Keith Moon died that September. Rod Argent of the Zombies played the piano. It was issued as a double A-side with John Entwistle's "Had Enough" and reached number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 7 in Canada. The band first played it live at the Gaumont State Cinema in Kilburn on December 15, 1977.
Who Are You runs at 152 BPM, the tempo of hard techno, punk and fast rock. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.58 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 395 ms. It is in D minor, Camelot 7A, which shares its notes with F major and mixes cleanly with G minor and A minor.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.