Politics & Power Quote by John Entwistle

Entwistle isn’t selling nostalgia here; he’s quietly rewriting it. The surface is practical - two versions of an anthology, same songs, different mixes - but the real story is control. Anthology albums are supposed to be tidy museum displays: sanctioned highlights, boxed and labeled for the casual listener. Entwistle treats the format as a living workbench. The American edition is presented as faithful, almost archival, while the European version becomes the “director’s cut,” where he finally gets to sand down the compromises that cling to recorded music: rushed sessions, producer choices, label limits, band politics.

The phrasing matters. “Added a couple of things that I have always wanted to add” carries the resigned weight of a veteran who has spent decades hearing the gap between what was captured and what was imagined. It’s not just perfectionism; it’s delayed authorship. For a musician best known as a component of a larger machine (The Who’s powerhouse low end), remixing is a way to step out from the “supporting player” narrative and assert that his ear - not just his fingers - has authority.

There’s also an old-school, pre-streaming pragmatism embedded in the regional split. Different markets, different products, different incentives to buy twice. Yet Entwistle frames it less as marketing and more as artistic restitution: the chance to slip in details listeners wouldn’t have known to miss, and to make the past sound closer to what he intended all along.