There’s one country song I was listening to yesterday, a good country voice, too. But their voices are quite extraordinary. If that wasn’t coming out in that way, it would be all bottled up inside. Just to listen to them expressing themselves, you’re drawing something out of them, and that’s got to be good. I was flicking through a few yesterday, some really great singers there. Some of this stuff is really interesting to listen to. We have access to musicians and studios, and it’s a great way for to talk about how they feel going through this. Tell me about your new podcast, The Real Me, featuring musical performers by teen cancer patients. This is a great way of giving back to them. I used to say to the musicians, “Without the support of this age group, we’ve got no industry at all.” And even today, you’ve got no life support unless you’ve got that age group supporting you. You’ve held benefits with the likes of the Foo Fighters, Pink, and Eddie Vedder. The horror of it never leaves you, more than the mental anguish. Sadly, my younger sister Carol, who was 32 at time, died of breast cancer, so I saw cancer. Was anyone in your family afflicted with cancer? The mental strain of that must be horrendous. They know exactly the journey they’re going to be on. Whereas a teenager, unfortunately, knows everything. And I thought, “Just imagine what it would have been like if someone had told you I had cancer at that age.” Young children get cancer but don’t know the ramifications of what they’ve got. I was bullied very early on when I was 12, 13. The Teenage Cancer Trust in England was started by my GP and we supported him from day one. How did you first become aware of the teen cancer cause?

Online stuff is all right, but it’s not human contact. We’re doing an awful lot online, which is helping, but it’s not the same. We haven’t cut back on our services in the hospitals. If we’d gone on like we were going, that number would have been 60. And in some of the biggest institutions in America - Sloan Kettering in New York, Stanford, UCLA. In eight years, we had reached 43 hospitals with programs. How has that impacted the organization’s plans? We’ve lost out probably to the tune of $8 million there. In America, we lost out on two of the big events I’ve been staging for the last 10 years, partly to support an autism program and mostly for teen cancer.

So we lost probably $10 to $12 million last year for the Teenage Cancer Trust in the U.K. But the charity side of it, like Teen Cancer America, for instance, it’s extremely difficult. The music business is just getting back on its feet, which is great. How hard has the pandemic slammed those plans?

You’ve been involved with raising awareness and funds for teen cancer research by way of concerts for years now. (The Who song of the same name was also licensed as the podcast’s theme song.)Īnd, as Daltrey tells RS, the Who are plotting a return to live performance next year, which will include several benefits to make up for lost funding. It premieres on October 5th across all platforms. Undeterred, however, the band has found a new way to give back: The Real Me, a podcast hosted by Daltrey that features teen cancer patients not only talking about their stories but presenting songs they’ve written and performed. Two, which means the band was unable to raise the money they intended to earmark for Teen Cancer America - a foundation Daltrey started with Pete Townshend in 2012 to help teen cancer patients by way of building cancer units in hospitals - and the Teen Cancer Trust in the U.K. Daltrey faced two challenges at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic: One, the Who was forced to cancel the remainder of its 2020 shows.

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