The Who returns to Birmingham this week

Roger Daltrey and Peter Townshend are the only surviving members of the band and they'll return to Birmingham's Barclaycard Arena on Wednesday to play songs from Tommy as well as other hits.

The band plan to make this their last big tour, though some dates were changed after Roger Daltrey contracted meningitis. And guitarist Pete said he'd taken inspiration from the fact that the audiences contained an increasing number of millennials.

"It's much nicer to play our music to younger audiences, who really haven't grown up with it," he recently told Rolling Stone. "That's what struck me about the last five weeks of the tour; we were playing to a much larger number of younger people. I just feel, like, 'Wow. I'm alive to see a new generation of people really get this stuff.' It's just a real kick."

The show will feature an acoustic version of the Tommy album, an idea that came about during Roger's Teenage Cancer Trust concerts at the Royal Albert Hall.

Pete adds: "Roger wanted The Who to do two nights there, which I agreed to and then I suggested we need to do something a little bit different.

"I was worried about how loud it is in the Royal Albert Hall when we do a standard rock show. It's terrifying. I usually feel like I'm blowing out the last little range of what's left of my hearing when we play there. So I said, "Can we do something a little quieter?" He suggested we look at Tommy, and I thought about it. So we're gonna do it, but we're gonna do it in a new way. It will be quieter. Whether it will be unplugged, as it were, is another story. There's certainly part of it that will work very well that way, but we need to play it through and see how it lands.

"We've got five shows that were scheduled for this year and apparently Brexit stopped all ticket sales across London in a hiccup and they panicked and they moved them 'til next year. Now those shows will probably be a little different from the show that we're doing at the moment, but I hope it's not too different because we haven't got much time to rehearse it. The other thing is that the show we're doing at the moment is really good, and I tend to like to get into a groove with a show so I can not have to think too much when I'm performing."

The band played a major show last year in the USA, which featured other stand-out performers. Desert was a six-day event that included the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Sir Paul McCartney, Neil Young, Roger Waters and The Who. It was dubbed Oldchella, after being founded by Coachella producer Paul Tollett.

Pete adds: "For me, the last five weeks of the tour we did, before we came to California to do Desert Trip, everything felt very different. I'm notorious for being, I suppose the word is blasé but also a bit diffident about performing. We'll do a good show and afterwards, people will say, "Were you having fun?" And I'll say, "No, not really." They'll say, "Isn't it great?" And I'll say, "Well, glad you think so but it's just what I do." That kind of thing. I'm a little bit detached and I put it down to the way that I grew up: My dad was in a band, and I grew up on the road with my dad, and I feel safe on the road.

"I feel that Roger and I probably can work together and make music together in the future, maybe even do new recordings,. But I certainly don't feel like I did when I started on this tour at the end of 2014. I thought, 'Well, we'll do a 50th-anniversary tour. It will revitalise our cataloge, and when it's finished I can get back to doing whatever it is that I'm going to do for the rest of my life'.

"And I imagined that what I would do for the rest of my life would be certainly to work with Roger occasionally but not touring. I don't think either of us really want to go and do long intensive tours anymore. Roger was the one that was ill, but I didn't get ill, but it was a wake-up call when he got il.

"So I think, you know, we don't particularly want to go and do heavy touring again but the future is looking good. It feels good to me. It feels optimistic and hopeful.