It is one in every of rock’s most iconic cowl pictures: The 4 members of The Who, fastidiously adjusting their clothes after apparently urinating on a mysterious concrete monolith.
For years, the exact location of the Who’s Subsequent cowl shoot has remained a thriller, however a report within the Derbyshire Times reveals that the band’s historic pee cease passed off close to Temple Normanton, a township two and a half miles south-east of Chesterfield, Derbyshire.
Let’s rewind. On Might 14, 1971, American photographer Ethan Russell photographed the The Who pretending to destroy their dressing room on the College of Liverpool, the shot that was used on the again cowl of Who’s Subsequent. The next morning, because the group headed again to London, Russell noticed a slag heap dotted by a number of concrete pilings, like deserted props from 2001: A Area Odyssey.
“I used to be occupied with that scene,” Russell instructed Traditional Rock in 2022, “so I had the band form of behaving the best way the apes and people do within the film, reacting to it in worry.”
Mission completed, the band elected to have some enjoyable, which is how the quilt picture took place. For years, individuals have argued in regards to the location, but it surely was solely pinpointed not too long ago when an American TV crew making a documentary about Russell visited Chesterfield and spoke to native man John Hirst.
“Again when the album got here out I used to be working for Clay Cross council, and somebody within the workplace was an enormous Who fan stated he knew the place the photograph had been taken,” Hirst instructed the Occasions. “He used to drive previous it every single day on his method from Mansfield.
“I saved just a little digicam in my automotive, so three of us went up there and I took photograph of him standing with it. I acquired married and moved close by quickly after and over the subsequent couple of years I took extra images because the land was crammed in round it, till the factor disappeared.
“I sat on these images for years and years, and now and again I’d hear about Who followers who stated it was someplace utterly completely different. It’s all around the web that it’s someplace close to Easington [a village 130 miles north of Temple Normanton, in County Durham]. If I’d modified it on Wikipedia, somebody would have simply modified it again.”
As we speak solely the highest of the monolith remains to be seen, however Who followers wishing to make a pilgrimage to the location, maybe to pee on the historic concrete, ought to be conscious that it is now located on personal farmland and permission from the landowner ought to positively be sought.