The two of them have practically nothing in common except being close colleagues for over 50 years. Townshend said rock music is the only profession where you’re expected to remain best friends with someone you met briefly when you were 18 and then joined a band with later that night. But they have stuck together and there’s something admirable about it.
Got to see them during their farewell tour in the U.S. in October 1983. One of the two performances they put on at Shea stadium in New York. Didn’t know until recently, as a result of finding youtube videos of separate respective pre-concert interviews done of Daltrey and Townshend on the same night before the first New York show, how shall we say “less-than-best-friendly” they were back then, how at-his-wits-end Daltrey was about Townshend’s more or less unilateral decision to pack it in with “The Who” and go wherever the wind blew him after that (it was Pete’s band, after all, apparently), and how two bandmates so inseparably associated by the public at large can get to the point of having to maintain total physical and emotional separateness at all times between tour dates (up till minutes before showtime as it turned out in New York that October), to avoid antagonizing each other and potentially negatively affecting the amazing and powerful on-stage performances The Who had always been known for.