In the autumn of 1973, bassist John Entwistle found himself with a job nobody else in The Who wanted. Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend and Keith Moon were busy preparing the film version of Tommy, so the task of finishing an album fell to the quiet one. The material was not new: it was a pile of studio outtakes, abandoned songs and stray recordings the band had left behind over the years.
Fighting bootlegs with studio tapes
The reason for the rush was simple. Bootlegs of The Who's live shows were circulating widely, and the band wanted to fight back by releasing the unheard studio material themselves. Entwistle saw the project as something bigger than a stopgap. He tried to shape the album as a parallel career for The Who, a second story running alongside the official one.
He tried to shape the album as a parallel career for The Who, a second story running alongside the official one.
He did not work alone. With John Alcock, the producer of his solo records, Entwistle dug through tapes and assembled what became Odds & Sods. The record arrived in Britain in 1974 on Track Records, and ten of its eleven songs had never been released before. It was one of the first examples of a major band compiling its own unreleased recordings into a proper album.
The abandoned double album
Entwistle believed there was enough material for a double LP, and for a while the label considered putting out two records. In the end only one appeared, but the leftovers were not forgotten. A remastered CD released in 1998 included some of that unused second album, giving fans a glimpse of what the bassist had originally imagined.
The album reached the Top 10 in Britain and the Top 15 in America, a solid result for a collection of cast-offs. But the songs themselves told a stranger story. 'Little Billy' had been written by Pete Townshend for the American Cancer Society and never came out because it got stuck in the office of the executive Townshend had sent it to.
The oldest track on the record
The oldest track on the record went back further than anything else. 'I'm the Face' was the very first recording by The Who, made when they were still called the High Numbers. Only a few hundred copies of the original single had been pressed. For the 1974 album, Entwistle had the song remixed into stereo, giving that early piece of the band's history a second life.
Entwistle also had a personal stake in the project. 'Postcard' was the only song on the original album he had written himself, and it was released as a single. The track had been planned for an EP years earlier, but that release was cancelled. Now, with new overdubs and a fresh mix, it finally reached the public.
Decades later, the album keeps expanding. A limited double vinyl edition appeared in 2020, with the first disc preserving the original 1974 release and the second gathering tracks from the 1998 CD and beyond. What began as Entwistle's lonely autumn task became a permanent part of The Who's catalogue, proof that what a band throws away can be worth more than anyone expected.
The title said it all. Odds and sods: bits and pieces, leftovers, fragments. But arranged by a bassist with time on his hands and a bootlegger to outrun, they became an album that still turns up on shelves more than half a century later.