The Who will reportedly be the next band to receive their own branded Rock Band video game. Singer Roger Daltrey let the following tidbit slip in an interview with MassLive: “The game, yeah, yeah, they’re going to be doing a Who one next year. There is one planned. [The idea] is fabulous. Anything that gets non-musical people interested in music is wonderful.” So far, only the Beatles have their own Rock Band title; Guitar Hero has games pegged to acts including Aerosmith and Metallica.

Check out video game avatars of rock’s biggest names.

A Rock Band spokeperson told video game blog Kotaku, “We’re working closely with the Who on what’s next, but don’t have anything new to announce at this time.”

Given the cinematic and conceptual nature of the Who and Pete Townshend, Rock Band seems like a better fit for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band than Guitar Hero. Whereas GH has created lifelike avatars and restored famed venues for their artist-based games like GH: Metallica or GH: Van Halen, MTV Games upped the ante with The Beatles: Rock Band, crafting entire dreamscapes to accompany the music and offering replicas of the Fab Four’s instruments, an approach that would work well with the Who’s concept albums like Tommy and Quadrophenia.

Unlike the Beatles, however, the Who have already offered up a number of their songs for preexisting Rock Band games: RB featured “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” RB2 had “Pinball Wizard” and July 2008 saw the The Best of the Who bring a dozen of the band’s hits to Rock Band as downloadable content.

Related Stories:

• “The Beatles: Rock Band” Beats “Guitar Hero 5″ in September Sales
• Rock Star Avatars: Video Game Versions of Real-Life Music Heroes
• “Guitar Hero 5″ Giving Away Van Halen Game Free For Limited Time

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Heavy metal acts have attended the Kerrang! awards in London. But how do rock bands choose their often death-fixated names?
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Poison frontman Bret Michaels was forced to reschedule a pair of solo gigs citing “injuries suffered at the Tony Awards June 7,” but according to Def Leppard frontman Joe Elliott, Michaels is still on for the June 23rd launch of Def Lep’s summer tour with Poison and Cheap Trick. “I bet he’s had worse in bars,” he tells Rolling Stone. “We all have, really, at some point in our career. Some irate boyfriend that thinks you looked a bit too hard at the girl in the third row.”

Def Leppard are heading into the tour fresh from their buzz-generating performance with Taylor Swift at last week’s 2009 CMT Music Awards, and Elliott says the band has assembled some career-spanning sets, to keep things fresh for those who’ve seen the group in concert in recent years.

“We’ve got 90 minutes to try and keep every Leppard fan out there happy, because they’ll all get, ‘Oh, they should’ve played this, and they should’ve played that,’ ” he says. “I think if we played all night, there’d be someone saying, ‘Well, they didn’t play that B side from 1983,’ or whatever. What we’ve done is, we’ve got a tour set that’s going to change. We’ve got certain songs we’re going to flip out every night, but I doubt very much we’ll play the same set two nights in a row.”

Of course, the band has to insert certain songs from their repertoire (”Pour Some Sugar on Me,” “Rock of Ages,” “Love Bites”) into every set, “or we wouldn’t get out of the building alive. If I were to see the Stones, and I didn’t hear ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash,’ I’m going to go home disappointed,” Elliott says. Not once, though, did the band consider following in Aerosmith’s footsteps; Steven Tyler and Co. will be playing two of their albums, 1975’s Toys in the Attic and 1976’s Rocks, from front to back on their summer tour with ZZ Top.

“There might be a time in the not-so-distant future where we do something similar to what Sparks did last year,” Elliott explains; the American rockers played a 21-night stint in London, playing each of their albums in chronological order over 21 days. “We’ve thought about making it into a spectacle, at some stage in our careers, where we just do every album we’ve ever done… 12 albums over 12 days, in a theater somewhere,” Elliott reveals. “It would be fantastic to be able to film it, and put it out as a DVD, where you could buy them as individuals or you could get them like a set of encyclopedias, if you like.”

This summer’s tour follows the formula Def Lep’s been using the past five years: Team up with other mega-acts from the 1980s (like Bryan Adams, Journey, Styx, and REO Speedwagon), hit the road, and rock America’s arenas, one after the other.

“I think us, Poison, and Cheap Trick is pretty much an event,” Elliott says. “Up until 2005, we were really struggling to find opening acts that wanted to tour with Def Leppard,” he admits. “It was sort of that post-grunge hangover or whatever, and all of a sudden, the Journeys and the Foreigners and people were banging on our door. We’ve had a real mixture of ’70s and ’80s bands out with us. There are no ’90s bands around, other than Pearl Jam, and they don’t need to tour with us. So, where are you going to go? Everybody was telling us that teaming up with other bands from the ’80s was going to put bums in seats, as they say, and we’ve been embracing this for five straight summers now. It’s been fantastic, and I think this year’s going to be up there with any that we’ve done so far.”

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