Stare at this photo long enough, and it looks like Pete is wearing kabuki makeup.

Pete Townshend (1986)

The English Beat (1982)

In 1985, Pete Townshend performed a pair of charity shows with the “Deep End” band, a band he put together that included Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and a number of well-known session musicians. From those concerts came the 1986 album, Pete Townshend’s Deep End Live!, a very good live album that for me stands out primarily for one of the covers that Pete and the band performed, “Save It for Later,” the 1982 hit by the English Beat. It stands out because for one, it revealed that Townshend was paying attention to the punk/ska/New Wave scene of the early ’80s, but mainly because his version is excellent and turns it into a song that sounds like one of his own. It certainly fits in neatly with what he was doing on his solo albums at the time, following on the heels of his vastly underrated album, White City: A Novel. The backing vocals are typical of what he used on his own songs of the time; they sound just as at home here.

I don’t usually feature live songs on Cover Friday, but since this was on an official release, I’m making an exception. Not to mention that the English Beat’s original version is one of my favorite songs of the ’80s, so it needs to be included here in any case, and better sooner than later. That is, you might say, if you were so inclined, that I didn’t want to . . . save it for later.