The Who Sell Out

The album began as a follow-up called Who's Lily. In late September 1967 Chris Stamp proposed building an album from the songs on hand, and the pirate-radio concept emerged. The commercials were recorded in October and the album was mixed in November. PAMS made the Radio London jingles.

Writing in Pitchfork in 2021, Sam Sodomsky described Townshend as exhausted after a summer 1967 tour with Herman's Hermits, assembling the album from Pictures of Lily, I Can See for Miles and some other material. He called it the band's dark-horse favorite and said its collage-like flow echoed in 1990s indie bands such as Yo La Tengo and Guided by Voices. The 2021 Super Deluxe edition runs to five discs, with the fifth holding Townshend's solo demos.

In New York a master of Rael was accidentally thrown away, and the engineer Chris Huston patched in the mono version. The release slipped from 17 November after the deodorant maker Odorono objected to the cover, and Stamp obtained permission from all four products shown.

It reached number 13 in Britain, the lowest British chart placing of any Who album, and number 48 in the United States. Jann Wenner called it fantastic in Rolling Stone in 1968. Christgau said it made the band the third best not just in Britain but the world, and in 1999 Rolling Stone called it the most successful concept album ever.