Pete Townshend: I had dithered tremendously with "Rael"...and intended for it to be written for full orchestra and be genuine opera. Looking back, I can't quite remember where the Who as a group fitted in, because I had Arthur Brown lined up as the hero...The story was running into about twenty scenes when Kit Lambert reminded me that while I was pretending to be Wagner, The Who needed a new single. What did I have? I had "Rael." Thus "Rael" was edited down to about four minutes--still too long for a single in those days, ironically...[and] it was squeezed up too tightly to make sense. Musically it is interesting because it contains a theme which I later used in Tommy for "Sparks" and the "Underture." That music was written in 1966.

(From The Story Of Tommy, 1977; reprinted in Nicholas Schaffner's The British Invasion, 1983)