‘My brain was crushed. I went completely doolally. I was calling friends to say goodbye’
How he won’t get fooled again by politicians. Why his wife and kids are alright with his VERY rock’n’roll past. And how close he’s come to dying before he gets really old – as Roger Daltrey tells More...
Roger Daltrey, rock’s feistiest frontman, doesn’t have time for many politicians of his generation. But there’s one UK left-winger he’d like to just f-f-fade away. ‘Jeremy Corbyn is not a socialist,’ The Who’s redoubtable singer declares. ‘He’s a communist. Be honest about that and see how many votes you get, Jeremy, because otherwise you’re going to be moving in to Downing Street under a false premise.’
Daltrey, who in a 55-year career has fearlessly confronted audiences at Woodstock, Live Aid, Glastonbury, Hyde Park and the Super Bowl, was born to have opinions.
In his youth he was prepared to back them up, sometimes with his fists. These days he relies on passionately argued discourse. Take, for instance, his position on the European Union.
‘What I’m against is Brussels, not the EU,’ Daltrey declaims emphatically, his eyes flashing behind blue specs.
‘I can’t live with that because we lost people in my family fighting for our right to be democratic.’
Daltrey takes a dainty sip of water in the parlour of a Georgian hotel in London, where the floorboards creak discreetly and the speeches of Churchill play on an invigorating loop in the lavatory.
Dapper in a tailored waistcoat, crisp shirt and slim-cut jeans, Daltrey has just returned from the hairdresser, where his full head of pewter curls has been tamed. At 74, he looks fit and strong, compact at 5ft 7in and built like a breezeblock. He invites closer inspection of his bulging biceps (‘They’re like rocks!’). See me, feel me, indeed. Daltrey is here to discuss As Long As I
Have You, his first solo album for a quarter of a century, but somewhere between prawn sandwiches becomes sidetracked by pesky politics and bullish Brexit predictions. Later the vocalist, who has sold more than 100million albums, will talk candidly about his recently completed autobiography, his ‘brother’ Pete Townshend, his dear wife Heather, his beloved friend Keith Moon and his near-death experience with meningitis.
He will also address his violent past, knife crime, prison reform, media harassment, teenage cancer and his unusual perspective on mortality.
Daltrey’s excellent new album delves back into his soul singing in the early days of The Who, when he would belt out sprightly Motown songs with a flavour of Shepherd’s Bush, his birthplace.
‘I was always a soul singer,’ Daltrey says, ‘If music doesn’t move you, if it isn’t honest, then there’s no point.
‘I’m singing the same words on the songs that we did all those years ago, but now they’re full of life. And full of living.’
In 2016, life presented Daltrey with ‘a slight case of meningitis’ – a viral infection of the brain membrane – that almost finished him.‘I don’t recommend getting it,’ he says with a shudder.
‘I had a problem with overheating and getting low on salt. It’s a real danger – you can die. We did two very hot gigs and all of a sudden, wham, within a week I was crawling into the hospital on my hands and knees.
‘They stuck tubes and needles in everywhere, bone marrow, lumbar punctures, brain scans, you name it. Just trying to find out what was wrong because everything had stopped working.
‘I was in agony and I was going mad. The lining of your brain swells up. So the brain is being crushed. I tried to get out of the car on the way to the hospital at 70mph on the motorway to throw up. I was completely doolally. For a few days it was touch and go. I was calling people to say goodbye. I said: “I don’t think I’m coming out of here.” I was that bad.’ The experience has given As Long As I
Have You a soulful depth and a sensitivity not always associated with Daltrey’s more robust rock output.
‘People think I’m a tough nut but I’m not,’ he confides. ‘Inside, I’m incredibly sensitive.’
In As Long As I Have You’s more reflective moments, it reads like a love letter to Daltrey’s wife of 51 years, Heather, with tender covers of Boz Scaggs’ I’ve Got Your Love, Stephen Stills’ How Far and a moving rendition of Nick Cave’s In Your Arms.
‘I hope she gets that,’ he says. ‘I did tell her: “I sang this for you, you know.”’
Daltrey married Heather Taylor in 1971 and they have three grown-up children and ‘many wonderful grandchildren’.
The singer had one child from his four-year marriage to Jackie Rickman in 1964, and another son was born in 1968 as a result of an affair with model Elisabeth Aronsson.
He concedes that marital life hasn’t always been easy for Heather, ‘when your husband is on the road with the world’s biggest rock’n’roll band’, but they have, Daltrey says, an understanding that has deepened with the passing years.
‘She knew what business I was in,’ Daltrey insists. ‘Was she ever going to believe me coming back from a three-month tour that I’d been a good boy? I mean, come on. Men are men. No one needed to say anything, it was all open and it worked. That kind of relationship worked for the aristocracy for centuries. ‘It’s remarkable that we have survived, but we’ve survived because she understood. ‘It’s not been all easy and there have been times when I’ve hurt her and that’s upset me, but you can’t go backwards, you have to go forwards. ‘We’ve hung in there and what I love about being married this long is you get the valueadded.’
Daltrey excitedly remembers ‘this girl with an incredible pair of legs and the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen in my life’ standing over him in London’s Speakeasy Club in the summer of 1967. They still enjoy a fulfilling love life, although sex, Daltrey acknowledges, has become about something more than the physical.
‘It’s not just a lust thing,’ he agrees. ‘It’s just as important but it’s a different caring, a different nurturing. I love it because it’s another life lesson. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her,’ he says quietly. ‘I think the world of her.’
For a time, so did Jimi Hendrix, vigorously pursuing redheaded Heather and writing
Foxy Lady for her in an attempt to woo the striking model.
‘Jimi was always after Heather, even though he was going out with her best friend,’ Daltrey chuckles, adding, ‘but he didn’t get her. I did.’
This wasn’t Daltrey’s only triumph over the frisky guitarist. The Who famously pulled rank over Hendrix at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 to headline the landmark show, at which – contrary to reports of the time – Daltrey was not ‘draped in a psychedelic hippy shawl’ but a tablecloth purchased from Shepherd’s Bush Market.
‘Chelsea Antiques Market, dear boy,’ he corrects with a hoot. ‘And it was a big bedspread.’
Such essential rock minutiae will be available in October when Daltrey’s autobiography
Thanks A Lot, Mr Kibblewhite (a reference to his old headmaster) is published.
‘Normal rock biogs are so boring now,’ he complains. ‘It’s too much of the same story. I wanted to take you into what it felt like to do it, to be in the eye of the hurricane.’
Although Daltrey admits that ‘there are periods I don’t remember because I’ve had quite a lot of bad concussions in my life’.
He’s also survived a throat cancer scare in