Sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll? Well, two out of three ain’t bad
BIOGRAPHY THANKS A LOT MR KIBBLEWHITE by Roger Daltrey (Blink £20, 352 pp) RAY CONNOLLY
EVERY band needs a front man. And if that fellow has good hair, can carry a tune and is determined not to spend his youth as an apprentice tea-maker, that band has to have a chance.
At least, that was probably how Roger Daltrey saw things when, on being expelled from his West London school at the age of 15, he was told by his headmaster, Mr Kibblewhite, that he would make nothing of his life.
In time- honoured Sixties fashion, Daltrey set out to prove the head wrong. From singing in a youth club, he went on to recruit other local boys to his group. Soon, guitarist Pete Townshend joined, then bassist John Entwistle, before Keith Moon arrived to play drums.
By then, the original singer had left to become a bacon salesman, so Daltrey became lead singer, and The Who, then the High numbers, were off and running.
At first, Pete Townshend thought they should be a blues group, but Daltrey, socially a few rungs further down the ladder, was more of a populist.
If they went the purist blues way, he argued, they would lose their early fans.
That might have been fine for Townshend, says Daltrey. He could carry on with his art degree, ‘ which meant lying about in bed all day’. But it was different for Daltrey: ‘ I wasn’t at college. I wasn’t having my a**e wiped by the state. I had a whole different outlook on life.’
Daltrey won that battle but, from the start, there were differences between them. And, more than half-a- century later, he is still smarting at how Townshend, who wrote all The Who’s hits, once described the group as ‘three geniuses and a singer’.
The sexual revolution had begun by the time The Who had their first blink at success and by the time Daltrey was 20, his girlfriend was pregnant.
He did the decent thing and married her and went to live with her and the baby on the sixth floor of a council block — before leaving in favour of a rock star’s life.
When Daltrey’s father next saw him, he hit his son for his betrayal. But The Who, now under the management of a smooth-talking toff called Kit Lambert and actor Terence Stamp’s brother Chris, were on the brink of success.
If The Who were to stand out in the stampede of Sixties rock groups, Daltrey was convinced style was the way to do it, as they progressed from Carnaby Street mod outfits to op art T-shirts.
But with Keith Moon among them, there was no way they would stay a secret for long.
By the end of the decade, they were huge stars, living in a world where sex and drugs were available in abundance. Daltrey had discovered early on that if he took drugs, he couldn’t sing. So, he didn’t. But he loved the sex side of it, what he called the ‘groupie grapevine’ — although he thinks ‘groupie’ is a horrible name for girls who were friends and companions. On his 50th birthday, he received a card and a photograph of a pretty girl who looked remarkably like him. She was a daughter he’d never known existed. He didn’t even remember meeting her mother, though, no doubt, her mother never forgot the encounter with him. There were three other children by three other women from that period.
‘Looking back, I could have done things differently,’ he writes. ‘I was young. I was arrogant and I was ignorant. And, yes . . . I was enjoying myself.’
His is a candour rarely seen in a memoir, as is his obvious contempt for the drugginess backstage at Woodstock in 1969.
‘Everything was laced with LSD . . . even the ice cubes . . . I was fine right up until the moment I decided to have a cup of tea. That’s how they got me. A nice cup of hallucinogenic tea!’ The public’s perception of The Who at that time was that they must be millionaires. But, other than for songwriter Townshend, who, to Daltrey’s lasting annoyance, earned considerably more than the others, they weren’t.
Instead, they were ripped off by dodgy promoters and their increasingly stoned managers, who needed a flood of instant money to pay for their habits.
Then there was Moonie. Yes, he says, Moonie was great as both a musician and a publicist. But he was also a financial liability, with his trashing of hotel suites costing the group thousands of dollars on their U.S. tours.
On one occasion, after a U.S. tour in which Keith had attacked his drum kits with an anger only he possessed, Daltrey was, he claims, so broke that he had to borrow the money to fly home.
ONLY about 20 per cent of Moon’s japes were really funny, he says, and, as someone who Moon once tried to clout before I tried to clout him back, I vouch for the fact that he could be extremely irritating.
As Daltrey sympathetically points out, there was no malice, just a self- destructive plea for attention. Keith was a troubled soul, particularly after accidentally running over and killing his driver. He was found dead, at 32, from a massive overdose of pills.
Ironically, they’d been prescribed to get him off alcohol. It was a death that, Daltrey believes, had been coming for years.
John Entwistle also died of an overdose in Las Vegas at, fittingly, the Hard Rock Hotel, in 2002.
Roger Daltrey at 74 is now, like Pete Townshend, rich and deaf. He is also still married, after more than 40 years, to the very understanding former model Heather Taylor.
He was honest with her before they married. He knew what would happen when he went on tour, got lonely and needed a companion. ‘To come back home and tell her I’d been a good boy — it would have been a lie.
‘Sexual infidelity should never be a reason for divorce.’