Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon

by Tony Fletcher

  According to the rota system whereby each member got to design an album sleeve in turn, Keith had been due to come up with the ideas for Who Are You. But he failed. So on the day of the Shepperton show photographs were taken to make the most of having all four members in the same place. Three of the band were wearing the same clothes as at Kilburn months earlier, indicating an intention to merge footage from the two performances. (Keith, for whom continuity was not in the dictionary, was the exception.) Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey both sported casual jeans wear, as if trying to bridge the gap between their older audience and the ‘new wave’. John Entwistle evidently didn’t care: he wore the widest flares imaginable. And Keith … well Keith was not so much out of fashion as beyond it. He did some of the photos in a purple velvet jacket with flared white trousers and matching white spats. Then he changed into his latest persona, that of the landed gentry horseman, with riding boots, hat and hound-tooth jacket. Unfortunately, the tight trousers and finely embroidered shirt which tucked into them only served to emphasise just how fat Keith had become. As the photo shoot moved around to the back of the group’s PA, the band standing amidst cables and flight cases, photographer Terry O’Neil begged Keith to grab a nearby chair and sit forwards in it, so as to hide his paunch.

  And that was the image that became the album cover – the loudest band in the world on the other side of their equipment, a group who had once been among the most image-conscious in the world reduced to a bunch of 30-something full-time businessmen and part-time rock’n’rollers in varying degrees of non-fashion. At centre shot Keith hunched forward over his chair, the back of which clearly read, by one of those bizarre coincidences that would turn out to have tragic relevance, ‘Not to be taken away.’

  99 At some point after his return from LA, he also spent time at the Wellington, a private clinic in north London.

  100 Special Air Service, Britain’s crack commando troup.

  38

  On June 4, 1978, Keith and Annette left for a month-long holiday on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Everyone hoped that getting Keith away from the bars and clubs and other temptations of London, now that the nine-month ordeal of Who Are You was finally over, would be good for his health.

  It appeared to be. The holiday was idyllic, the couple spending their time scuba diving, fishing, lying on the beach and reading. They befriended a reformed alcoholic who had worked with the Beatles, and Keith seemed impressed by the attractions sobriety could offer. Indeed, just as in Tahiti, he showed that he could take or leave the booze. The only exception was the night at the hotel club when he was asked to play the drums. He obliged, but felt compelled to get drunk in the process. To him, it was all part of the package. Otherwise, it was a perfect vacation. Annette, who celebrated her twenty-third birthday in the middle of it, sensed – at least she wanted to – that Keith was turning a corner in his life.

  Why he then flipped on the return journey on July 3 remains a mystery. Maybe he felt a need to perform as soon as he was seen in public. It could have been a reaction to the impending boredom of the lengthy flight. Perhaps, also, there was fear of going home to work and its attendant pressures after such a relaxing holiday. Whatever, in the lounge before departure, he got paralytic. As the passengers approached the British Airways jet on the tarmac, Keith brazenly threw his briefcase into one of the engines. The plane was delayed at the gate while a vehicle came out to retrieve it.

  On board, his boisterousness quickly turned vituperative as he ordered more drinks and forced himself on other’s company. Some passengers complained; he told them where to get off. Annette started to cry; a stewardess gave her a sedative. Keith insulted a mother and child. When the captain himself finally asked Keith to behave, Moon reportedly entered the flight deck to remonstrate.

  The upshot was that when the plane made its scheduled stopover at the Seychelle Islands, Keith was thrown off As one of the passengers reported, revealing more about Keith than they may have known, “The doctor arrived and said he was unfit to fly on. We saw him running down the steps demanding to see the press.”

  For once, Annette did not stay by Keith’s side. She flew back to London without him, emotionally distraught. Word of Keith’s latest adventures travelled ahead of her. “When I got to Heathrow, I think every journalist in England was at the airport,” she says. “Richard Dorse came to get me and he had to hold on to me.”

  Keith, meanwhile, was taken off to hospital for the night. He was eventually flown back not by British Airways – who refused to accommodate him – but by Kenya Airways. “He was laughing about it when he finally came home,” says Annette. “He praised this airline because he had several seats to himself, and he had a very nice flight.”

  Keith played the incident down to the press. “A real storm in a tea cup,” he called it. “It was all a bit of fun.” The tabloids put him on their front pages anyway.

  “He always told me that any publicity was better than no publicity,” says Annette. “He enjoyed it all. When he came home from Mauritius on that flight, he had enjoyed it thoroughly.”

  In a blatant attempt to prevent his restless spirit getting into further trouble – “to give him something to do where he wasn’t goofing off somewhere, passing out for four days,” as John Entwistle says – the Who pronounced Keith director of publicity for their Shepperton studios enterprise. It was, in many ways, a token position, a sop. But it was one that Keith accepted gratefully and purposefully. He knew most of the journalists in the land. He had a knack for stunts and a way of attracting headlines that made him ideally suited to a job that consisted of little more than talking up the Who’s extra-curricular activities to all and sundry. “When we have finished with this place, it will become the centre of the international rock music industry,” he announced of Shepperton with customary zeal. “We will have the facilities here that are undreamed of anywhere in the world. And believe me, once this place is in operation, the rock music industry is going to start coming back to this country. Tax or no tax.”

  He and Annette had earlier moved into a second, more airy house on Hay’s Mews next door to their original rental, but now the lease had run out. Keith wanted to buy somewhere – he was talking about the Ascot area just over the Thames from Chertsey – but he no longer had the finances. What little of his fortune he had not spent over the years was tied up in the house at Trancas; there was certainly nothing in the coffers to allow for similar extravagance in London. In a typically aristocratic action Keith had spent £300 on a bottle of 1875 Chateau Lafitte in a charity auction in March but that was paid for in the’ attendant publicity. In reality, he had taken to ‘buying’ trinkets from the high-class jewellers Asprey, where he had a credit account, and pawning them in the East End for immediate cash. He even showed up at Henrit’s under the management office, in the Rolls one Friday, trying to sell Bob Henrit a boot full of snare drums – “dozens of them,” says Henrit who, suspicious, decided not to take him up on the deal.

  So it was that Keith and Annette accepted Harry Nilsson’s offer of the Curzon Place flat in Mayfair where Keith had been staying just before he met Annette in 1974, and where Mama Cass died only days before the two of them took off for America. For all that he talked of moving back to the country, he seemed best suited to central London.

  Throughout the summer, Keith was in and out of the recording studio, editing suite, management office and Shepperton studios, keen to show willing and stay busy. At times, he appeared to be fully rejuvenated, not least when the Who went into Ramport shortly before the ‘Who Are You’ single was released in the middle of July to shoot a promotional film clip. The original intention was to show them pretending to record the song, but the Who were never very good at miming. As Jon Astley played the 16-track master down their headphones, they played along for real; Astley bounced the results onto a 24-track machine and recorded the drums, guitar and vocals over again.

  Keith was on spectacular form. There on camera, in a red T-shir
t monogrammed with his name, he seemed clearly delighted to be in the presence of his partners, goofing around as always, inspiring the others to laughter with his array of expressions – and most importantly, drumming superbly. Much of what was used on the finished film was performed live that day, Keith recording in front of an intrusive camera crew in a mere afternoon what had previously taken several weeks. “He played a drum solo at the end just for the sake of the Who and the people who were there,” says John Entwistle, “and it was just fucking phenomenal.”

  Dougal Butler had met Keith again at the Shepperton concert in late May. Although Keith “looked really, totally strung out”, they had talked amicably. After returning from Mauritius, Keith took to phoning Butler at home, pleading with him to come back to work. Dougal, who was struggling to get a chauffeuring business off the ground, wrote Keith a reminder about the money he was owed for his time in Trancas. Keith continued calling and made promises to sort out the debt.

  Then one day Dougal was driving down Park Lane and decided to see if Keith was home. “I just knocked on his door and he opened up and he was overjoyed. He said, ‘Come in, we’ve just finished the album, I’m off the booze,’ and I even ran up the road to the off-licence to get some Perrier water. Then all of a sudden my bleeper went and I had to go off and pick up a client. He said, ‘Don’t go, come back later on.’ I said, ‘If I can,’ but I never did.”

  They talked several more times on the phone. Keith was excited about all the activity at Shepperton. The Kids Are Alright was being edited down and a movie of Quadrophenia was about to go into production. Knowing that Butler wanted to work in films, Keith begged his old friend to resume working for him, again offering up to half his income, and again Butler had to say no, he preferred just to have Keith as a friend.

  They arranged to meet at Shepperton one day, regardless. Dougal got there late, to find that Keith had shown up in a Rolls Royce, wearing his fur coat in summer, leaving immediately when he found Dougal was not there. He had, said the road crew, been completely off his head.

  Butler, leaving Shepperton disappointed, assumed there would be plenty more opportunities to meet. In the meantime, he became accustomed to Keith’s telephone calls at all times of the night. “He was gaga on some occasions and sentimental on others. Knowing Keith over all that period, there was obviously something very wrong with him. Obviously drugs or emotional things, or the two mixed together. I really don’t know what he was trying to say. One time he was literally crying.”

  “He started to call me up just to say ‘Good night’ and ‘I love you,’ “Pete Townshend revealed several years later of what he calls Keith’s ‘maudlin post-binge love calls’. “He did that about ten times, and you could tell he was crying a little bit. He’d say, ‘You do believe me, don’t you?’ I’d say, ‘Yes, but you’re still an asshole.’”

  Dougal and Pete were two of the select people to whom Keith would dare expose his emotions. Kit Lambert was one of the few others. A photograph of those two together taken around this time shows a number of startling visual similarities between the pair – particularly the decay brought on by their lifestyle. Yet even as Lambert’s own self-abuse propelled him to oblivion, he remained genuinely concerned for Keith’s well-being. Coming across Ginger Baker in a King’s Road pub one afternoon, he begged the esteemed drummer to have a word with Keith about his drinking. “He thinks the world of you,” said Lambert. What the ex-manager either didn’t know or didn’t want to recognise was that Baker was now a heroin addict himself.

  “I didn’t really take it seriously,” says Baker of Lambert’s plea. “I said, ‘Kit I have so many problems of my own, Keith will be all right.’ Because he always appeared to be. Keith was the sort of guy that you would never know he was at all unhappy. He was the life and soul of the party. Keith was a natural comedian. The sad thing about people like that, they’re usually very unhappy, but they have this wonderful ability to make everybody else feel extremely happy. And Keith was like that. It was hard to really imagine that he had problems.”

  Those in control of their own lives saw it differently. “There were never tears far from Keith’s eyes,” says Ray Connolly, who met Keith at the well-known King’s Road hang-out Wedgies one night that summer. “And I never knew what was in them. It could have been pure alcohol.” On that last occasion they met, drink was definitely a part of it. “He was a mess. He was throwing pills in the air, catching them and swallowing them. God knows what they were. He latched on to me straight away, as an audience. I just remember him throwing the pills in the air, catching them and swallowing them. And then ordering a drink and downing it in one. That was really amazing, because I’ve never seen people do that except in films.”

  ‘Who Are You’ the single was released in the middle of July, the album in late August, both to considerable fanfare. The first new material from the band in almost three years, it was also the first since the punk explosion. As such, in the UK there was much discussion about the lyrics – particularly ‘the punk(s) and the godfather’ story behind the title song – and the Who’s overall place in the scheme of things. These were exciting times, but if you were one of the only surviving bands from the glory days of the Sixties, they were challenging ones too. No one knew how long a rock’n’roll group was meant to continue and as such there were some, even among their loyalest fans, who felt the Who had now fulfilled all expectations and could not continue much longer without tarnishing their almost spotless reputation. Just as many others believed that for as long as they cared about what they were doing – and everyone knew that the Who cared – they should keep going forever.

  In America, where punk’s impact was marginal – the Sex Pistols had imploded while touring the States, and no other act seemed close to a commercial breakthrough – the angle was not the Who’s relevance, which was never in doubt, but their decision not to tour. Pete, Keith and Roger found themselves continually asked to explain this almost blasphemous position when they travelled to New York and Los Angeles in the middle of August for press duties. (John Entwistle stayed behind, wrapping up the soundtrack for The Kids Are Alright?)

  Pete gave Rolling Stone the justification that “the last three years have been the happiest of my life as far as my family goes”, to which Daltrey, apparently forgetting his promise made almost a year earlier, challenged in Los Angeles: “Physically, I still think I’ve got about three or four years left for going on tour and I think we should do it while we can.”

  Keith played referee. “Just like old times, those two are at it again. Never mind, I shall talk some sense into them.”

  But in talking to Dave Marsh of Rolling Stone, Moon was more serious. “I feel I’ve got a sense of purpose … In the two years off, I was really drifting away with no direction, no nothing … Nothing ever came close to the feeling I get when I’m working with the guys. Because it’s fun, but at the same time I know I’ve gotta discipline myself again. And also, it teaches me to take it as well as dish it out – that’s rock.” In the past, he admitted, “I’d fantasize that it was Pete’s problem, or John’s problem, or Roger’s problem. And it wasn’t. It was my fault, ‘cause I couldn’t take it. So I’ve grown up a little, from learning that.” The honesty was as disarming as it was endearing. Live on ABC’s Good Morning America a few hours earlier, he had been even more candid.

  “Are you in control of your life at all?” asked the presenter, David Hartman, evidently well prepped as to Moon’s reputation.

  “Oh yeah,” replied Keith. Then a caveat. “On certain days.”

  “What are you like on the other days?” came the natural follow-up.

  “Quite out of control… I mean, amazingly drunk.”

  That particular day he appeared to be veering between the two extremes, drinking wine before the breakfast show, during his interview with Marsh at the Navarro and over a lengthy lunch, but he maintained sufficient composure that in the afternoon, on arrival at radio station WNEW, DJ Scott Muni remarked
on air that Moon was looking healthy.

  “Yes,” replied Keith in his best ‘dear boy’ accent. “Surprising, seeing as how I keep reading all these reports of how I’m supposed to be close to death.” He gave a laugh, a most undeniably nervous one. No one else joined him.

  Back in south London, Ian McLagan and Kim Moon were contemplating emigration to California. The Faces had long ago split up, and given that a Small Faces reunion on the coat-tails of punk had just ground to an unsatisfactory halt, it made sense for McLagan to be in Los Angeles, the global base for session work, where he was in constant demand for his keyboard skills.

  But when Kim mentioned their plans to her friend Penny Wilson, a barrister, she was reminded she would need Keith’s permission to take Mandy, now twelve, out of the country. Although Keith had made no attempt to see his daughter (or ex-wife) in the year he had been home, it was unlikely he would agree to let her move away. That’s just the way he was.

  A few nights later Kim had a dream. She was with Keith in Africa, at an art gallery. They were happy together, it was just like old times. And then in that dream, a friend of Mac’s, a roadie called Ray Cole, telephoned her to say that Keith had died. “He can’t have,” she told Ray in the dream. “I was just with him.”

  The very thought of Keith dying was so upsetting that she woke up in tears.