Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon

by Tony Fletcher

  Later that week she had lunch with her friend Penny, whom she told about the dream in which Keith died. In an attempt to cheer Kim up, Penny cracked a morbid joke. “Well, if that happened, you wouldn’t have to worry about taking Mandy to America.”

  On August 12, as Who Are You entered the British top 20, and while three-quarters of the band were in America, Pete Meaden died from an overdose of barbiturates. Though the group’s first mentor had been back in the Who camp, co-managing the Steve Gibbons Band with Bill Curbishley, he had seemed desperately unhappy all the same. It could have been many things, not least that he was so near control of the Who, yet so far – just as he had been back in 1964. The coroner, failing to find evidence of intended suicide, delivered an open verdict. Meaden’s friends said he knew too much about drugs to have overdosed by mistake. Pete Meaden was 35. Or 36. There seemed to be some confusion about his age.

  When the Who came back to London, in the midst of mourning for Meaden they sat down to watch a rough edit of The Kids Are Alright. “It must have been horrific for Keith,” said Daltrey later. “There was this young drummer, great looking kid, going bananas, who turns out at the end of the film a fat old thing, falling off the drums, being held up. He’d gone to seed and he wanted to get it back. We were going to get a gym together at Shepperton.”

  Moon became yet more forthcoming in his interviews; in tandem with regretting his time in America was admittance that he was human after all. “It’s the fear of insecurity and loneliness that depresses me,” he said in one instance, naming four of his biggest problems in one sentence when previously he would have admitted to none.

  In another interview, Keith was highly tactful when asked about touring. “We’ve been doing that for 15 years and you can get a bit bored, especially when there are so many new directions opening up for us. I mean, let’s not count it out, but let’s not put it too high on the agenda.”

  In private, he proclaimed a renewed enthusiasm for the road, especially to John Entwistle. “I’m fed up with being a fat pig,” Keith told his friend, announcing his intention of going to a health farm – yet again – to lose the weight.

  “If he was under control he could drop ten pounds in a week,” says Entwistle, who clung to the memories of how fantastic the band had sounded at the end of 1976 and was eager to perform some Christmas shows that were strongly rumoured to have been booked. “He was determined, I could tell. He was absolutely disgusted with himself. Whenever he’d got in that state in the past he’d gone for it. It didn’t really matter if it was for good. You go a tour at a time.”

  The ‘new directions’ of which Keith had spoken included, for him, an autobiography. He asked Bob Henrit to write it with him; Henrit, as well as owning a store, was one of the few drummers who doubled as a journalist. Keith made the same offer to broadcaster and journalist Annie Nightingale, who had long been a friend. The book was to be called The Moon Papers. Of all the characters in rock, certainly no one had more sordid and hilarious stories to tell. But he did not explain why he wanted to tell his life story at this particular stage. Maybe it was just another idea for self-promotion. And maybe, just maybe, he was finally ready to put the lock on ‘Moon the Loon’ and move into maturity.

  If so, it was no less a struggle than ever before. “Keith used to go on the wagon every week,” says John Wolff of Keith during that summer. “And of course he would pontificate about how clean he had been for the last eight hours. The periods were very short because ‘mine host’ would find himself in a situation where he wouldn’t have had a drink but was in a situation where other people were, and he wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to join in.”

  The relentless pattern of heavy binges followed by attempted withdrawals increased the number of seizures, the status epilepticus attacks. Annette went to the Hilton one day to do some shopping, “And when I came back up to the flat he had had another fit because he had this big bump on his forehead, and that confused look you have when you come out of not knowing where you are or what happened, and I just knew that he had had another fit although he didn’t want to admit that was what had happened.”

  At some point during August, Keith cut himself at home again. This appears to have been in a fight with Annette, who was later quoted by the Sunday Mirror saying how “He had to be put to sleep by a doctor to save him from maiming me.” This quote, she now admits, is an exaggeration in that while Keith might destroy everything in a room in a fit of fury, including throwing objects at her, he never ever laid a hand on her or gave any indication that he would. But that particular night, frightened of Keith’s potential to inflict damage on himself or others, she called Richard Dorse just as she had called on Dougal in the past. Dorse came round and “He held Keith back, he tied him down, he told him, ‘You’re going to stop this, you silly bastard,’ “as Annette recalls. A doctor was promptly called.

  That doctor was a certain Geoffrey Dymond, previously unknown to Keith, who recalls another doctor also being summoned to the flat, but that he was the one with whom Keith decided to pursue a relationship. That evening, according to both Annette and Dymond’s subsequent recollections, the doctor ended Keith’s rampage by injecting him with a sedative. Subsequently taking Moon on as a client patient, Dymond put him on a course of Heminevrin, the brand name for the compound chlormethiazole, which is officially described as being for use ‘in the treatment of insomnia, psychosis, alcohol withdrawal symptoms and status epilepticus.’ Given that this almost perfectly described Keith’s problems, it would appear to have been the right drug for him. And it might well have been, had it been administered as it usually is: under direct supervision, during a hospitalised detoxification process, for the short period of time – a few days – during which withdrawal can provoke epileptic fits.

  Any other form of prescription was inherently dangerous. According to a book on alcohol treatment distributed by the World Health Organisation,101 “Chlormethiazole should not be used in home detoxification because of a significant risk of respiratory depression when mixed with alcohol; it also has a high dependence potential and should not therefore be used in outpatient detoxification.” In other words, the drug should not be left in the hands of alcoholics both because it can be deadly when mixed with alcohol and because the patient’s addictive tendencies and the drug’s addictive qualities might easily result in an overdose. Keith Moon was given complete control over a full bottle of 100 tablets.

  As we know, Keith could be persuasive, in particular resorting to a childlike innocence that would suggest butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth – nor a bottle of pills pour down them by mistake. He was, also, desperate to get clean but in no mood to go back into hospital. And Doctor Dymond was new to Keith and possibly unaware just how extensive and difficult his problems had been.

  Dymond himself is surprisingly vague on his relationship with one of rock’s most distinguished and celebrated characters. “My recollections now are so few and far between,” he said almost immediately when I tracked him down by telephone. “It’s a long time ago. I doubt I can help you at all.” Of what must have been one of his more famous clients, he could say only that, “If he appeared to me tomorrow morning, I wouldn’t recognise him.”

  Of Heminevrin, he insisted that it was “a standard drug… it certainly wasn’t new”. As to whether it could stand to be mixed with alcohol, he said only, “Well, it’s a sedative, and with alcohol it can be even more of a sedative.” Upon mention of Keith’s long history of alcoholism, he interrupted. “I don’t even remember that. I just don’t remember.” And then, as if reading my thoughts, he added, “It’s not a question of not wanting to give you information. I do not remember very much about it.”

  For her part, Annette Walter-Lax knew next to nothing about Keith’s latest prescribed drug. “For me, these were good pills,” she says. “I was told that these pills were going to sober him up and help him stop drinking. So for me these were kind tablets. If they had been valium I would have thrown t
hem away because I would have known they were bad.” Keith told her he was to take the Heminevrin when he had a craving for alcohol, and Annette says she always knew when that was, because it had the same result. “It always gave him the impression that he was drunk. They were like an alcohol substitute, it seems to me.”

  Late in August, Keith was called in to CTS studios in Wembley where the soundtrack for The Kids Are Alright had been put together. He needed to overdub some drums to replace his lax playing of ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ and ‘Baba O‘Riley’ at the Shepperton concert. There was also a montage of guitar-and-drum destruction from over the years for which the original recordings were ropey, and on which Keith could have some fun.

  Pete Wandless, who as house engineer at CTS had spent the past few weeks alongside Cy Längsten and John Entwistle, synching up and improving the footage of the early Who, watched Keith walk in that day. “I could barely recognise him. I knew it was him, but he was very puffy, very slow. He just looked like he was past it. His skin had taken on that pallor people have when they really are not looking after themselves, quite a grayish colour. I was quite shocked when I saw him, because he wasn’t the guy I’d been watching on the screen for the last three weeks. Keith was the youngest member of the band and yet he looked ten years older than the rest of them.”

  Keith couldn’t remember Pete’s name, which didn’t offend the engineer although he thought they’d met enough times over the years and recent weeks. But when Keith began calling Cyrano by a different name too, it was obvious, as Längsten recalls, that “He was gone.” (Tranquillised,’ thought Wandless.) He kept asking Richard Dorse to bring him more of the pills he said he was taking to cope with his alcohol withdrawal. As far as anyone else could tell, the drugs offered no improvement. At least in the old days when Keith was drunk, he could play. Now he could not even do that.

  “He got halfway through, and we had to stop the tape,” says Wandless. “He leaned forward resting on his two drum sticks on the toms, and he looked through the glass, like, ‘God do I have to do this? It’s hard work.’”

  “It was pretty sad,” recalls Längsten of Keith’s persona and performance that day. But eventually they got the Shepperton footage dubbed in all the right places. They moved on to the montage, and “He refused to play a drum solo,” recalls Entwistle. It was exasperating. All they wanted him to do was play like he always had done over the years – a free-form rampage over the drums. Keith started playing and singing Boris Pickett’s ‘Monster Mash’ instead.

  But, recalls Langsten, “That was the great thing about Keith. As out of it as he would get, he could always make you laugh. It was hilarious and tedious. He was like that a lot of the time. During the time that it was tedious you would also have tears coming out of your eyes, he was so magical and so special.”

  Eventually, they got what they needed. Just. He’d made them laugh -though mostly, he’d driven them to despair. Par for the course, perhaps, but still it was pitiful to see him so out of it, so dependent on drugs when he claimed he was getting healthy.

  Keith never played the drums again.

  Keith Moon turned 32 on August 23, and as September came around, he renewed again his promises of sobriety. Reformed alcoholics will say that you can only take it a day at a time, even years after giving up. But several days went by without his getting seriously drunk, and with Keith, that was progress. Annette noticed something else, too. He was softer, more amorous. And he was looking to the future, for once, without dread.

  “He talked about wanting to have children and a normal life,” says Annette about Keith those first few days of September. “He never mentioned marriage as such, but I got a feeling that something in his head was beginning to change. He was just a little bit different.” Perhaps there was after all a new Moon about to rise and eclipse the full one that had threatened to explode.

  On Wednesday, September 6, Paul McCartney hosted a party at Peppermint Park in Upper Saint Martin’s Lane in honour of Buddy Holly, whose forty-second birthday it would have been the next day had the singer not died in a plane crash at the age of 22. McCartney, who had bought Holly’s song publishing rights with his Beatles fortune, had an extra reason to celebrate: The Buddy Holly Story, a bio-pic starring Gary Busey, an actor Keith had got to know in California, was being premiered that night.

  All the same, Keith announced to Annette that he planned not to attend. He wasn’t, he said, in the mood for partying. She understood that his determination to stay sober necessitated avoiding situations where he would be easily tempted – of which that night’s party was a prime example. But still she begged him. She hated the idea of missing out on such a great event and Keith would hardly let her attend on her own. (And she wouldn’t want to either.) Evidently keen to satisfy her, Keith must have made a phone call, because later that afternoon someone arrived at the flat with “an envelope of cocaine”, and “after a couple of snorts Keith had changed his mind”. Clearly, staying sober applied only to alcohol.

  But given that definition, sober Keith appeared to stay. Wearing a ‘Wings’ T-shirt under a black leather jacket, Keith attended the party with Annette on his arm and was on impeccable behaviour throughout the evening. Surrounded by fellow members of the ‘old guard’, dozens of friends going back almost 15 years, he preferred to crack jokes and swap stories than attack the free wine and champagne in front of him. “It was wonderful,” says Annette. “I felt so safe, seeing him sitting there having a conversation with normal people, like a normal person.”

  Keith was, of course, never ‘normal’, and neither were the other guests. They had all lived the most abnormal lives imaginable. But we know what she means. He didn’t appear to be showing off, or making a fool of himself, or acting any more the star than anyone else. He didn’t need to: he existed in that rarified atmosphere to which only the most exalted were allowed entrance. He sat at the head table (but of course) with Paul McCartney and his wife Linda where they were joined by television presenter David Frost and his date. Later, his fellow mod-era drummer Kenny Jones came over for a chat. Eric Clapton and members of Roxy Music were also holding court. All manner of friends from Annie Nightingale to May Pang to Richard Cole were there too. It’s quite likely Keith was on first-name terms with more people in the room than anyone else. Annette flitted between dancing with girlfriends from the rock world on the disco floor and sitting at the table with Keith. Pictures taken of them together that night seem to show them genuinely in love, their eyes habitually fixing on the other’s face. While Annette was on the dance floor, Keith told his friends that he was going to marry her.

  “He said he’d given up drinking, which for me was not the greatest news in the world,” recalls Richard Cole, who was heavily into heroin at the time. “He was sober, and seemed straight, quite happy sitting there with Annette. He definitely said to me he was getting engaged or getting married.”

  As had been the case two years before, he had not consulted Annette. Forty-eight hours later, when the papers would reveal that the engagement had taken place at the party, it would be the first she knew about it. “To be honest, he never asked me to marry him. I wish he had, I would have been proud. I don’t know what he was thinking that night.”

  Others who were with him just seemed pleased that he was thinking straight and not resorting to his now dreaded alter ego. David Frost said Keith seemed “completely relaxed and content”. Kenny Jones, in demand as a session drummer but no doubt jealous of the Who’s continued fame and fortune, remarked on Keith’s sobriety.

  After the party, on the way to the movie premiere itself, Keith gave Pete Townshend’s protégé and recent hitmaker John Otway a lift in the Rolls Royce. They had never met before this evening, but Otway, typically, came away from the encounter thinking he had made a new friend. “He was reasonably straight. Very cheerful, very chatty. Basically in the state everyone else was in. He certainly wasn’t drinking any more heavily than I was, or my girlfriend, or Paul McCartney, or any
one else. Everyone said he was always good for a laugh. He certainly was good for a laugh that night.”

  Dick Hunt, a TV engineer who recorded an interview with Keith at the premiere, observed that “He was in high spirits, jumping out of the car and running through the crowds into the theatre.” But he also noted that when interviewing Keith, “His voice was a bit slurred.”

  Roy Carr, who met Keith for the first time since his return from America there at the theatre, takes that observation further. “He came over as if I’d just come back from the wars … ‘How are you, old chap?’ I turn round and there are tears in his eyes. I looked at him and he looked shagged out. He looked slightly grotesque. It just seemed that his facial characteristics had hardened or become larger than life. He looked a caricature of himself. He was crying – you don’t know if he’d put it on or if he was just over-emotional. I said, ‘Keith, what are you doing, why don’t you calm down a bit?’ I could smell booze on his breath. I said, ‘Why don’t you come stay at my place for a couple of weeks. Don’t tell anyone where you are, just get some rest, eat some food, lay off the booze.’ He said, ‘I’ll do that yeah yeah,’ and I said, ‘No, I’m serious about this, ease up, you’re looking really tired.’ We sat down to watch the movie and he sat down next to me but then he was up and about – he couldn’t sit down. He said, ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’ I said ‘Do, and if you haven’t rung by three o’clock I’m ringing you and coming round.’”

  It was already well past midnight when Keith decided to leave the premiere prematurely. He and Annette went straight home to Curzon Place by taxi, without even calling for Richard Dorse. Though he was by nature notoriously restless, prone to constant movement, it was most unlike Keith, who habitually carried on partying after everyone else had dropped, to walk away from a celebrity event and go straight home for an early night. It appeared to be further indication of a serious commitment to (relatively) clean living, a decision to get out while the going was good, before further temptation reared its formidable head.