The Electric Pitchfork

Roger Daltrey exclusive interview: the Who frontman on groupies, the madness of Keith Moon — and backing Brexit As the singer in one of the world’s biggest bands, Roger Daltrey witnessed the wild excesses of the 1960s. Fifty years on, he tells Matt Rudd how marriage, hard graft and fishing kept him sane — and why he’s anti-EU Three years ago, when Roger Daltrey was supposed to be on the second half of the Who’s 50th anniversary stadium tour, he was in hospital phoning friends to say goodbye. “Everything was packing up,” as he puts it, and none of the doctors could work out why. In the half-light and hallucination of a mystery illness, he suddenly remembered Rosa, the industrial-grade physiotherapist who’d travelled with him on US tours in the early 1980s. It was her job to unravel the damage of the nightly three-hour show. “When she found a knot in my back, I’d tense up,” he says. “I’d resist. And she would ask me why I was hanging on. ‘Let it go,’ she’d say. ‘Let it go.’ ” So t...

Sally Field: my life with Burt Reynolds The Oscar-winning actress believes her submissive relationships with men – including Burt Reynolds – began with her abusive stepfather. She talks to Helena de Bertodano Burt Reynolds and Sally Field starred together in Smokey and the Bandit in 1977 When Sally Field won her first Emmy more than 40 years ago – for her performance in Sybil as a woman with multiple personality disorder – she didn’t even go to the ceremony. Burt Reynolds, her lover at the time, was shooting a movie and wanted her by his side. He didn’t stay up to watch the show on television with her. “I ended up sitting alone with the sound turned down so as not to disturb the man who perhaps didn’t know, or maybe didn’t care, how much it meant to me.” As she describes it in her memoir, In Pieces, this was a pattern of submissive behaviour that began in childhood when she was abused by her stepfather. That experience was so destructive that it has overshadowed most of her su...

We have spent a decade fixing the system but the problem remains: cheap credit and too much debt Saturday 15th September 2018 marked the ten-year anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ collapse. There were many epochal moments during the financial crisis, from BNP Paribas’s decision to freeze fund redemptions to the run on Northern Rock in 2007 to the rescue of Bear Stearns early in 2008, but the fall of the Wall Street titan was the one that changed everything. It was the moment that the credit crunch, which had tipped the West into recession, graduated into a full-blown catastrophe. The moment the world looked behind the shiny mirror of the global financial system to see a whirring Heath Robinson machine glued together with ignorance and trust. Shorn of their ignorance, markets abandoned their trust and the engine fell apart. After that, it was as WB Yeats wrote, “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” Once the dust had settled, losses on the American sub-prime mortgages at the hear...

Kweku Adoboli: I’m not a thief. I acted out of loyalty to bank The rogue trader replies to his old boss at UBS from his detention centre cell as he awaits a ruling on deportation Adoboli was convicted of the UK’s largest financial fraud and sentenced to seven years in jail. After his release more than 100 MPs signed a letter asking Sajid Javid, the home secretary, to grant him leave to stay in Britain Share Saved I am writing this in an all-male, high-security immigrant removal centre in West Drayton. It’s convenient for Heathrow, but the airport can’t really accommodate charter deportation flights. These now run from Stansted late at night or very early morning. That’s because many of the deportees are in shackles, with two Mitie security guards accompanying each one on to the plane, and it’s not a sight that they want scheduled passengers to see. I was due to be on one of these flights, destined for Ghana, a place where I have not lived since I was four, at 2...