Roger Daltrey Exclusive Interview:

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 there in the hospital, unable to move, convinced he was dying, he recalled Rosa’s advice. Let it go.


“I thought about all my family,” he says. “Jackie [his first wife, whom he left in 1964] ended up with a nice house and a new family. All my family with Heather are taken care of. My other kids [he’s had the odd proverbial knock on the door over the years from children he was unaware of] … I’ve tried to make them feel included. I thought to myself, ‘You’ve never left anyone in the shit. You’ve done all right. Just let go.’ ”

Daltrey didn’t die. Instead, he describes “an incredible peace”. “Through the pain, I saw this exit. It was very visual — an actual door with an exit sign — and I thought, ‘The other side of an exit is always an entrance. I’ll just head for the entrance.’ ”

I’ve discussed this with him several times since, and any attempt to rationalise it has failed. Daltrey is adamant. Death was beckoning and he wasn’t afraid. He just chose the entrance rather than the exit. Since then, the 74-year-old has no fear of dying whatsoever.

           Mod almighty: from the start, the Who were known for their incendiary live shows, often trashing their equipment

I saw him a week after his epiphany. He was propped up in his hospital bed, wearing a regulation reverse-button hospital nightie, a lot less rock’n’roll than the cloak he wore at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 (a bedspread, by the way, bought at the Chelsea antiques market). He had been diagnosed with viral meningitis and he was still struggling with the neurological effects of the disease. But he wanted to carry on working on his memoir. We’d become friends after I first interviewed him for this newspaper in 2013, and he had asked me to work with him on a book. That day, he was in no fit state to work, but we did anyway. His wife, Heather, came in and rolled her eyes at me. She knew he was too ill. I knew he was too ill. But try telling him that.

Pete Townshend, the only other surviving member of the original band, also came to visit and asked what they should do about the tour. Daltrey told him the doctors had recommended a year for recovery, “but I can’t wait that long”. The Who were back on the road a few months later.

This is the simple reason why Roger Daltrey, a working-class kid expelled from school on his 15th birthday by a headmaster who told him he would never amount to anything, became the frontman of one of the biggest rock bands on the planet. Whenever it comes to fight or flight, he fights. As a teenager, to prove that headmaster wrong (it was such a defining moment, he references the headmaster in the title of his memoir, Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite). As a septuagenarian, to postpone death and resume touring commitments.

It’s a question I’ve asked him repeatedly: why carry on? When Keith Moon, their drummer, easily one of the wildest men in rock, died of an overdose of prescription drugs in 1978, why carry on? When John Entwistle, their bassist, died of a heart attack after taking cocaine at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas in 2002, why carry on? When you have enough money and fame to sit back and play with your railway set (Daltrey has a spectacular track running around a large attic at his home in East Sussex), why carry on? Daltrey’s answer has always been a variation on the same theme: “If you’re doing nothing, what’s the point of you?”

His mother, Irene, spent the nights of her third trimester between their home in Shepherd’s Bush and the Tube platform at Hammersmith, an impromptu air-raid shelter. He was born in March 1944, at the height of the Little Blitz. His first recollection of his father was of a strange man in military uniform coming home one day and being in his mother’s bed the next morning. His was a frugal but happy childhood, playing in the bomb craters around west London, but he dwells on the silence of his parents, their shock of war, his father’s muted grief every time Armistice Day rolled around. This is Daltrey’s explanation for what happened in the 1960s: the invention of the teenager, the explosion of musical energy, black-and-white 1950s Britain made technicolour. The Beatles, the Stones and the Who all arrived on a wave of testosterone and frustration.

In his case, the rebellion has more specific origins. He passed his 11-plus with flying colours and found himself uprooted from his blue-collar neighbourhood to the leaf-lined streets of Bedford Park and the “posh” boys’ club of Acton Grammar.

“It was a mile and a quarter away, but it might as well have been another planet,” he says. “The kids were upper-middle-class, upwardly mobile.” He was bullied by the boys and bullied by the teachers. Even now, he comes out fighting if you mention trigonometry. “Why teach high maths to someone who is never going to be good at it?” he says. “As long as I can add up the change from the pub, I’ll be all right.”

Trout fishing at his home in East Sussex

Sixty-odd years on, he still smarts at the memory of his music teacher, Ms Bowen, telling him he’d never make a living as a musician. “Mozart, Chopin, the most beautiful music ever written … if we’d listened to it and then they’d shown us the dots, I might have made the connection. But you can’t just show the dots to a bloke like me. I understood music, just not the dots.”

He was happiest strumming the guitars he fashioned from plywood rather than sitting quietly in a classroom. “One thing you cannot deny about grammar schools is that it creates upward mobility,” he says. “It works for some people. Just not me.” Predictably, he is withering about today’s exam culture and the pressure on children to follow a prescriptive curriculum.

“We’ve got this strange thing now where we’re trying to make everything equal,” he says. “We’re not equal. Everybody is good at something, you just have to find out what it is. In Germany, they don’t have inhibitions about streaming people into what they think they’ll be good at. But here they make this whole tiramisu, everyone thrown into the same swamp. It stops a lot of people succeeding, which is tragic.

“The loss of our technical colleges was an enormous disaster. Today, if you’re a clever kid but not very good at maths, there is nothing wrong with being the best plumber in London. You’re always going to be in work, you’ll always put food on the table. It’s just a nonsense to think that’s a lower grade of job. But that’s what they’ve done. They’ve created this them-and-us view of society. There’s only us. We’re all in it together.”

In today’s parlance, Daltrey is “unfiltered”. He says what he thinks — a dream interviewee in this media-trained age. But that was the point of his generation of rock stars. He is completely honest, for example, about his decision to walk out on his wife and baby son at the age of 20 “to pursue his dream”. The safe (“and honourable”) option would have been to stay and to carry on working at a sheet-metal factory, but “I was an arsehole. I was completely driven.”

Bean there, done that — the famous album cover from 1967

By the summer, he was touring Britain, living in a beat-up van with a girl called Cleo. Small gigs became big gigs and then, in 1965, the Who released My Generation, their first big hit. Over the next three years, they continued to develop their sound — aggressive, driving, destructive — and they set off on increasingly wild, increasingly successful tours of Europe and America. In 1967, Daltrey found himself posing in a bath of cold baked beans for the iconic cover of their concept album The Who Sell Out (getting pneumonia for his troubles). They played Monterey, Woodstock and the Isle of Wight. They produced the rock opera Tommy — a masterpiece, as the critics of the time put it. Daltrey was a star and his decision, in his mind, was justified. He would be able to provide for the family he had walked out on.

The rock-star arc is a well-worn one. First comes the slogging from pub to pub, then success, then fame and fortune, and then a spectacular implosion. The average lifespan of a rock star is about 20 years shorter than that of the general population. The chances of accidental death are five to 10 times greater.

Daltrey experienced all of the highs and lows of stardom, but consistently swerved disintegration. He avoided hard drugs because “if I was going to be a good singer, I couldn’t be a rock’n’roller. I saw some people go on stage who I really admired and they couldn’t deliver. I saw Cliff Richard when I was 15 years old. I saved for God knows how long to get the ticket. Cliff owed it to us to be good that night and he was, and I owed it to my audience. Our audience were blue-collar — where I’d come from. We owed it to them to do our best.”

His bandmates did not follow his example and rock’n’roll excess took its toll. “Everyone assumes life on the road with Keith Moon must have been hilarious, but most of it wasn’t,” he explains [see the extract Exploding loos and cars in pools — on the road with Moon the Loon]. “Eventually I started checking into separate hotels. Sometimes it was hard to find one, we’d been banned from so many.”

At which point, I ask again, why carry on? Daltrey explains that he developed a range of coping mechanisms. There were the groupies — a term he describes as “horrible” because “it wasn’t just about a shag. These were real friends. The camaraderie was incredible. All the bands knew each other. All the people around the bands knew each other. It was a community. Despite all the people, all the noise and all the partying, without those friendships, life on the road could be lonely.” And crazy … “In the old days, you watch films of Mick Jagger, the Small Faces, anyone, you’ll find women running up to the stage and dragging them to the ground, all over them. The amount of women who have pinched my bum … I never complained, though.”

Closing the London 2012 Olympics with Pete Townshend

Moon, in particular, loved the attention. Wherever he went, girls screamed, “Keith, Keith, Keith”, encouraging his firmly held view that he was the pin-up of the band.

The free-wheeling free love of the 1960s is a long way from where we are today. Daltrey is clear on the #MeToo campaign — if someone has been assaulted or made to do something against their will, it should be dealt with. “But the serious aspects of the movement are at risk of getting lost in the way they are reported,” he says. “It becomes salacious, a trial by media and social media. Anyone who is accused of anything deserves a trial, deserves a defence and then a judgment. We seem to have gone from allegation to immediate guilt. It’s dangerous to negate the rule of law.” He’s not a fan of Facebook or Twitter, constantly telling me: “The antisocial media — it will rot your brain, Matt.”

In the days before social media, Moon’s behaviour could go unchecked, culminating in the collapse of his marriage after he broke his wife’s nose in a fit of jealousy. The alcohol- and drug-fuelled chaos accelerated when he moved into a house next to a disgruntled Steve McQueen in Malibu. Townshend sought release from the pressures of songwriting by turns in alcohol, heroin and the teachings of Meher Baba, an Indian spiritual master. Daltrey, on the other hand, continued to insulate himself from the madness of the music business.

In 1971, he married Heather Taylor, a model he had met at a concert in New York. It’s clear that their marriage — and the beautiful Sussex manor house in which they raised their three children — has been a grounding force over the decades. I’ve sat in their kitchen many times while they’ve discussed some long-lost fact — stories told a thousand times get improved, mangled, elaborated. Getting back to the truth isn’t always easy. “That’s not right.” “Yes, it is.” “No, it isn’t.” They argue like any long-married couple and she tells it like it is. Daltrey knows how lucky he’s been that Heather, with “her Glaswegian-New Yorker redhead temperament”, stuck with him, even when he went off on those long, wild tours. “People break up too easily,” he says. “You have to work at it. We’ve reached the value-added part of our relationship.”

Of course, Daltrey is not short of temperament either. You might start discussing the time Moon and Oliver Reed almost drowned during the filming of Ken Russell’s Tommy and, with hardly a nudge, veer off into a debate about antibiotics, the problem with poorly maintained hedgerows or the bloating bureaucracy of the NHS (something he’s well acquainted with through his work with the Teenage Cancer Trust). Mention Brexit — and it has come up a few times over the past couple of years — and Daltrey becomes especially animated.

He is not, he insists, anti-Europe. “What I’m against is Brussels, those nightmare, shadowy people in Brussels,” he says. “It’s like being governed by Fifa. If anyone is like Sepp Blatter, it’s fucking Jean-Claude Juncker. They’re twins. I believe in what Europe was trying to achieve, but you can only achieve it with an organisation that follows its own rules. They broke their rules to a huge degree to get Greece into the eurozone. How was it allowed that Greece was put on the same economic level as Germany? I will only believe in the euro when the Germans put their pension funds into the fiscal union. Can you see them doing that? German workers giving their pensions to balance southern European economies that have been broken by the euro? The structure is completely flawed and will collapse one day. Why would we stay on a ship with a hole in it?”

With Brian Jones, Yoko Ono, John and Julian Lennon, 1968

To the suggestion that it’s better to be inside urging reform than outside with no say whatsoever, he says: “Cameron tried that and got nothing. With us coming out, they have to start thinking about it. You’ve got all these right-wing movements across Europe … Everyone thinks I’m right-wing, but I’m absolutely not. I really do think that if we had a second referendum, it would fuel the far right. That really worries me. We’ve had a weak government made weaker by the stupid decision to have an election. The whole thing is a mess.”

His view of the current Labour leadership is partly informed by his memory of the Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s, whose 98% top tax rates prompted a mass exodus of rock stars. David Bowie left, so did the Stones, Cat Stevens, Sting and many others. The Who stayed, but if Corbyn gets in, “I’ll be gone. I’m not doing that again.”

“Corbyn and McDonnell aren’t socialists,” he says. “They’re Trots and that’s the Communist Party you’re voting for. They should just be honest with the people and say that. The loony right is even worse.”

Once Daltrey had recovered from his illness, the show was back on the road. I joined him for the European leg of the Who Hits 50! tour. We flew by private jet, we stayed in luxury hotels, we moved from airport to hotel to gig in limos. No queuing, no waiting, everything expedited by a tour manager who has mastered the art of keeping a rock band on the move. Five days in, I was exhausted. And I wasn’t even performing. “It’s all very posh these days,” said Daltrey, while demonstrating his niche skill of not spilling his tea during a period of strong air turbulence. “A far cry from when we started. But it’s still knackering. You have to travel like this. If you’re waiting at every stage, you end up spending your whole time standing around. I’m not good at standing around.”

I experienced the extreme version of Daltrey’s inability to hang about at a festival in Madrid. The Who were headlining in front of a crowd of 40,000 and, as they reached Baba O’Riley, the penultimate song of the night, I was told to get ready for a quick exit. Halfway through Won’t Get Fooled Again, I was standing stage left. As Daltrey finished, the crowd went wild. Thirty seconds later, the two of us were in the car being escorted out of the festival at speed. My Almost Famous moment. Twenty minutes more and we were back in the hotel bar, like nothing had happened.

I told him it was an incredible gig.

“One show’s just like the next,” he replied. “I don’t care if I’m performing in front of a man and his dog in a pub or half a million people at Woodstock. I just drive through the audience. It’s all about the drive.” This is how he describes the energy of a Who gig — a figurative fast march through the sea of fans. If you’ve been to one, you’ll understand.

With his second wife, Heather, 1970

The truth is he has to be like this, almost ambivalent to these big occasions, just to stay sane. He has to have his view across the fields in Sussex. He has to have Heather and his family. He has to go fishing and drive around his fields in a battered Landy and build dry-stone walls. How else could he stand front of stage at Glastonbury, at Live Aid, at the Superbowl, at Madison Square Garden? He has to have normal to balance a job that isn’t normal at all.

Here we are in 2018, and he’s spent the summer touring the US as a solo artist, with his own band. His relationship with Townshend is often fractious — more like brothers than friends. They are related by music rather than blood. Like brothers, they’ve been there for each other when it mattered. Daltrey, for example, stood by Townshend throughout a child pornography investigation in 2003 (the guitarist was eventually cleared of downloading illegal images). Also like brothers, they’ve been at each other’s throats at times. Townshend has criticised Daltrey in interviews, once describing the band as “three geniuses and a singer”. Daltrey has occasionally responded, but has only knocked his bandmate unconscious once, after a particularly hostile recording session in 1973. It can’t be easy working for five decades with the guy you met at school, but the Who will keep going. “Pete is a genius,” Daltrey says. “His music is genius. We’ll finish when we can’t do it any more.”

And then what? “Then that will be it,” he says matter-of-factly. “I’m a universalist. I am of the belief that the energy of the universe just transfers. Nothing leaves. It just moves. When you die, your energy moves on. Who knows where it ends up, but the possibilities are wonderful.”

For a man who always fights, never flights, he can also be quite the hippie.

From Roger Daltrey’s new book, Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite: My Story,