Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon (117 page)

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.’

O
n 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-shirt 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.”