Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon (127 page)

And all the while,
Dear Boy
kept selling, quickly transcending the relatively finite world of Who fans to reach a wider public – people either intrigued by rock’n’roll in general, or by this specific tale of a gifted, loveable but ultimately self-destructive talent. I’d always hoped (but never dared assume) that Keith’s story might resonate far afield. I was, understandably, thrilled.

One of the inevitable by-products of this success was that, beyond those people I had originally interviewed for the book, a whole new crop of Keith Moon’s acquaintances, associates and paramours now made themselves known, eager either to fill in the gaps in Keith’s life or to question my facts. Their information ranged from comments about Keith’s car collection and disputes about his drum kits, through to vital memories of recording sessions, hotel parties and personal relationships. As such, it seems necessary, or at least useful, to add an Afterword to
Dear Boy
so as to clear up some loose ends and, in the process no doubt, raise further questions about certain key issues.

To those who may wonder why I didn’t find these people first time around, it’s worth noting that
Dear Boy
was one of the last big music biographies to be fully researched (and mostly written) before the spread of the Internet. When I started work on the book, in the early Nineties, few people were using e-mail, and there was no Friends Reunited or similar site to track Keith’s old school pals and band mates through the click of a few buttons: finding distant associates meant embarking on a long (and often fruitless) telephone and paper trail. Similarly, there was no Google or other reliable search engine to confirm concert dates, obscure album track listings, school records or the precise location of a foreign address; gathering such information required not just extensive use of phone and pen, but also the help of a core group of rock archivists. And there were none of those
NME/MM
Specials in which every IPC press cutting from time immemorial is collected together in a bumper edition to celebrate an individual act, such as honoured the Who in 2003; instead, it was necessary to spend what seemed like entire weeks at The British Newspaper Library in Colindale (or the Performing Arts Library at the Lincoln Center in New York) poring through the entire back catalogues of British music papers to find every possible mention of Keith Moon.

Equally, at the time of the book’s publication, readers could only contact the author through their own detective work, or by sending letters via my publisher (who did, indeed, send them on). Now, like so many other writers, I spend too much time maintaining my website (
www.ijamming.net
), and rarely a day goes by when I don’t receive an e-mail adding to, asking about or merely commenting upon Keith Moon’s life story. My thanks to everyone who made contact over these last few years, who volunteered their information, and who trawled through their memory banks to help make this edition of
Dear Boy
that much more precise.

At the start of
Chapter 5
, there is a reference to a group Keith played with after the Escorts (as detailed in
Chapter 4
) and before the Beachcombers (as discussed in
Chapters 5
and
6
). It’s the band that is pictured in Richard Barnes’ book
Maximum R&B
, where it is erroneously labelled as the Beachcombers. In that photo, a baby-faced Keith sits perched on a drum stool in a back garden, his three older band mates smiling innocently as they themselves sit on the lawn, their guitars laid on the grass before them. In their book
Anyway Anyhow Anywhere: The Complete Chronicle Of The Who 1958–1978
, published in 2002, Matt Kent and Andy Neill finally revealed this group to be Mark Twain & the Strangers, featuring, in addition to Keith, Peter Tree on vocals, Michael Evans on bass, and Barry Foskett on guitar.
¹¹²

Peter Tree and Michael Evans were close friends and keen rock’n’roll fans who lived in central London, just off Regent’s Park; in their determination to find themselves a band, they responded to just about any advert in the
Melody Maker
seeking either a singer or a bassist. One day in early 1962, Evans accompanied Tree to an audition for a vocalist in Wembley. “It was in somebody’s front room, which was always the case then,” recalled Evans in December 2004. “We walked in and there was this little kid behind the drums. I don’t think it was even a full kit. It was Keith looking very young, and I’ll always remember, he had a bow tie on.”

Tree recalls that the band was already a four-piece, only lacking a singer, but that they “were at odds about what they were going to do”. Peter and Michael were themselves in no doubt as to the Wembley band’s star attraction. “He was just in a class of his own,” recalls Tree of Moon. “We were just taken aback by Keith.”

“He was extraordinary,” confirms Evans, noting that Moon’s talent was rendered all the more precocious by the fact that “he was like the youngest (player) I’d ever seen”.

Peter and Keith hit it off at the audition, and the former left with the latter’s phone number. On the way home, Peter asked Michael his opinion, and Evans was quick to respond: “If you get hold of the drummer, I’ll come play as well.”

And so, says Peter Tree of Keith Moon, “We decided to nick him.”

The Wembley band they stole him from could have been the Escorts, had they found themselves auditioning a new singer. (Moon might have seized that opportunity to audition himself a new band.) But they could as easily have been any number of barely formed bands still struggling to get a line-up together, which would explain the lack of musical direction and why Keith would have had no compunction about abandoning them to join with Evans and Tree.

Either way, the newly formed trio of Moon, Evans and Tree soon recruited Barry Foskett on guitar. As Mark Twain & the Strangers, they built up a set of American rock’n’roll songs by acts like The Crickets, Del Shannon and Dion & the Belmonts (along with a cover of ‘I Fought The Law’) at semi-public rehearsals in Foskett’s south London neighbourhood of Wandsworth. To ease the logistical difficulties of having a band spread across three different parts of London, Keith would store his drums with Peter or Michael in central London, and frequently stay the night there too. They’d then catch the tube out to Clapham Common together. Occasionally, Michael would stay with Keith in Wembley, and sometimes Alf Moon, Keith’s dad, would shuttle them all back and forth in his van.

Gigs were understandably thin on the ground for the group of 16-year-olds, but as with the Escorts, Keith soon fell into a tight friendship with his new band members, especially once Peter Tree secured Moon a job in the printing department of his employers, the National Council for Social Services, in Bedford Square. Evans worked just round the corner, and Foskett was with a big advertising firm down the road on St Martin’s Lane. This latter company had its own lunch canteen, and Keith soon showed the others how easy it was to eat for free: “Just act like in the army,” recalls Tree of Moon’s instructions. “Just keep walking and join the queue!”

Out on the perpetually packed pavements of Oxford Street, Keith had a fondness for a typically effective public prank: he would feign a fainting attack, his friends in the Strangers would fake their own concern, and only when a crowd of worried passers-by had built up and someone called an ambulance would Keith jump up and dust himself off.

It was always about rejecting the staid ways of an inherently conservative society that, by the early Sixties, was finally under attack from a new generation – of which Keith would prove such a prominent member. The Strangers played a show in Tree’s family home town of Burgess Hill, Sussex (where Tree’s father took the photo used in
Maximum R&B
, in his back garden), and found themselves catching an early morning commuter train back to London. “It was all ‘City Gents’ reading
The Times,”
recalls Evans of a scene that smacks of the morning equivalent of the 5.15 train in
Quadrophenia.
“It was an automatic cue for Keith. Because he was quite small, he leapt up into the luggage rack and started squawking like a parrot! He did this to get a reaction, but of course there was no reaction – they all just kept reading
The Times.
Except for me and Peter who were falling about on the floor.”

The NCSS, where Moon and Tree both worked, had its own stiff-upper-lip traditions, most notably a daily “tea” at four o’clock with what Tree recalls as “all these old dears and retired colonels”. Unable to suffer their sedate ways, Keith arrived for one such session wearing his khaki smock from the print room on which he’d painted, with a felt tip, the name Lance Bombardier Tripe. For those who’d fought in World War II, making a mockery of the Armed Forces was … well, good enough reason to bring back National Service. Keith was called in by a superior and told, recalls Tree, that, “If he didn’t go and apologise to Brigadier so-and-so he’d have to leave. So of course, he said, ‘Well, I’ll leave.’ It was his thing at the establishment.”

If Keith treated his day job with disdain, his dedication to the drums was nonetheless devout. “He knew even then that he was good,” recalls Tree. Lunchtimes were drawn out by extended visits to Drum City, where his friend Gerry Evans (no relation to Michael) worked, and where Keith would confidently hit up the star drummers of the day for playing tips. And if the Strangers stopped in to see other bands at night, Keith would often ask to get up and play a couple of songs. On one such occasion, they came across a band whose powerful singer, Reg King, would later front The Action, the venerable R&B band for which Michael Evans would play bass. Keith volunteered his services that night, stepped up to the drums “and smashes them to bits”, recalls Evans in what sounds like a mirror image of Moon’s fabled audition with the Who.

On the few occasions that the Strangers had a public audience of their own, it was always Moon who received the most accolades. “It is what he was,” says Evans of Keith’s drumming. “It was always there. Later I tried to analyse it because the drummer in The Action, Roger Powell, was a fantastic drummer too. And I’d say Roger’s style was more Buddy Rich and Keith’s was more Gene Krupa.”

The Strangers were certainly ambitious. They followed Keith’s lead and acquired gold lamé suits from Cecil Gee’s. They recorded a demo tape -probably Moon’s first recording session, which makes it all the more disappointing that it has subsequently disappeared. And they auditioned for the BBC’s Light Programme in the Beeb’s Piccadilly Studio in September 1962. (The Dave Clark Five got the nod instead.) They then secured a lengthy overseas tour of US Army bases in Germany, but what should have been the Strangers’ introduction to the big time instead inspired its demise. Keith was barely 16 and his parents refused him permission to tour. Peter Tree also had problems confirming his availability. Foskett and Evans found replacements and went ahead with the tour, but the group split up soon after.

Evans then went on to join Reg King’s group the Boys (later The Action), opening for the Who – now featuring Keith Moon – during the legendary Marquee residency of late 1964/early 1965. Peter Tree went into concert promotion and, through his friendship with Moon, booked the Who for a gig around Burgess Hill in Sussex after they’d struck it big.

Keith must have spent a few months in the performing wilderness after his time with the Strangers. It turns out his audition with the Beachcombers was not, as that band originally claimed, December 1962, but April 1963.
¹¹³
This reduces Keith’s time with the Beachcombers from seventeen months to one year. It does nothing to alter his band-mates’ glorious memories of that time.

There is some confusion about Keith’s first recording sessions with the Who/the High Numbers. In
Anyway Anyhow Anywhere
, published in 2002, a tape case for ‘I’m The Face’ (dated May 11, 1964) and the Townshend composition ‘It Was You’ (dated June 4, 1964) is displayed, credited to engineer Alan Florence at IBC Studios. It’s uncertain whether Moon played on either of these recordings, as it’s known that Brian Redman was brought down from Liverpool for a couple of auditions around this time. It is accepted that Moon was the drummer – though not without some disagreement – on the High Numbers’ single ‘I’m The Face’/‘Zoot Suit’, recorded in June 1964 at the Philips’ studio on Stanhope Place. The keyboard player on that session was Allen Ellett, who was hired by Pete Meaden and who sat in with the band at a couple of London shows leading up to the recording date. In a letter to the
Dear Boy
publishers dated April 2000, he noted that, “Somebody wanted to use another drummer on the session but this went down like a lead weight.” One can only surmise that this “somebody” was Philips’ A&R man Chris Parmeinter, who had previously rejected Doug Sandom and was perhaps not aware that the young firebrand Moon had been instantly accepted by the band.

Ellett notes that, onstage, Keith “was in a league of his own on those drums and was ever ready to show his skills to their best effect, which went down well with the audience but detracted from Roger’s singing.” He also details all manner of frictions between three members of the band, consistent with their long-term image, and confirms John Entwistle’s role as peacemaker. “John was a mediator within the group and helped defuse matters that became very tense, purely by being there and remaining cool and calm.”

As well as playing piano, Ellett says he was “given the job of cracking a thick leather belt which was bent in two … great fun.”

Ellett recalls “running through a couple of standard rock numbers that day to get sound levels,” and history suggests that these were ‘Leaving Here’ and ‘Here ‘Tis’. In due time, these recordings showed up: ‘Leaving Here’ initially on the 1985 compilation
Who’s Missing
, joined by ‘Here ‘Tis’ on the four-CD box set
30 Years Of Maximum R&B
, where they were both credited to that June 1964 High Numbers session. Given that this box set was compiled with the close involvement of the Who themselves (Townshend even wrote the introduction for the booklet), Who fans had every reason to believe this information, and I duly spent much of pages 91 and 92 waxing lyrical about Keith’s performance on ‘Leaving Here’, expressing some astonishment that his drumming was so fully formed at his first serious session.