Sitting in a corner chair in the lounge of the quietly luxurious Durrant’s Hotel in Marylebone, Roger Daltrey, CBE, radiates good health. Cobalt blue eyes stare evenly back at you through mauve-tinted Aviator shades, while his tanned features and muscular 5ft 7” frame – today in an elegantly dressed-down ensemble of denim shirt, black T-shirt, jeans and trainers – suggest impressive fitness levels.
Hard to believe, then, that in July 2015, the singer was lying in a hospital bed, convinced he was about to die.
“It was a nightmare,” he says of a bout of viral meningitis so severe he had said his farewells to friends and family. “But it’s turned out to have done me a lot of good. In my head it’s made me a lot stronger.”
But then, Roger Harry Daltrey, born in Hammersmith Hospital, East Acton, on 1 March 1944 during a heavy bombing raid, has always been a survivor. Expelled from school at 15, he was playing gigs with his own band, The Detours, within a year.
As singer with The Who, his stuttering delivery of early classics I Can’t Explain and My Generation gave voice to the pent-up frustration of a nation’s teens, inspiring generations of mod-minded musicians from Paul Weller to Liam Gallagher, before the band’s groundbreaking 1969 rock opera, Tommy, sent The Who’s career into the stratosphere.
The tragic death of drummer Keith Moon at just 32, in 1978, was the first in a litany of line-up changes and personal traumas (bassist John Entwistle died in 2002), but throughout, Daltrey’s determination to drive The Who on has remained unshakeable.
A father of eight who’s been married to wife Heather for 48 years, he wears his status as a living legend lightly, regularly cracking up with laughter as he recalls the band’s trials and tribulations. If there’s a glint in his eye as he enthuses about his latest project – a stunning symphonic version of Tommy – it comes with a wry self-knowledge forged as an apprentice sheet-metal worker at Chase Products Ltd of Packington Road, South Acton.
“Listen, I’m 75 years old,” he says as the tape recorder begins to whirr. “All the glamour has fucked off. In the end, all you’re left with is the music.”
Which seems like a cue to reflect on what has been a quite amazing journey…
What was the first record you bought?
Bought? Borrowed, more like. Or kind of, you know, found [laughs]. In those days you just had to listen out for music. You would very rarely hear people like Lonnie Donegan on the radio. The BBC was fearful of rock. They still are. Once they sunk the pirate ships, music [on the radio] started to go downhill immediately.
At 16 you made your first guitar out of plywood using your father’s tools, inspired by the skiffle scene…
That was a fabulous period. Skiffle was the real deal. If you could make a noise, find a rhythm, or get a note, then you could form a band. And people did. Every street had a skiffle group. More than one. The great thing about Lonnie Donegan’s stuff was that, because they were basically chain gang songs, or Leadbelly songs, you only needed three chords to play them. Even if there was another chord somewhere you could kind of cover it by singing a bit louder over that bit.
In your first band, The Detours, you were the driving force. You recruited John from The Scorpions, and then Pete….
John obviously got something from me singing and playing the guitar that he didn’t get from his other band. Pete always says that joining me and my band was like joining a gang. Peter, I feel, was quite mistreated as
a youngster, especially at school, so he felt kind of protected. I had a bit of a reputation in the area [grins]: “You don’t fuck with Daltrey!” So that was the reason he joined. But he stayed with us and it was obvious immediately that his talent was huge.
The final piece in the jigsaw was Keith Moon, who did an impromptu audition at a gig in Greenford. Is it true he was dressed in a gold suit?
It was his version of a gold lamé suit. But it was straight out of Shepherd’s Bush market.
It was the kind of thing which would go rusty in the rain [laughs]. He wanted to be in The Beach Boys, so he’d bought a bottle of peroxide to try and make his hair go blonde. Of course, he was so dark, the peroxide made it go bright ginger. Carrot!
What did he have that other drummers of the time didn’t?
As the singer, you don’t see the rest of the band, you only hear them. So, the feel is all-important. Up until Keith joined, we hadn’t had it. John, Pete and myself had used session drummers, and it was almost there, but never quite right. As a three-piece band there was so much space to fill, and Keith managed to fill it. He played with the guitarist, he played with the bass player, but most of all he played with the singer. So, to my mind, he had to be the drummer. I’m sure the other guys in the band had their opinions, but in those days, if I decided he was going to be the drummer, then he was going to be the drummer. That was the end of it.
At that stage was it just a case of playing anywhere you could?
Yeah. We began to build up a following but we didn’t move into the West End until the beginning of ’63. Before we started at The Marquee, we used to play a place in Leicester Square run by this guy called Bob Druce who put on gigs across West London. We used to play there every Friday night.
How important was The Who’s first manger, Pete Meaden, in terms of the band’s image?
He made us see the band from the outside.
He said: “You’ve obviously got a big following, but there are a thousand bands who look like you lot.” And he was right. He was very tuned-in. He had an ear for the street and he knew what was coming down the pipe from Catford and Lewisham, which was the early mod scene.
I was aware of it because my sister used to go out with a mod from Lewisham. In ’62 he had a scooter, herringbone flared bell-bottoms, a black PVC top. This was before they started wearing parkas. It gets forgotten, but back then all the faces had mini-vans, not scooters. With lots of headlamps on the front, and a mattress in the back! They were fucking cool guys.
The Who’s early singles tapped into the mods’ sense of frustration. Was part of that frustration that you were sick of being told about the war?
It wasn’t that we’d been told too much about the war, it was that we hadn’t been told enough about it [sighs]. I think it was the silence of our parents which drove our frustration more than anything. There was a vacuum to be filled, and we filled it. We made our own noise.
You toured almost non-stop around the UK throughout 1965 and 1966…
We used to drive everywhere and come back the same night. We’d think nothing of driving to Glasgow and back. In those days, without the motorways, there wasn’t any traffic so we used to have the foot flat on the floor. How we ever lived through it I don’t know, because there were no speed limits. You don’t want to know what speeds we used to do.
The mods v rockers skirmishes are well documented. Did The Who get involved?
We had a fight with some Teds at a gig in Hastings one Christmas Eve [1965 – Ed]. It was a mods vs rockers thing. They just don’t understand strategy. Never attack the high ground from a position of weakness!
You were briefly fired from the band in September 1965 after a fight with Keith at a gig in Arhus, Denmark…
We couldn’t go on like we were. If something is broken you either leave it broken or try and fix it. They were so drugged out of their boxes and were playing so badly, something had to give. The fight I had with Keith was very unfortunate, but he was attacking me with a tambourine. Believe me, you do not want that across your face. If someone slashes at you with that, it’s like half-a-dozen razors.
Did you really think that was the end of The Who?
Yeah. I thought to myself, I’ve got this far in my life by putting a band together, I’ll just put another one together. They went out and did gigs without me. I heard a few things back from people who were at the shows. They said they were a load of shit! [laughs].
Would your new band have been along the same lines as (Brian Auger’s) Steampacket?
That was the kind of music I loved. Remember, we used to play James Brown, Tamla Motown stuff, all kinds of other material. The moment we started playing Townshend’s stuff, I struggled to find a way to put it across. You try getting to grips with Happy Jack or I’m A Boy after singing Please, Please, Please by James Brown. Your brain goes, “Woah!” It’s a mind-fuck!
In 1967 alone, Pete Townshend smashed more than 35 guitars…
To see things destroyed… I found it really difficult. Pete came from a very different background from me, very middle-class.
So did John. Maybe their lives hadn’t been so hard early on. When you have to fight for everything you’ve got, you don’t smash it up. It used to hurt me emotionally, to see those guitars going up. But I could equally understand what it was doing for our image. So I had to bottle it up. But it wasn’t pleasant. A guitar takes a long time to make, you know?
By 1968, The Who were moving away from pop art…
I Can See For Miles was an interesting one, because it had some bite. Magic Bus – that was just a filler, really. When you break Magic Bus down, it’s a bit of a dirge.
What are your memories of The Rolling Stones’ Rock And Roll Circus?
I’ve got a lot of good memories of that. We just did our thing, and I went home. They [Townshend, Entwistle and Moon] all stayed and got pissed. They were doing all kinds of stuff. That’s where the heavier drugs kicked
in. Things used to get weird. Really weird. Brian Jones, who was a good friend and a lovely bloke, was in terrible trouble that day. Terrible trouble. But we were young and stupid. If we knew what we know now, we would have intervened. But we didn’t know anything about that then. He was dead shortly afterwards.
Was his death a wake-up call?
I don’t think it was. It went downhill from there. I had a little cottage in Berkshire which Jimi Hendrix came down to with his girlfriend, who was my wife Heather’s best friend, and another friend of theirs. That was two or three weeks before he died. He did the Isle Of Wight one night, and we were doing it the next, so I didn’t see him there, though I heard he was in a bit of state. He was taking Mandrax, acid, all kinds of stuff.
The other headline act at the Isle Of Wight that year were The Doors…
I was sharing a bottle of bloody Southern Comfort with Jim Morrison at the Isle Of Wight. To us, they were just normal blokes. He was just Jim. I remember sitting around a bonfire with him there. It was a freezing cold night, and all our roadies were breaking up palettes to put on the fire to keep warm.
I had two bottles of Southern Comfort: he had one and I had the other. Three months later he was dead.
The Who’s first performance of Tommy was at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club on 2 May 1969, where Pete introduced his rock opera with a synopsis of the story-line. Did you think to yourself: I hope people like this?
We never used to think about things like that. We’re artists. If a painter ever tried to paint things to please people, it wouldn’t be art anymore. You have to please yourself, and we liked it. We thought it was good. But the reaction to it was out of this world.
The album went Top 5 on both sides of the Atlantic. What is it about Tommy which continues to appeal?
For me, the whole record is about the human condition. In Tommy, it’s [presented as] the holiday camp, but that’s what life is, if you’re lucky. We all share the same insecurities. All those characters like Uncle Ernie and Cousin Kevin are metaphors for what happens to all of us. We’ve all got the potential to be all those people. Nowadays, pinball has been replaced with the iPhone. Tommy is about creating false gods, which we do all the time. If you start to worship false gods then it’s going to come back and kick you in the face.
From May 1969 to December 1970 you performed it 170 times…
Once we got Tommy onstage it took on a new life. It was great for me because I very quickly realised that it needed a central character to represent the songs. It gave me a lot more confidence as a singer and it allowed me to explore lots of areas in my personality and in my voice that I previously hadn’t been able to put out there. My whole persona changed.
I was Tommy.
It was during this period that you started wearing the fringed buckskin jacket and your hair started getting longer…
My hair grew and it was curly. My girlfriend at the time – who became my wife, Heather – was the first girl who told me, “Your hair is beautiful.” It was the first time anyone had said to me that having curly hair was alright. I had no confidence at all in the early days. Up until that point I’d been rushing off to the bathroom every five minutes to straighten it. Being a mod with curly hair was like having the clap!
Were you in competition with Zeppelin’s Robert Plant in the rock god stakes?
No. He came about two years after me. I gave him a good model to fashion himself on [laughs]. I love him. He’s such a good singer.
What are your memories of Woodstock?
Those were about the worst working conditions you could ever have. Mud, crap, waiting around for hours. We got there at 7:30 in the evening and we went on at five in the morning. That’s a lot of waiting with no food, and nothing reasonable to drink. It was a weird experience. But we got through it.
By 1973, it seemed as though The Who were spiralling out of control. Pete, Keith and John were arrested after an epic bout of destruction at the Bonaventure Hotel in Montreal, which included an attempt to break through a wall using a marble coffee table as a battering ram…
That was their thing; I was never involved in it. I was at parties where there would be cake fights. They were legendary. But once they got into the smashing, I used to leave the room.
I used to think, ‘This is fucking stupid.’ But in Keith’s head it was an art form. He was the master of it. You wouldn’t take him on at smashing things up!
The success of Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocket Man prove that people are still fascinated by that period of 70s rock excess. Have you seen them?
I’ve seen Bohemian Rhapsody, which I thought was a very thin script, but a wonderful performance from Rami Malek. He did a really good job with very thin material. He made it work. He deserved that award he got. Did I like the film? No.
Would you consider making a Who film along similar lines?
[Dismissively] No. I’m working on a biopic of Keith at the moment and it’s going to be the antithesis of that. I’ve been trying to do it for 30 years. It’s getting the right script.
It always ends up as a Who film, and I don’t want to do a Who film. It’s about a drummer. A drummer who happened to be completely unlike anybody else I’ve ever met in my entire life, who is now held in people’s imaginations as one of the best rock drummers ever. You ask young people now, “Who was the craziest rock drummer ever?” and they say: “Keith Moon.” It’s just a fact of life. He had something special. But he was a complicated character. Very complicated.
You were nominated for a Golden Globe for your role in Tommy the (1975) movie…
The film was an absolute triumph. It blew us into orbit. It also did me proud, thank you very much. I got nominated for a Golden Globe, but I didn’t get it. That was because I went around Hollywood saying that all this awards stuff is bollocks! [laughs]. To us in the rock business, they all seemed like a load of preening pussies. I couldn’t stand the film industry.
After 1976 you didn’t perform Tommy again in full until 1989….
It’s like everything else: you enjoy it so much, and expand it to the point where you’re getting more and more out of it. But you get to a point where you’ve dug the whole garden. That’s the point where you have to say, “We need to move on” and leave it fallow. That’s how it was with Tommy. When we revisited it after the film it was fresh again.
After Keith’s death, Kenney Jones joined the band for 1981’s Face Dances…
At that point, it was anything to keep the band and the music going. We were in shock, for a good four years there, no doubt about it. We didn’t have the luxury of grieving in private, like most people. We made some terrible mistakes during that period, but there you go.
You toured an orchestral version of Tommy last year. How did that come about?
I was asked to do it last January. There’s a whole series of venues on the arts circuit in the US which are between seven and 15,000 capacity, where you play with the local orchestra each night. I’ve always heard Townshend’s music as classical music, so it was an opportunity to bring what I always thought was in his music to life. It was all seat-of-the-pants stuff. You never know if this stuff is going to work until you try it.
The album sounds phenomenal. Were you conscious of the need to avoid the usual pitfalls involved when rock bands move out of their comfort zone?
Yeah. I’ve seen orchestras with rock bands before but I’ve very rarely thought they’ve added something. I said to [arranger] David Campbell: “I’d like you to do the orchestrations, but if you go near anything that could be played on a keyboard, forget it.” I love what he did with the music. It’s really percussive and melodic. Where there used to be holes, there’s now melody. When you hear it played this way, you hear the songs again
for the first time.
The album was recorded at Bethel, which hosted the 1969 Woodstock Festival. Was that deliberate?
No, it just happened that Bethel was the first night of the tour. The stage was 1,000 yards from the Woodstock stage, 49 years later. When I listened back to it, even I thought it was quite good, and that it needed to be heard. It’s 50 years since Woodstock, 50 years since Tommy. I thought there should be a celebration [of it].
The only snag was that the orchestra who played that night [The Hudson Valley Philharmonic] wanted so much money to be on the record I had to take them off. So, we went over to Budapest where you can get
a world-class orchestra for a reasonable price. Other than that, there’s not a single overdub on there. That is the live show.
You’ve been playing US dates as The Who with the same symphonic line-up, prior to a show at Wembley Stadium in July…
Yeah. It’s the whole band that are on the Tommy recording, except with Zak [Starkey] on drums and Pete. So, imagine what it’s like when Townshend is on guitar with all that going on. It takes your face off!
A new Who album is scheduled for later this year, isn’t it?
[Seriously] The album’s good. Very good. It’s on the money. I’ve got to tell you, I was very sceptical as first, because I wasn’t sure whether I could inhabit the songs. You can’t give me a set of lyrics and a melody and say: “Sing that.” I can’t do it. I have to sing from the heart. I’m a huge Townshend fan, but there were issues. Then I said to Pete: “Can I change a few things here and there, to make them work for me?” and he said, “Yeah.” So I found a way in, and I’ll tell you what, some of it is brilliant. There’s one last song where I’m still having trouble with the lyrics. But if we can get that right… it’s a Townshend masterpiece.
Since 2000 you’ve done some incredible work with your Royal Albert Hall concerts for the Teenage Cancer Trust…
My main drive is the charity. For the last few years we’ve been promoting it in the US. We’ve got the same amount of hospitals in the US after six years as it took us 30 years to do here. We’ve raised a lot of money, but the money’s not as important as raising the awareness. Once we start to address those situations, we will build a better society.
Tommy Orchestral is on Polydor.
