In June 1967, as the Summer of Love crested its cosmic purple wave, the Who played at the Monterey International Pop Music Festival alongside Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. After their performance, Roger Daltrey met the underground chemist Augustus Owsley Stanley III, the first individual to synthesise LSD on a commercial scale. The psychedelic pharmacist had some advice for him. “Never do anything more than a joint,” he told Daltrey. “It won’t suit you.”
On the evidence of Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite, Daltrey’s earthy, distinctly untrippy autobiography, Stanley’s judgment was sound. The singer was born in Acton in 1944 while his father Harry was away fighting; his pregnant mother Irene hid from V-1s in Hammersmith Tube station.
He recalls a childhood of itchy
