Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite

by Roger Daltrey

  When he wasn’t with us, he spent all his time with Viv Stanshall and Legs Larry from Bonzo Dog, raising merry hell. Viv was a perfect partner in crime for Keith. He was a wonderful, colorful eccentric. He looked like something from Rupert Bear. On a quiet day, they’d walk into a Savile Row shop and ask if they had any really strong trousers. “Really strong trousers, sir?”

  “Yes, really strong.”

  The bloke would come out with a pair of trousers. Moon would get in one leg, Viv would get in the other, and rip.

  “Sorry, they’re not strong enough.”

  On a day when they had more energy, Viv would dress up as a priest and Keith would drop him at the top of Oxford Street. Then Keith, dressed as a Nazi officer, obviously, would do a few laps in his purple Rolls before doubling back to Oxford Street. With no warning to the afternoon shoppers, he’d jump out of the Roller, scream at Viv, and then start pretending to beat the shit out of him. Why? To see how people would react to the sight of an SS officer attacking a priest. Of course, nobody did anything. So Keith would stand to attention, give it the full “Heil Hitler,” jump back into the Roller, and drive off. Viv would limp away and they’d meet sometime later for a celebratory drink.

  The two of them thought it was hilarious. I’m sure it was hilarious at the time, even if it isn’t with hindsight. But the underlying force driving Keith into all these japes was a need to be the center of attention. He felt like he was nothing without the attention or the bottle. Remember what his teacher wrote in his report? Must guard against a tendency to show off.

  He didn’t have that guard. He was in a rock band. His whole life was showing off. When Neil died, it was a terrible blow, and a lot of people have said that that was the beginning of the end for Keith. There’s no doubt it was a source of terrible guilt and it played on his mind, but the real catalyst, the thing that set him on a darker course, was losing his wife, Kim. That really escalated things. After that, he lost the last few boundaries he had.

  Keith and Kim bought Tara House in Chertsey in 1971 from Peter Collinson, the film director who did The Italian Job. It was, of course, an unusual home—an abstract bungalow with five pyramids on top, all sorts of Tomorrow’s World gadgetry and a huge sunken central living room, and a pub at the end of the drive. Kim described it as an upside-down egg box. It could have been their first proper family home—their daughter Mandy was four when they moved in—but Keith made it party central instead. He wasn’t good when he wasn’t touring. He never practiced. He didn’t even have a drum kit there. He got bored, he got depressed, he hit the pills and the bottle. Within six months, he’d driven the Rolls into the pond. He claimed he was just trying to bump-start it, but I’m sure he did it for a laugh. He’d smashed up the house a few times, too. When we took a break in 1972, he was bouncing off the walls.

  His antics pushed Kim, the girl he always loved, away and, eventually, she started seeing Ian McLagan from the Faces. When Keith found out about it, he went berserk and smashed the whole place up, and he did it in front of his daughter Mandy. It makes me feel sick thinking about it. He was just completely off his head on brandy and pills.

  That night, he broke Kim’s nose, and that was the final straw for her. She walked out and she never came back. I don’t know whether he had ever hit her before but he had been violent. He’d thrown a Champagne bottle at her at their flat in Highgate. The bottle missed but he’d thrown it hard enough that it had embedded itself in the wall. The next day, he put a frame round it and got our publicist to call the newspapers. It made a full page in one of the Sundays and people thought it was all a great laugh, but it wasn’t a laugh at all.

  The truth was, he idolized her and he was a jealous man. We were all jealous at that age. I used to find it difficult when Heather was chatting to some guy and he was clearly trying it on. But I couldn’t say anything. Not after I’d just got back from some tour. But that didn’t mean I didn’t have it in me.

  Keith was on a different level, though. He was an incredibly jealous man. Once, he paid some heavy two hundred quid to break Ian’s fingers. Pete found out and paid the same heavy another two hundred quid to do nothing. It was Keith’s jealousy that drove Kim away. When I saw her after the night Keith broke her nose, she told me she loved him and that she had put up with all his destructive behavior because of that. But following that night, she had no choice but to leave. She left the house that night with Mandy and they checked into a hotel. It was final. That was that. He’d lost the thing he cherished the most. And he would never get over her.

  * * *

  About the same time Keith was moving to his egg box in Surrey (chosen partly, I suspect, because it had that pub at the end of the drive), I was heading south to something altogether more traditional. Heather and I weren’t really in the market to buy a house. We had no money. We were happy enough in our cottage in deepest, darkest Berkshire. But there was no harm in looking. I used to go around with a friend of mine who ran an estate agent’s. He’d go off and check all these houses and I’d go with him. One beautiful late Saturday in spring, he took me and Heather down to Sussex. We passed one For Sale sign on a bend in front of some farm buildings. Over a wall, you could see a house in the distance and Heather asked what it was. My friend said we’d have a look on the way back. They’re clever, these estate agents.

  We went on to look at Pashley Manor, a Tudor house once owned by Henry VIII, but I didn’t like the vibe. If I don’t like the vibe, that’s it. I’m very susceptible to ground energy. I can’t explain it but there are places I go to that I have to get out of. It’s like someone has dimmed the lights. I just have to get away.

  Anyway, I wasn’t going to buy Pashley Manor, even if we could afford it, which we couldn’t. We looked at a couple of other places and then we got back to the place on the bend with the For Sale sign. The friend turned off the main road and there it was: Holmshurst. We were shown around the house by a young kid whose parents were getting divorced and there was just something about the place. It was in good condition, but nothing had been done to it for a long, long time. The hallway was black as pitch, there was damp, the kitchen was terrible but nothing frightening. Then we walked up into the front room and I saw the view for the first time.

  The house is on a hill looking west across the valleys and villages of the High Weald of East Sussex. You can see for miles and miles and miles and miles, no drugs required. The first time I looked out, I just stood open-mouthed and knew I had to live there. I thought to myself, “With this view, I’m safe.”

  I asked the friend how much it was and he said, “Thirty-nine thousand, five hundred pounds. A bargain. But whoever offers the money first can have it.” So I said, right, offer the money and I’ll worry about finding it later. All I had to do was convince the bank manager to lend it to me. If everyone else assumed I was a millionaire, why wouldn’t he? I went straight into the bank and managed to raise the loan. The offer went in first thing on Monday and by five that night it was accepted.

  I called Heather, all excited.

  She didn’t sound over the moon. I asked her what the matter was.

  She said, “There’s going to be an awful lot of cleaning.” Never happy.

  We moved into the place that would be our home for the rest of our lives on June 26, 1971, and the first week in was wonderful. The road crew moved us in. We had a party every night. It was the ultimate hippie crash pad and it felt great. Holmshurst is a very special house and it grounded me. It was built for a Puritan. There’s nothing fancy about it. It’s a simple, functional place, which suits me. I’m no Puritan but I do like to work. I do like things to be functional, on the level. And that was Holmshurst. But Heather was right, there was an awful lot of cleaning.

  A few days later, my decree absolute came through from my first marriage and, the following month, Heather and I tied the knot at Battle registry office. We didn’t have a wedding reception. There was no need because we’d already had one the year before. We had planned
to get married in the summer of 1970. We’d organized this big wedding and everyone was invited. All the bands. All the music industry bigwigs and most of the village. We’d even got Ahmet Ertegun, president of Atlantic Records, to trudge out to this three-acre field in Berkshire in his never-before-used wellies. It was going to be a huge event.

  The field belonged to a Miss Gwendoline Taylor, a very respectable lady from the village, but it was used by Eric Goody, a large and portly Mr. Micawber character with rosy red cheeks and bright blue eyes that twinkled devilishly beneath his flat tweed cap.

  I first met Eric when he turned up on our doorstep about a month after we’d moved into Elder Cottage. He was wearing a white shirt, a bright red waistcoat, and large brown dealer boots.

  “I’ve come to meet the real Roger Daltrey,” he declared. Apparently, I wasn’t the only young man with long curly hair in the village. “I’ve met the imposter. Now I’m here to meet the real one.”

  Eric’s accent was as broad as the Royal County of Berkshire and he spoke as if he were still living in Victorian times. We hit it off immediately and he invited me to his yard to see what he did for a living. What a place. In a large, covered agricultural shed he showed me all manner of Gypsy caravans, barrel organs, steam engines, and other delights. In pride of place was a 1911 London bus with its open-top deck and its open staircase at the back.

  Eric and his brother Harold had, I think, been the first scrap dealers to summon the courage to knock on the doors of the stately homes of England and ask if they needed anything cleared out. The brothers ended up with one of the largest collections of horse-drawn vehicles and Victorian artifacts in the country. In period films, Eric was always in high demand as a horse-drawn coach driver. He’d started his working life decades earlier driving the mail coach between Reading and London, so his credentials were impeccable.

  He was also the perfect man to help organize a party. With Eric and Gwen’s help, we were going to have the wedding of the century. There was a big, old-fashioned circus tent in the middle of the field. We had all of Eric’s old half-restored vehicles around the perimeters. There were pigs and chickens on spits, eels in jelly, coconuts in shies. There were fairground stalls and games and the wonderful sound of the barrel organs. There was a hay trailer for a stage and Bob Kerr’s Whoopee Band for the live music. It was all there. In fact, there was only one thing we didn’t have, and that was the piece of paper that said my previous marriage was over. We had no choice but to cancel the actual ceremony at the registry office.

  It was too late to cancel the party so Heather and I just pretended we’d got married. All through the party, everyone kept asking about the service. We just told them it was lovely.

  The next morning, as I woke up next to my beautiful “bride,” I made the perfectly valid point that if we’d had a big wedding party and everyone thought we were married, why did we need to bother?

  “You Mick Jagger, you,” she said.

  As soon as she said that, I thought we’d better get married. I was honest with her, though. If it was going to last it had to be a marriage with no issues because of the business I was in. I knew the reality. Life on the road, month after month, can be a very lonely place without company. And we were away on tour for five, six months at a time as one of the biggest rock bands in the world. To come back home and tell her I’d been a good boy—it would have been a lie.

  Sexual infidelity should never be a reason for divorce. For a man, it’s mostly just a shag, unless you fall in love. If a relationship is based on just that, it’s crazy. People get married and they immediately start trying to change each other. If you’re straight from the start and you really love each other, then you can be who you are all the way through. Otherwise, why would you get married in the first place?

  So we had a wedding and then, a year later, we got married properly. The vast majority of marriages in my world don’t last, but we’re still together after all these years, and I’ve never regretted it. Not once. Heather might have from time to time, but I haven’t. I was very, very lucky to bump into her that night at the Speakeasy.

  What I do know is that settling down in Sussex came at the right time. I had that view across the fields. I had a wife and then a young family. I had a whole side of my life away from the band.

  Pete, on the other hand, had the family but he was under pressure. He was the writer. He’d written Tommy. What was he going to do next?

  chapter eleven

  Who’s Next

  The idea Pete had was Lifehouse. An album and a film. Musically, it was an astonishing concept, but it was so out-there it was hard to grasp. In a world sometime in the not-too-distant future, pollution is so bad that the urban population has to live indoors wearing experience suits. Senses are stimulated artificially by these suits. People disconnect from their natural environment. He got that bit right, didn’t he?

  Everyone else lives hand-to-mouth in the fields. The experience suits are linked to the Grid, which keeps them fed and entertained through test tubes. They can experience thousands of lifetimes in a day, which is great, but there’s no rock and roll, which is bad. Along comes a rebel called Bobby who hacks the Grid. He converts everyone’s personal data into musical notes, which he plays to them.

  The music converges into one single note. With that note, they are free. They all vanish into Nirvana. The end.

  It sounds pretentious now. Can you imagine what it sounded like in 1971? And it wasn’t half as clear. Pete’s always been sketchy on narrative, which is fine when you’re making rock music but not when you’re making a film. Lifehouse was an intellectual ever-decreasing circle. It was a mess.

  I offered to try to write it into a proper script but this proved insurmountably difficult. I understood what he was trying to say. When we find the meaning of everything, when you find a higher being, it will be a musical note. I got that. But how do you make a film of that? How do you make a film of something that isn’t there?

  Every time we talked about it, it was all about the film and we just went round and round in circles. We sat around various tables at Track, at my house, at his house. Kit and Chris were there, too, and it went on for hours and hours. Keith and John would start drinking, just to make the time pass faster. On one particularly long evening, Keith just started taking his clothes off. Then he stood on his head and rested his bollocks on the table.

  I tried to be more constructive. I kept saying, “You’ve got these songs. Let’s do these songs.” But for him, it was the whole thing at once. A project. A film and an album. The full multimedia experience. And we were just too stupid to understand.

  I’ve said it before, and I mean it in the nicest possible way, but talking to Pete could be like walking through a minefield wearing a pair of clown shoes. And a blindfold. When he’s fixated on something and other people don’t get it, he’s intellectually terrifying. His frustration sometimes manifests itself as spitefulness. He has a beautiful, kind side to him—and that’s the side you see most often—but there’s this other side, which can just come out of the blue. He’s like a scorpion with a warm heart. No matter how happily the conversation is ticking along, you’re constantly aware of the sting in its tail.

  It might have helped if we’d taken the idea into the studio to knock it about. There was always something in Pete’s ideas and we could have helped. We could have worked it out. But he just couldn’t do that. He took all the pressure of coming up with the next big thing on his own.

  The hours and hours turned to months and months. Then we did some experimental shows in front of some students at the Young Vic. Pete’s plan was audience participation. Lifehouse would be a participatory experience. A four-dimensional show. He said he’d seen Who concerts where the vibrations had become so pure that he thought the world was going to stop and we’d all fly off into a unified Nirvana. He wanted to re-create that.

  It doesn’t work like that. I said that at the time. It happens, occasionally, during a concert, but it
’s not something you can re-create. Pete thinks it comes from the audience. I don’t. I love the audience and the audience feeds your ego. But that thing Pete’s talking about, that vibration, comes out of us and the audience. It’s a symbiotic synchronization. The way each member plays together creates a harmonic and, when it happens, we do feel the audience move up a notch, which moves us up a notch, and it’s magic.

  Whether you could still do it without an audience, I don’t know. I guess it would be harder in a completely empty room. There’s an energy you’re transmitting, and if there’s no one to receive it then it probably doesn’t work. But you don’t need an audience to behave in a certain way. Pete got irritated if the audience wasn’t right. If it was full of record execs or the same people from yesterday’s front row or whatever, I never cared. I play to the back of the room. I see a mass of faces and that’s it. I don’t care. The music takes me somewhere and I don’t care about the rest of it. If you start to worry about individuals, you flounder. I see it in footballers when they start trying too hard—they never hit the goal. When they relax and go with the flow, it works. It’s the same onstage.

  But the point is, it’s not a tangible thing you can produce by interacting with the audience. When you get it right, you know it. The second time we played the Charlton Athletic Football Club ground in 1976, we got it right. There were supposed to be 70,000 people in the audience but 120,000 turned up, the gates to the ground were ripped off and in they all came. It was raining all day and, by the time we hit the stage, it had turned into a fine misty drizzle. When I ran on, I skidded across the entire stage. “Welcome to The Who on Ice,” I announced as I took off my boots and socks (you learn very quickly that the only way to engage with a soaked audience is to get soaked, too—it’s harder for the guitarist but Pete managed it as well). After that, we just went for it. The audience responded. You could feel the whole thing reach another level. And then another level. And then another. It just kept going, a symbiotic relationship. Us. The crowd. You couldn’t bottle it.