Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite

by Roger Daltrey

  At some point in 1973, Robert Stigwood became the producer, Kit was holding various meetings, and plans were all firming up. Then it all started to go weird in the back room. There was a lot of brilliance but there was also a lot of drugs and, therefore, a lot of miscommunication. We were battling with Quadrophenia, trying to inhabit it like we’d inhabited Tommy. Making a film seemed like a distant item on the to-do list. And then, all of a sudden, Ken Russell arrived, things started happening very quickly, and I was cast as Tommy.

  To be honest, I was shocked. I know I’d been singing Tommy for the last few years, but that didn’t mean I had a clue about how to act it, particularly with Ken directing. Anybody who was in touch with anything in the 1970s was a Ken Russell fan. He was an icon, a hero, and we idolized him. And there I was not only meeting him but having lunch with him and his wife, the costume designer Shirley Kingdon, in their very posh house in Holland Park. He loved music and he completely got Tommy—he said it was “the best modern opera since Berg’s Wozzeck.” But I was completely straight with him. I said that I’d never done any acting before. I’d tried to be in the school play, but they’d chucked me out for being too disruptive. So I had no experience. I wasn’t sure I could do it.

  Ken was having none of it. He said I was Tommy, full stop. I explained that I could handle a crowd from a stage, but I didn’t have a clue about how to project on film. In the end, I got off lightly because there was no dialogue. It was all singing. It would have been a whole different matter if I’d had to speak.

  So that was it. I was going to be an actor and, once I’d calmed down and thought about it, I knew I was going to love it. It was a complete change and the timing was perfect. We’d had the difficult Quadrophenia tour. We’d had conflict within the band and with our management. I knew we were never going to break up but, four years after our biggest album, never a day went by without someone in the music press predicting our imminent demise. I needed that complete change.

  Overnight, I switched from the hours of a musician, late to bed, very late to rise, to the hours of an actor, up well before the larks, still late to bed. I spent most of my time hanging out with the crew and it was great. If a band is like a small family that fights a lot, being on a film set is more like being in a large family that fights only some of the time. There are fifty or sixty people thrown together for four months.

  There are the actors, the crew, the makeup girls. We all stayed in the same motel on Hayling Island, down by Portsmouth, and the intensity of life on a Ken Russell set meant we all developed a close bond quickly. And while I said I got off lightly, that’s only very relative. The first thing I had to get to grips with was being deaf, dumb, and blind. I spent a lot of time with the disabled extras we had in the film, and they taught me a lot. I already knew from Mike Shaw how difficult life in a wheelchair could be. You just need to push someone around for a day and you realize how hard it is, and how little things make a huge difference. Things like kneeling down to talk to wheelchair users at their eye level. No one’s educated about it, are they? And because they aren’t, it creates a barrier. How hard would it be to replace one, just one, trigonometry class for a lesson run by a disabled person, explaining what would make their lives easier? Because everyone would do it. Even the toughest kids would do it. And it would make a huge difference to society.

  Anyway, I spent time with these guys on the set and they were amazing. Just amazing. They taught me so much, not just with how to play Tommy but for the rest of my life. They helped me feel some of what they feel.

  And by the time the shoot began, Tommy’s complete sensory deprivation just took over. I went into a complete trance. I can’t remember half of the stuff that went on because I was in such a daze. Sometimes that was a good thing. Sometimes, less so.

  For example, I spent a whole day lying on the floor between Tina Turner’s legs while she wiggled and shook her stuff. I had been a huge fan for years, but I can’t for the life of me remember anything about it. I couldn’t even tell you what color knickers she was wearing. Or if she was wearing any at all. I can’t even remember if I spoke to her. Tina Turner. A whole day.

  Nothing. I must be the greatest method actor ever to have lived.

  But then there was another day on the same “Acid Queen” segment where I had to stand there while Ken tried to work out which tropical creatures I should share a sarcophagus with. I was wearing nothing but a loincloth. If they hadn’t had the film classification board to worry about, they would have made me do it naked. And I thought I’d come a long way since that bath of cold baked beans in 1967.

  First, Ken tried snakes. I quickly learned that snakes spray not only feces and urine, but also, if you’re really lucky, a very strong musk from their cloacal scent gland. For context, the musk is second only to a skunk’s for potency but it’s far more durable. Snakes spray it to mark territory, even if that territory is a sarcophagus. It stinks like you wouldn’t believe. Ken didn’t care. He just wanted to get the right shot, and, after a couple of hours with the snakes, he decided the snakes weren’t right so he tried bugs. Then he tried butterflies.

  I remember feeling relieved when the butterflies fluttered in but that was a mistake. They were not normal butterflies. They were giants: plate-sized with bodies the size of a fist. Into the sarcophagus they’d go and they were all over me, nice and dark, settled and calm. Then, after a lot of faffing around, someone would shout “Action!” and the sarcophagus would open. Each time, as the butterflies flew up into a panic, they’d all empty their bowels. By the end of that session, I was covered in snake and butterfly shit. It took days to get the stench off, but I got through it with my brilliant method acting. Complete detachment from reality. Hardly noticed the smell. Away with the fairies, not the butterflies. Ken, by the way, never used any of the footage. He went with poppies instead. And poppies don’t spray.

  The other big test was to convince myself and the audience that Ann-Margret, the stunning Scandinavian-born Hollywood actress only three years older than me, was my mother. I did that by steering clear of her on the set. Because you can’t fancy your mum, even if she’s a screen mum. She was an absolute treasure, though. No airs and graces, always smiling. Not a hint of superiority about her.

  I doubt she even complained when they were shooting her big finale, where she throws the bottle through the television and gets sprayed in foam and beans. On one of those takes, when she’s writhing around, the crew watched as the foam turned pink first and then red. She’d caught a piece of glass and slashed her wrist. The blood went everywhere. I wasn’t on the set that day, but I saw the crew that evening and they were all still quite shaken. She needed twenty-one stitches but she’d stayed in character as the blood had flowed.

  Proper actors have the same mentality as proper musicians. The show must go on. Ann-Margret was a pro. So was Oliver Reed. Ken liked to push his cast to the brink. It wasn’t purely sadism. He was always in search of the fully committed performance. But there was still an element of brinkmanship about it and Ollie was never going to show he was near any brink. I’ll give you an example. When we were filming the end scene at the holiday camp, it was an uncommonly hot summer’s day. The set designers had sprayed a load of harbor buoys silver—they were like mirrors reflecting and magnifying the sunlight. By the time Ken shouted wrap, we were all burned to a crisp. But Ollie had it worse. This was the scene in which his evil Uncle Frank was murdered by the angry mob. Ken had him lying in a puddle, playing dead.

  After several takes, someone said, “Ollie, it’s lunchtime.” And Ollie replied, “You go ahead. If that fucker thinks he’s going to break me, he can think again. I’m going to lie here all day.”

  And he did. He lay there all day in that puddle. The puddle had almost dried out by the end of it. But he wasn’t going anywhere. Ollie and Ken loved each other and trusted each other and went to extremes not to let one another down. Everybody loved Ken. He was always open to ideas. If he got stuck on how to shoot a thin
g he’d always ask, “Well, what do you think?” And if he liked it, he’d try it. He was filming with giant cameras, no Steadicams and nothing like those little tiny GoPros they use today. And when you watch the camera movement it’s pure genius. I learned so much from him. I loved him and I trusted him with my life, even though he often seemed hell-bent on killing me.

  Everything was quite easy until Tommy regained his senses.

  Visually, it became a harder story to tell; it just got boring. It was the same problem we had with Lifehouse. How do you film a feeling? Ken was the only director who could have got away with it. His camerawork was just extraordinary. He was happy to take risks, but he was happiest when his family of actors took bigger risks. He always said to me, “I want you to do this and you will be safe.” And I always believed him.

  In July, we went up to Keswick in the Lake District to shoot the climbing sequence in “See Me, Feel Me.” I’m not good with heights. It would have been a good time to bring in the stuntman, but there was no stuntman.

  “I want you to climb down that rock face, wait for me to say ‘Action!’ and then climb up again. And, don’t worry, you will be safe,” says Ken.

  I got down there, barefoot and topless, trying not to think about the two-thousand-foot drop beneath me, and I waited. And waited. And I’m thinking, “Come on, Ken, come on, Ken.”

  Eventually, this voice comes down. “We’ll be about five minutes, we’re waiting for the light.” The sky was pitch-black with angry clouds. That’s the Lake District in late July. I waited on that ledge for twenty-five of the slowest minutes of my life, getting colder and colder and colder.

  Finally, the sun came out, Ken shouted, “Turn over, speed, and action!” and I shot up that mountain like a spooked goat. I still remembered the lyrics, though. Watching it back now, you can hardly tell I wasn’t enjoying myself. What an actor.

  “Let’s try it one more time…”

  Those were always the words you didn’t want to hear but you always heard them. Keith really struggled with the repetition. He just didn’t have any discipline. To edit a film you need to do everything over and over again. Once you’ve done a long shot, you need to do close-ups. It’s got to all sync up otherwise you can’t cut it together. And Keith just couldn’t remember what he had done from one shot to the next.

  It didn’t help that he and Oliver Reed were as thick as two intoxicated thieves. They didn’t stay with us in our cheap motel during the main shoot. They stayed at the Grand. I only remember that because there was a fountain full of goldfish in the foyer and Keith used to take great delight in pretending to grab one of them, eat it, and then spit out their remains. Of course it was only pieces of thinly sliced carrot—at least I think it was—but it still made all the old blue-rinse ladies scream.

  I don’t know if it was a good idea that the two of them became such good friends. Keith was the only person who ever drank Ollie under the table. They had a bet one evening—who could put away more brandy. After the second bottle each, Ollie passed out where he was sitting.

  Keith looked at him and said, “You’re no fun at all.”

  Halfway through the shoot, we almost lost Uncles Frank and Ernie. Keith and Ollie commandeered a fishing boat one night after another drinking competition and set off across the Solent. Something happened—it was impossible to work out exactly what—and they ended up a couple of miles off the Hampshire coast minus the boat, trying to swim home. Keith, as you know from the one and only time he tried his hand at surfing in Hawaii, was not a first-class swimmer. I remember them coming back, just as we were having an early breakfast. Keith always made light of things, no matter how dark they were. This time was different. It must have been a very close call.

  We all survived that summer and, by early autumn, the epic shoot was almost over. The only thing left to shoot was the hang-gliding section. I had assumed we did it at the end in case I was wiped out. They’d have the film with a particularly poignant glider scene and they’d sell more cinema tickets if the main actor died for his art. I found out only afterward that it was because they couldn’t get the insurance.

  “Don’t worry,” said Ken. “You’ll be perfectly safe.”

  Had I ever been hang gliding before? Of course I hadn’t. It’s not something you do growing up in Shepherd’s Bush. But on a cold, blustery October day, I found myself halfway up the Marlborough Downs, taking a quick lesson from the instructor.

  Step one: thirty yards up the hill. “Okay, push the bar forward to go up and pull it back to go down,” said the bloke. “And you must wear a helmet for safety. Put this on.” Quite what good a well-aged post office telegram delivery boy’s motorbike helmet would do from five hundred feet up was baffling. His last piece of advice? “Whatever you do, don’t stall. You’ll come down like a stone. You’re always better off going too fast rather than too slow.” That was all right by me. I’ve always gone too fast. I ran down the hill, pushed out the A-frame like he’d said, and I was up and away, five, maybe six whole feet off the ground. I flew for a good fifty yards before landing, with a bump, flat on my arse.

  Step two: another twenty yards up the hill. “We’ll just have another go before we try it from the top.” So off I ran again, pushed out the A-frame, felt the thing lift off the ground, and it just kept going. Up, up, up. I’d caught a thermal and I was two hundred feet up before I could react.

  Don’t stall, don’t stall. That was all I could think. And eventually I got it back down again, at speed, into a very large gorse bush.

  “An excellent landing,” said the instructor. “Let’s try it from the top of the hill.” So now I was fully trained.

  And action: so now I was right at the top of the hill and I’m in my Tommy uniform. Jeans, no top, no shoes, no helmet. There were a few other guys up there with their gliders and they just looked at me, mouths open. What an idiot. I didn’t mind. It was an adventure. I looked down the hill, I looked up at the clouds, took a deep breath, and went for it. As soon as the thing caught the air I started singing. And cut. I made a perfect landing in a field at the bottom of the hill. The field was full of thistles but I didn’t care. I’d survived. Job done.

  And, of course, there was Ken, all smiles.

  “Let’s try it one more time.”

  * * *

  When Ken asked me to play Franz Liszt in his next film, Lisztomania, I thought he was kidding. When I realized he wasn’t, I said yes immediately. That was the only time I ever put myself before The Who. It wasn’t just because I wanted to continue working with Ken. He was bringing things out of me that helped with my singing. It was also because I wanted to learn about acting. I wanted another string to my bow. It wouldn’t hurt to do a bit of acting on the side. Tommy had been half a master class but I still knew next to nothing about the craft. I needed more experience. I needed to learn the ropes. For the next few years, I took any acting job, no matter how small. I did lots of stuff with the Film Foundation. And who can forget that I was the second house guest to die during a botched tracheotomy in Richard Marquand’s 1978 horror film The Legacy.

  But in 1975 I was still a complete acting novice. I just liked the idea of having a second career, not because I dreamed of ditching the microphone and becoming a movie star, but because I never knew when the microphone might ditch me.

  Bands blew up all the time. The fact that we were still together had surprised everyone, including all of us. The way Pete talked about us in the music press or onstage between songs, it always felt like we had a month or two left, tops. And if we were going to split up, it was too late to go back to the sheet-metal factory. I’d been in a band since I was a teenager. I’d hit thirty, which is old in rock years. I needed something to fall back on. Besides, working on a film was so much easier than slogging your body around the world singing. Yes, you had to get up early and I’ve never been good at that. But as long as you could find somewhere out of Ken’s sight lines, you could always sleep between takes. It was the first cushy job I’
d ever had.

  I said at the time that Lisztomania would either be a huge flop or a huge success and, in the end, it wasn’t the latter. It was certainly Ken at his most out there. The script was only fifty-seven pages long—the rest of it was somewhere deep inside Ken’s terrifying head—and the dialogue was dreadful. I could see what Ken wanted visually but I felt like I let him down. Knowing what I know now, I would have changed every single word of it and made the character work. But back then I didn’t even know how to deliver a line of dialogue. I think I got better at it over the years through practice. But even now, if you write something that I have to read, I can’t do it. I have to speak it from the heart or nowhere. I found singing much more natural. Life isn’t a play, it’s an opera. My singing comes from the heart. Speaking other people’s words comes from the brain.

  So yes, my second film with Ken Russell wasn’t a great success. The Liszt Society wrote to film critics before they even saw it, warning that the story contained scenes of “rape, blood-sucking, exorcism and castration.”

  “The Liszt Society didn’t know the half of it,” wrote the Sunday Times film critic. “The film is impudent, vulgar, near pornographic. And I like it.” Most other critics didn’t, but I thought parts of it, some of the vignettes, were absolutely phenomenal. The scene with Fiona Lewis in the Swiss chalet is extraordinary. And I came away with two things of which I could be tremendously proud. I’d procured both more invaluable acting experience and an eight-foot penis.