Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite

by Roger Daltrey

  Kenney said nothing. Bill said nothing. John was quiet, too. But Pete didn’t hesitate. Not for a second. He just said it was no choice at all. Kenney would stay. I should have left there and then. I hated the fact that Pete made it personal. Why would he choose Kenney over me? Well, you’ll have to read Pete’s book, but I did expect a bit more support. So Kenney stayed and, though I came to regret it, so did I. And we set off on another intense touring schedule.

  Pete’s refusal to make a tough decision consigned the band to a long, slow death. I also think it was the trigger for Pete to get heavily into heroin. He had all kinds of issues—his marriage, Cincinnati, the pressure, always, to write material—but it was when the wheels started to come off our band that he really went to pieces.

  I got a call, I can’t remember from whom, asking me to go and see him. I was down in Sussex but there were all these reports of Pete out and about in the clubs of London, off his face. I had to go and see him. In spite of everything, I was the only one he might listen to. In those days, it was very hard to open Pete up. It’s different now. We’re much more honest with each other. Back then, the walls could come up very quickly.

  But I did go and see him. I swallowed my pride and I went up to his Eel Pie Studio in Twickenham and there he was, nodding out, surrounded by drug paraphernalia. I sat there and I started talking. I didn’t know if he could hear me. For the first half an hour or so he definitely wasn’t there. But I carried on for three or four hours. I told him nothing was worth this. He was too bright for it to end like this. He’d been against this junk for most of his life. Why change now? I was trying to get him to talk, to engage, but he wouldn’t talk. He didn’t answer any of my questions, so I just carried on and on at him. I left late in the afternoon with no idea if anything had gone in. The next day, he checked himself into rehab.

  When he came out, we made our tenth album, It’s Hard. And, Christ, it really was. Pete was tearing his hair out trying to come up with new songs. He got there in the end, but even at the time I didn’t think the songs stood up to our earlier work. Everything felt wrong. If you listen to the record, every drum break was a straight roll down. Again and again and again. Dosh dosh dosh d-d-d-d-dosh. It drove me mad.

  It all crystallized for me in September 1982. I was on my way to do the launch of the record’s accompanying tour. Another forty-two shows. Another three-month haul across North America. I was doing the launch on my own, as usual. Pete wanted nothing to do with promotion. He didn’t want to do interviews or photo shoots. Nothing. So I was on my own in the car, trying to build up the enthusiasm, and I just made the decision. That was it. This would be our last tour.

  I made the announcement at the press launch and I knew it was the right decision. It solved all our problems. Pete would have no more pressure on him. The drummer problem wouldn’t exist anymore. It took the band completely by surprise, but I knew that if we had just carried on it might have killed him.

  So that was our farewell tour and we ground through it. And, even then, it still wasn’t the bitter end of it. We were stuck with two-thirds of a three-record deal to fulfill.

  About six months after we came off the road, Pete came down to Holmshurst. He’d been trying to write the next album and he was there to tell me he couldn’t. He was finished. This really was the end.

  “I can’t write anymore,” he said. “I can’t go on.”

  And I think he was shocked when I just said, “Fine.”

  It was difficult because I’d already spent the advance and so had John, but it didn’t matter. We found a way through and I was fully supportive of Pete’s decision. He needed space to breathe. He needed to recover. So that was it. Apart from Live Aid in 1985—which silver-tongued Bob talked me into—we were done. For almost a decade, that was it for The Who.

  chapter seventeen

  Life After

  I wasn’t happy to break up. It was just fate. But there was nothing to worry about it. If we didn’t get back together, well, so be it. And if we did, we’d only do it if we found the right drummer. I knew that Pete wouldn’t throw it all away. He’s a very clever man. He’s always been aware. We recognized his talent. And although there were times he couldn’t admit it, he did recognize his own luck in finding us. He knew he’d somehow managed to find three other musicians who could present his talent. That number had dropped from three to two, but I never thought for a minute that it really was the end.

  In the meantime, I had to pay the bills. So the eighties became about acting, solo albums, and fish farming.

  In 1980, I played McVicar, an armed bank robber and escaped convict in the film of the same name. That was different from all my other acting jobs. I wanted to do it because so many of my friends had been blaggers. They walked about like it was a really cool thing, just like the gangs do today. It’s the thing to aspire to when you’re on a slummy street or a rough estate. Crime seems like an easy way out.

  I knew it wasn’t. Eventually, it always caught up with them. Ask Bill Curbishley. Ask George Davis. He was put away for twenty years for an armed robbery at the London Electricity Board in 1974. The only trouble was he didn’t do it. His wife, Rose, put together a great campaign to get him released and I was very happy to help with it. I went onstage wearing a “George Davis Is Innocent” T-shirt and I celebrated when he got released. And then, about a year later, he got caught at the wheel of a getaway vehicle outside a bank and that was it. He spent the next seven years banged up.

  I was glad he got off the one he didn’t do and I was glad he got put away for the one he did do. And that’s how it is. It’s not glamorous. He lost his freedom. He lost his lovely wife. All these guys were mugs and, eventually, they found that out. John McVicar was particularly honest about it. He wrote the least glamorous account of his criminal life. He showed that being a robber was an easy way to make a living until it wasn’t. I wanted to show that on film. I just thought anything you can do to deter people on the street from getting into that stuff in the first place has got to be good.

  I don’t think we glamorized him at all in that movie. It was just his story. And, as it turned out, there was a happy ending. His life turned around once he came out of prison. He became a very successful writer and he’s never been in trouble since.

  The process of making that film was an immersive experience. After several weeks, I found it difficult to stop being McVicar. I was strutting around the place, giving off the gangster swagger. I’m not sure what Heather thought about it all. But I learned a lot. I did most of the prison scenes with Adam Faith, who was playing McVicar’s cellmate Wally “Angel Face” Probyn, and he was brilliant. He helped me learn to relax and let myself go. If you feel like you’re acting, you’re failing. If you feel you’re doing nothing, it’s working. It’s strange. The lines are the least important thing of all.

  You can tell I still haven’t got the hang of it when I played Macheath in the BBC’s 1983 adaptation of The Beggar’s Opera. I didn’t quite know how to deliver the dialogue, how to make use of the words. And I was scaling it wrong. I was scaling it like a film. In film, micromovements are very noticeable, but it’s not like that on the small screen and I was still learning.

  I wasn’t going to give up, though. It wasn’t just because I needed to pay the bills. I still wanted to stick two fingers up at that bloody English teacher. I’d never got the part in the play at school. I was never going to amount to anything. All that stuff.

  I think I got to give the two-fingered salute when I auditioned for The Comedy of Errors just after I’d finished The Beggar’s Opera. This was Shakespeare. This was my chance. They told me which bits we were going to read for the audition so I spent ages learning my lines by heart because I’m a very bad reader. And off I went, prepared. When I arrived, James Cellan Jones, this renowned director, was sitting there poker-faced and I just launched into it. Quite early on, maybe three or four lines in, he started laughing and after that it just got worse and worse. By the time I got to the
end, he was pissing himself. I just assumed I’d cocked it up.

  To make matters worse, he then asked me to read another part. I hadn’t learned it and I just couldn’t do it. It was a mess. But at the end, he said, “Right, then, do you think you can play both parts?” I could not believe it. I was shocked. You could have knocked me down with half a feather. I was cast as Dromio of Ephesus and Dromio of Syracuse.

  And I loved it. Here I was, working with a Shakespeare text, understanding it, getting the jokes. No one was talking down to me. I was involved and it was an extraordinary experience. It was only at the end, when the two Dromios were put side by side in the edit, that you could see how involved I’d become. The Dromio whose master treats him with more respect was a good two inches taller than the other one. Subconsciously, I’d shrunk to play the less fortunate twin.

  * * *

  I don’t think the Kray twins approached me because they admired my hilarious portrayal of the Dromio twins in The Comedy of Errors. I suspect McVicar was more up their street. Whatever the reason, I got a call one day from Big Joey Pyle asking if I wanted to buy the rights to make the Kray film. I really got to like Joey. He was a respected villain. Honorable.

  The police had been after him for years. He was tried unsuccessfully for the murder of a nightclub bouncer in the 1960s. They got him in the end in 1992 for “masterminding a massive drugs ring” but I still went to visit him in Belmarsh. I used to enjoy visiting him and cheering him up. We never talked about the villainy. I understood what side of the water he was on and I didn’t want to know.

  Joey wasn’t high-profile in the public’s eye, but he was a mediator between the big crime families. He was the one who sat with them and sorted out the grudges. Imagine that for a day job. He was good at it, though. When he died in 2007, members of the Kray and the Richardson families went to the funeral. Mediating between me and the Krays must have been a relative piece of cake.

  I thought it would be great to make a definitive film about the twins. Like it or not, they’re a part of the social history of modern Britain. You’ll always have people like them on the streets. You take them away and someone else takes over. That’s how it was and that’s how it will always be. But they had something extra. They had image and they knew how to use it. With the help of David Bailey’s photograph, they made gangsters glamorous. The sixties were all about image. Look at Twiggy. Look at us. Look at the Krays.

  I didn’t like them and I didn’t like what they stood for, but when you met them, you recognized that they were extraordinary. If Ronnie hadn’t been mad, they would have had it made. They had the clubs and the casinos. They were earning a fortune. But Ronnie was a paranoid schizophrenic with an identical twin brother. I didn’t want to make a film about the violence. I wanted to make a film about those particular cogs in those particular brains.

  I’d never met the Krays before but I had had dealings with them. In 1965, I had a lovely Austin Westminster. Plush leather seats. Three-liter engine. I liked that car. I was driving it across Salisbury Plain—the long, straight road that, in the sixties, you’d only ever do flat out—and as I flew over the top of the hill I noticed a tractor turning right and another car waiting behind it, blocking the whole road. There was nothing I could do but brace, curse my youthful exuberance, and hope for the best. By the time I’d clambered out of my crumpled, beloved Austin, it looked as if I’d run over a group of wheelchair users. In the wreckage, there were all these metal frames and buckled wheels. It took a while to work out the car I’d rear-ended had bikes on the back. What a mess. I drove more sensibly after that.

  It also got me a big bill. The car had cost twelve hundred pounds. The repairs were four hundred pounds. I didn’t have four hundred pounds and I couldn’t find it. The banks wouldn’t lend it. Management obviously never had it. So I had no transport, which meant I couldn’t get to gigs. I hired a car for a couple of weeks but that was eating up more money than we were earning. Eventually, one of our roadies said, “I know someone who will lend you that money.”

  “Great. Who is it?” I said.

  “Don’t worry about who it is. You can have the money for three months at ten percent. There’s only one thing. If you value your legs, make sure you pay it back on time.”

  I took that as a piece of bravado, but the next day he handed me the check for four hundred pounds. It was signed Charlie Kray.

  I paid it back on time and I just thought, what a great bunch of guys. They stood up for me. They saved the day. And that was it until Big Joey called me up in the eighties.

  When I first went to see Ronnie in Broadmoor, he was sitting at this round table. I sit next to Joey, and Ronnie comes round and shakes my hand.

  “Hello, Roger, nice to see you.” He’s almost whispering. “How’s your mum? Would she like a box of chocolates?”

  He sits down right next to me, shuffles over and puts his knee right against my thigh, and pushes really hard. What do you do with your leg when Ronnie Kray has his knee stuck in your thigh? I tell you what. Nothing. That leg didn’t move for two hours. He was challenging me. It was all about front. How much bottle have you got?

  Me and my thigh survived the meeting and in the days following, Don Boyd, my partner in the project, and I did the deal. A proper contract. Ronnie signed away all his rights in front of two Broadmoor doctors. What none of us realized, Ronnie included, is that the Krays had been living off those film rights for years. They sold them, the deal went south, they sold them again. But our deal was cast-iron. They couldn’t do anything without my agreement.

  Ronnie didn’t like that. I didn’t like that Ronnie didn’t like that. We were never going to stop him doing what he wanted to do. But even then, it was difficult. He wanted Ray Winstone to play him, but I didn’t want to make that type of film. I wanted Hywel Bennett to do it. He had the right voice. He could portray homosexuality without being overtly camp. That was the thing with Ronnie. He was very particular about what he was. He was not gay, he was homosexual.

  I had it all within my grasp—I had even found an exact twin to Hywel in an actor called Gerry Sundquist—but in the end I just couldn’t deal with Ronnie. I saw him beginning to turn. He got very angry. When I went to see him again, the old knee went in even harder. He used to talk more and more quietly. And then Ronnie had a flaming row with Don. He told him, “You’re either going to make my film or it’s going to be all over.” Don came back from the confrontation looking very worried. He said there was someone else looking out from behind the eyes. And he was really scared.

  After that, this other production team popped up and I was glad to let them have it. I just didn’t want it in my life anymore. It felt too dangerous. They went on to make that film with the Kemps. They weren’t bad in it, but it glorified the violence and it missed the intrigue, the Bob Boothby connection, all those spies. That’s why the Krays got thirty years. They didn’t get it for bumping off two villains. Two people tried in the same dock at the same time for two murders in different places on different dates? It seemed like an establishment conviction. I’m not sticking up for the Krays, but they were much more than just growlers and I think it’s a shame that story still hasn’t been told properly. It could have been the English Godfather.

  * * *

  With no work since 1982, John Entwistle started to run out of money by the end of the eighties. For that matter, so did I. It’s expensive living the life of a rock star when you’re not earning rock star money. I hadn’t thought about The Who for a long time. After a lot of persuading from Sir Bob, I’d put aside my feelings about Kenney and we’d done Live Aid, but then we’d returned to our separate lives. In the end, financial necessity drove us back.

  We re-formed in 1989 with Simon Phillips on the drums and set off on our first stadium tour in seven long years. It was a big production—there were people on brass, there were backing singers, a percussionist, and keyboards. Pete spent most of the tour playing acoustic guitar. He got someone else in to play the
electric. He even thought about playing in a glass box to protect his hearing. I wish I could have got someone else to sing my bits. I would be very happy, standing there, doing the odd harmony. But that’s what Pete wanted and I just gave in. On the upside, Simon Phillips was a huge improvement rhythm-wise. It was better than our last final tour, but it wasn’t good enough to make us rush into another one.

  For the first time in my life I had nothing much planned work-wise. Instead, I had the joy of spending more time with Heather and the kids. I had always done bits and pieces of the daily chores. I’ve never been afraid of putting out the bins and doing the washing up, and I always enjoyed sharing the school run, which, when you live in the countryside, is unavoidable because public transport is virtually nonexistent.

  It was on one school run back in 1992 that something that had been out of my life for twenty-odd years came roaring back. Football! I had picked up my son Jamie and a couple of his mates from school and noticed that Jamie was wearing a red and white scarf.

  “What’s that you’re wearing around your neck?” I asked.

  “It’s my team’s scarf,” came the reply.

  Oh shit. I hope he’s not a Man United fan, I thought.

  “What team’s that then?”

  “Arsenal, Dad.”

  What a relief …

  “When are you going to take me to see them, Dad?”

  When your ten-year-old son asks you that question every day for a few weeks, there can be only one answer.

  I had been a Queens Park Rangers supporter until the early seventies when the violence that was common back then got really bad. One day, I just walked away. I hadn’t even watched a game for twenty years. Fortunately for me, Robert Rosenberg, Bill’s right-hand man in the management office, was a lifelong Arsenal fan. So I gave in and took Jamie to Highbury to see them play. The atmosphere was fantastic—friendly and funny with wonderfully loud singing. I was hooked on the game again, and this feeling hadn’t been passed from father to son, but from son to father. I became an Arsenal fan and Robert became a really great friend.