Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite

by Roger Daltrey

  chapter eighteen

  The Re-formation

  Years passed. Projects came and went. I continued to pursue my little acting career and, when the phone rang, I answered it. In July 1991, I was lucky enough to receive a call from Paddy Moloney from the Chieftains. Would I sing a guest spot with them at the London Palladium?

  I said yes. I always say yes to a challenge. It’s one of the few rules I stick to. It was a challenge because there would be no rehearsal, which is always nerve-racking. I’d just have to walk onstage and fit in with what is, as I’ve said, almost certainly one of the quietest acoustic bands in the world.

  I’d learned the words to “Raglan Road” and within three minutes of hello they were playing the introduction and we were off. For the first time in my life onstage with a band, the first time in thousands of gigs, I could hear myself sing. I’ve told you I don’t like hearing my own voice, but it does make life easier when you’re performing. The song went so smoothly. Clockwork. So I suggested we try “Behind Blue Eyes,” my favorite Who song.

  “Let’s give it a go” came the reply and it was wonderful to hear a song I’d performed so many times done in such a different way. A few weeks later, I went back for more, recording a live album with the Chieftains and the talented American folk singer Nanci Griffith at the Grand Opera House in Belfast. It was billed as an Irish evening and this time there were to be rehearsals, but about half an hour into the first session someone came onto the stage and calmly informed us that they’d received a credible bomb threat. Would we mind leaving the building?

  So we all trudged out into the car park at the back of the opera house. A few minutes later, the same someone suggested we might like to move a bit farther away. We ended up in the doorway at the back of another building and I’ll never forget the sight that greeted us. It was a full bingo hall in all its afternoon glory. Row after row of chain-smoking blue-rinse ladies running up to six bingo cards each, a study of concentration and anticipation. The smoke was so thick you could hardly see the other side of the room. It would take more than a bomb scare for them to give up on their numbers. They weren’t going anywhere.

  It was going to take three hours to check that our building was safe but the show must go on so we decamped to a room above a pub round the corner and finished the rehearsal. That night, the show did go on and it was a great success. I went home the next day, thinking about the beautiful atmosphere rather than our disrupted afternoon. In fact, I didn’t give the bomb threat a second thought until, a few months later, the IRA set off a twelve-hundred-pound car bomb on Glengall Street and blew that beautiful opera house to bits. Miraculously, no one was injured. Whether it stopped the bingo is another question.

  * * *

  On March 1, 1994, I turned fifty. It was an eventful day, not because the half century felt like it had passed so quickly, but because of a letter. I was out on the farm—we were building something, I can’t remember what—and I came in for lunch. Heather always opens the post and she just handed me this letter. “Here’s another present,” she said. “Happy birthday.”

  It was from a Jewish girl called Kim. She had enclosed photographs of herself and her son and, immediately, I could see the resemblance. She had the Daltrey look. I could see my mum in her and I could see my sister. It was obvious she was my daughter.

  I just sat there feeling two overwhelming and contradictory emotions. First of all, there was joy. Here was this beautiful person, all grown up and happy. Kim’s adoptive father was a renowned orthodontist at Guy’s Hospital and he’d given her a wonderful education. It had all turned out okay for her. But there was also a real pang of sadness. It can’t have been easy growing up with the knowledge that your dad wasn’t around and your mum had given you up. And it must have been awful for her mother, too.

  Looking back, I could have done things differently. I could have behaved more responsibly. Just like I could have done with Jackie. But as I already said, I was young, I was arrogant, and I was ignorant. And, yes, I admit it, I was enjoying myself. Besides, I never knew Kim’s mother was pregnant. I don’t even remember meeting her. I remember the mothers of my Scottish daughter, my Swedish son, and my daughter who lived in Yorkshire.

  But this one, I never had a clue. And I still don’t regret the act and I can’t regret the consequences. To do that now would be to regret my daughter. What I can do is deal with it.

  I called Kim that day. Not long after, we met at a little Italian restaurant in St. John’s Wood and we both felt an immediate connection. She had first tried to find out who her birth parents were when she was eighteen but the social worker had told her the birth certificate was water-damaged. When she tried again, at the age of twenty-seven, it turned out that had been rubbish and she got the answer. This man is your father. She describes it as “quite a shock” and I don’t blame her. She looked at some photographs of me and watched a couple of my films, and then she knew it was true.

  “Hand on heart,” she admits now, “I wasn’t a big Who fan, but I’d seen Tommy and then I found out Tommy was my dad. It was a strange moment.” She waited two months and then she wrote that letter. I’m so glad she did.

  A few days after I met my twenty-seven-year-old daughter Kim for the very first time, I took her back to meet Heather and the rest of the family. I’m sure it wasn’t easy for Kim and I know it can’t have been easy for Heather either. But she welcomed Kim and it all worked out well. With all my surprise children, it’s worked out. We’re very good friends and I love them all, but I’ll be completely honest, I don’t feel the same way about them as I do about the children I had with Heather. I missed their childhoods; they have other parents, so it’s a different kind of bond.

  It is nice, though. I see all my children as often as possible. I go on little tours every year. All of this could have gone another way. It might not have worked out so well for my children or for me. Each one of them has, at one time or another, thanked me for giving them life. And I’m grateful for that. I am a lucky bugger.

  Not everything in my life was going quite so smoothly. Over the last year or two, my singing career had taken a downturn. The arrival of rap and hip-hop meant that rock music had more or less disappeared from the radio. It was all Eminem and Ice Cube. I released my eighth solo album, Rocks in the Head, at the end of 1992 and it had sunk more or less without a trace. I thought it was a good album, but it was almost impossible to get it any airtime. Back then, radio was the only way to get exposure for a record, so it was doomed from the start.

  Music moves on—it has to—but unless I was going to start rapping, which, don’t worry, I wasn’t, I was stuck in the doldrums. I had become disillusioned with my management. Bill had decided to live in Spain with his beautiful Argentinian wife and their two young children and although this was great for him, it left me feeling isolated and unrepresented. I was about to turn fifty. That didn’t bother me. It was just another day. But it still felt like it was time for a change.

  So I decided two things. First, I would mark my fiftieth with a gig. I’d take a rock band and a full orchestra and we’d play Carnegie Hall in New York. Daltrey Sings Townshend. This was something I’d wanted to do with Pete’s music for quite some time. Explore a whole new way of presenting it. Why not?

  Second, I’d leave Bill on his sun lounger in Spain and move to what appeared to be a more proactively creative manager. Richard Flanzer had come recommended from various people in New York. He was coming up in the business and he was, they said, a mover and shaker. If anything needed moving and shaking, it was my career.

  Putting the orchestral component together was straightforward. I decided to use a student orchestra from the Juilliard School. They were young, talented, hungry musicians, all the essential ingredients to bring Pete’s music to life. Michael Kamen, the prolific film composer, would arrange the score and conduct. I also recruited a fabulous collection of guest artists, including Eddie Vedder, Sinead O’Connor, Lou Reed, Alice Cooper, the Spin Doctor
s, and, once again, the Chieftains (finally, as mentioned earlier, my Machiavellian plan to put Mr. Entwistle on the same stage as my quiet Irish friends would be realized).

  Predictably, the rock band component wasn’t quite so straightforward. Flanzer had already started moving and shaking, and he’d managed to get a DVD deal to cover the costs of production. The one caveat in the DVD contract was that Pete had to appear in the show. The one caveat Pete had was that I would then agree to use the musicians he planned to tour with solo after Carnegie Hall. So I agreed, he agreed, and my birthday concert was all set.

  After two weeks of rehearsal, everything sounded fantastic. All the guests had been a dream to rehearse with except one. Pete was the fly in the ointment. I don’t know why. One day, his dog was ill. The next, he didn’t want to play with an orchestra. The next, he didn’t want to play at all. I only needed him to play one song to fulfill the contract and pay the rapidly escalating production costs. But two days before the show I still wasn’t sure if he’d show up.

  In the end, he did show up and of course he was brilliant. But my stomach was churning like a cement mixer. We performed the show on February 23, 1994, and again the following night, but it didn’t go well. I didn’t realize it at the time but Kamen, our esteemed man with the baton, was on the Colombian marching powder. A conductor on coke means one thing: everything was speedy. The band also played twice as loud as they had in the rehearsals. Double the speed, double the volume. It was such a shame. In rehearsal, the orchestra and the band had been in synergy, two sounds working in harmony, revealing the light and shade of Pete’s music. Now they were working against one other. Above the ensuing cacophony, I couldn’t hear myself clearly and I oversang. The reviews of the show were not good and they were right. I didn’t sing well. I couldn’t.

  All the same, it wasn’t long before Flanzer was on the phone telling me about some amazing offers he was getting to put my orchestral show on around the United States. The promoters didn’t care about the reviews. They were more interested in the news that the Daltrey Sings Townshend special had broken the Carnegie Hall’s two-day box office record. It was the fastest sellout in the venue’s 103-year history. Promoters care only about the bottom line and here, clearly, was an opportunity to make some money. I was tired of the doldrums, too, so I agreed to do a summer tour.

  In the big cities like Detroit, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles, the orchestras were world class and the shows were well received. In the smaller towns, the musicians were a little more ragged and the music was less tight but overall, I thought, still okay. The problem it seemed to me was that the up-and-coming Mr. Flanzer hadn’t got to the lesson about the economics of touring. He had booked only three shows a week. We needed to do five or six to meet the budget for the very expensive band and the overheads. What I felt he had mastered was the ability to run up expenses on my behalf. At the end of the tour, I was down a million bucks or so and up one legal dispute with Flanzer over the show’s copyright. My experiment with new management had ended. The Flanzer affair made me see how good Bill was, even from that deck chair in Spain. Lucky for me, he was happy to have me back.

  It might well have been a wasted summer except for one seemingly small discovery, which would end up becoming a much more significant factor in the decades to come. At the outset of the tour, I had been compelled to make adjustments to the rock band due to the expense. One of the adjustments was a new drummer. Fifteen years after Keith’s death and we still hadn’t found anyone who came close to replacing him. So I auditioned seven or eight and the last one was Zak Starkey. It was like finding a diamond in a barrel of sawdust. Here was someone who could provide the mad rhythmic computations we’d lost when Moon died.

  You could say Zak had it in his blood. He was Ringo’s son and Keith’s godson. In fact, Keith had taken Zak under his wing when he was a young teenager. What a wing to be taken under. He’d done some solo work for John and, in 1985, I’d used him for one of the drum solos in Under a Raging Moon. I’d kept my eye and ear out for him ever since. The trouble was, he had a bit of a reputation as a loose cannon. He had that in his blood, too, and it was a concern because I don’t think I could have survived another Moon. Still, you go with the music and, after some straight talking and a gentleman’s agreement, I gave Zak the job. He was with us that summer and at least that part of it felt right.

  * * *

  It was May 1996 when I got a call from Pete asking if I’d do a one-off special for the Prince’s Trust in Hyde Park the following month. I asked him straight out if this meant he finally wanted to get The Who back together. His response was a bit cagey. He never quite said yes but he didn’t say no either. He just explained that he’d written a stage version of Quadrophenia that would have an onstage narrator as the main protagonist, Jimmy, and various singers playing the other characters.

  “Who am I supposed to be?” I asked. “Jimmy’s brain?”

  “Something like that,” he said.

  “How do I play a brain?”

  I fought for adjustments on the staging and a big edit on all the dialogue, but by the time we reached the sound check on the day before the show, the whole project felt like an overblown ego trip. Ade Edmondson was cast as Ace Face. Gary Glitter was the Godfather. Then there was Stephen Fry as the hotel manager, Trevor McDonald as the newsreader, and Phil Daniels narrating. There was a full brass section, backing singers, percussion, the works. When it came to the decision of who would be in the band, I insisted that Zak take the drums, and, thank Christ, Pete accepted him. We still had to carry another guitarist to play lead because Pete was still struggling with his hearing and would only play acoustic.

  Given our cast of thousands, this particular sound check was critical. A sound check is not a rehearsal. It’s an opportunity for the artists to make sure they can hear what’s going on. But Glitter never understood that. While the band was playing his opening song and I was walking around the stage listening, he decided it was showtime and started swinging his microphone stand around his head. Then everything went black.

  The next thing I heard was a voice asking if I knew my name. There was no face or body attached to the voice and it kept repeating the same question. “What’s your name? What’s your name? What’s your name?” Eventually I got fed up with this persistent voice and answered.

  “Well, I’m not fucking Mick Jagger, am I?”

  I had been unconscious for about fifteen minutes. One of the tripod feet of the mic stand had hit me square in the left eye socket. Someone was holding a cold compress over my eye and blood was pouring out of my nose. It was dark red, almost black.

  Heather saw the whole thing from out front and, as they moved me slowly back to the dressing room, she was trying to get someone to call an ambulance. An hour later it still hadn’t arrived. By now, I was sitting up, feeling pretty shaky. When I tried to blow my nose, it felt like my eye was coming free from the socket.

  “Fuck this,” said Bill Curbishley, grabbing his car keys. “We’re going.” It’s the fastest I’ve ever been across London in rush hour.

  The doctors had good news and bad news. The eye was okay but the socket was fractured. I had a brain scan at nine on the morning of the show and they confirmed there was no internal bleeding so I left the hospital with a bag of painkillers and a gig to perform. To solve the problem of the eyeball trying to escape its socket—a sight that would have upset the front few rows—I procured a patch stuffed with cotton wool. Pete’s brother Paul painted a bull’s-eye on it—and in the end, the audience thought it was all part of the act.

  I did that show rattling like a maraca, whacked out on a cocktail of painkillers, and when I got back to the dressing room I found a typewritten note from Pete. “You have performed in Pete Townshend’s Quadrophenia,” it read. I didn’t have time to let that sink in. I had to meet royalty. At least Prince Charles asked me how my eye was.

  Within days, the promoters were on the phone again and Bill was asking if I would do Pete To
wnshend’s Quadrophenia at Madison Square Garden. Once again, I asked where The Who came into the picture. Bill just said it was The Who that would sell the tickets and that I’d make some money. After two years of patchy acting work, I agreed. In 1974, we played a four-night stand at the Garden. In 1979, we did five. On July 16, 1996, we started a run of six shows in seven nights.

  Promoters from all over America were offering tours, but this time I said I’d do it only if some changes were made. This whole Jimmy’s brain business was a struggle and the endless narration between the songs just killed the energy. It felt like a racing car in the hands of a learner driver. Every time we got going, it stalled. It needed sorting out. Pete agreed to some of the changes. He agreed to have the live narration recorded, which saved money and made it more likely that the people at the back of the gig could hear what was going on. He also agreed to cut it down and, to my surprise, he even let me do the rewrite.

  After about two weeks trying to sell tickets to Pete Townshend’s Quadrophenia, the name changed, too. It became The Who’s Quadrophenia and in the end it was a sellout. We played twenty-five shows across North America that autumn and set off on our first European tour since 1975 the following spring. The economics were still all wrong. We made a few quid from the US shows but, even with the changes, we came back from Europe with the princely sum of sixteen thousand pounds. It was only when the tour had finished that the whole expedition made sense. That note in the dressing room after Hyde Park was Pete’s way of creating a Grand Right. It was hard not to conclude that I and the rest of the band had been used, but it was still progress. And even if I still hadn’t done Quadrophenia the way I thought it could be done, even though I’d have to wait another sixteen years for that, it was the start of a proper renaissance. Pete began to play more lead guitar and, gradually, it felt like we were back. So many bands never recover from a long break, but I always knew we would. Our return wasn’t going to be straightforward, but nothing ever is with The Who.