We opened in Sunrise, Miami, on November 1, 2012, and the show went down an absolute storm. Before, in the instrumental, we’d just had footage of waves hitting rocks. Now, we had all this archive footage spanning the last fifty years of social and cultural upheaval, cut in with us performing over the decades. I thought it was a pretty mind-blowing sequence. The audience did, too. They stood up in that section and went crazy. And, most importantly, Pete got it. He got that we’d found our way back to that very first idea. Over nine months, we played to more than half a million people across the United States and Europe. The classicist Mary Beard came to the last show on that tour at Wembley in July 2013 and found me afterward to talk about that montage. She said we’d encapsulated the late-twentieth-century period perfectly. An A+ from a proper academic. That really made me happy.
* * *
In 2015, I celebrated The Who’s fiftieth anniversary by contracting viral meningitis. Thirty dates on the North American leg of The Who Hits 50! tour were postponed. Instead of walking out onstage, I was lying in a hospital bed absolutely convinced I was going to die. I was phoning people to say good-bye.
This was the end and that was a shame because, after all the struggles, we had finally hit a golden period. We were enjoying ourselves and each other.
Looking back, it’s possible that things started to go wrong long before that dreadful summer. In December 2014, I did a gig in Cardiff when I should have canceled. I had a bad cold but the crowd was already in the hall so I went on and wrecked my voice. I had to put so much strain on it to get through, it did something to the nerves in my neck. We moved the next two concerts at the O2 in London to March and the doctors said I couldn’t sing for two months. By February, I was starting to sing again but I couldn’t get higher than a Johnny Cash top note. Sports Phil, a man who used to massage Kobe beef, was doing what he could to loosen things up but, as the concerts approached, it still wasn’t right. Phil is the strongest masseur on the planet. He has fists and fingers of steel. That’s what it takes to get my old gnarly wreck of a body onstage these days. But even he was struggling.
So he recommended Jan-Jan, a doctor in Holland, who I immediately decided to fly over to London for the first O2 show. You’ll do anything to get things right. Jan arrived in my dressing room three hours before the show. Like most Dutch people, he was more than six feet tall, he looked fit and healthy, and he had a confident smile. Unlike most Dutch people, he never went anywhere without a bag full of hammers and chisels.
“Where’s the problem?” he asked, and I pointed at my neck.
He told me to take off my shirt and sit facing away from him on his portable table with my back to him. For the next few minutes, he did what felt like an engineer’s drawing on my back with a marker pen. So far, so relaxing.
Then he said, “Are you ready?” And off he went. It sounded like a blacksmith was running late on the day’s orders. Chink, chink, crunch. Chink, chink, crunch. I could feel and hear the bones moving. I’ve been hammered before but never like this. Jan knew what he was doing, though. He got me through those shows and, by the summer, I was starting to sing well again.
* * *
On June 30, 2015, we played at the Zenith in Paris. We’d just headlined Hyde Park and Glastonbury and, for the first time that year, I felt like I was back. That night in Paris felt fabulous but it was hotter than a blacksmith’s forge. It must have been more than a hundred degrees Fahrenheit outside but inside the Zenith there were six thousand people. That’s six thousand one-bar electric heaters. The gig was great, really fluid, but when I came offstage I was completely drained.
I remember Liam Gallagher came backstage to say hello afterward. I love Liam. He’s one of the last few bastions of old-school rock. He’d be the last one in the trenches with you, always, and he’d carry you out. That night, in that boiling heat, he was still wearing his parka. Ridiculous—but it was great to see him.
It was the small hours by the time I got back to the hotel and had a lovely bath. Because we get to stay in posh hotels these days, the bathrooms are always full-on marble affairs. When I stepped out of the bath, the floor was like an ice rink and the next thing I knew I was over, out cold. There are times when I miss those crappy motels we used to stay in. Peeling, moldy linoleum might not be as aesthetically pleasing as marble but it’s a lot less slippery.
I couldn’t speak for a few minutes and a doc was summoned. He said everything was okay, so I popped a couple of aspirins and went to bed thinking nothing more of it. A spot of concussion never killed anyone.
The next day, the whole band and crew took the train from Paris to Amsterdam. It was one of those wonderful high-speed European trains we always hear so much about but the air-con had packed up. So another four hours in hundred-plus heat. We all just sat there in our underpants, sweating our bollocks off as the northern French countryside flew by.
One gig and two days later I was home, about to head off to rehearse in Acton for a gig I was doing with my band at Chris Evans’s CarFest. And I had to cancel. I’d come down with a sort of flu. I don’t know if the bang on the head had anything to do with it—today, I suspect it might have triggered the whole thing—but over the next few days it got worse and worse. I was taken to the hospital and tested for everything: AIDS, TB, leukemia. I had four lumbar punctures and two brain scans, each of which rendered me completely deaf for a couple of days, which was very unsettling.
Through all of this, I was going a bit nuts. I had blackouts, memory loss, hallucinations. I had a hard time working out where I was and what was going on. At one point, I just got up and left the hospital to attend to a dental appointment. After that, they stationed a nurse by the door, but I still managed to escape. I couldn’t tell you why I was trying to get out. It makes no sense looking back at it now. But I turned up at Holmshurst one morning and point-blank refused to return to London.
After three days hiding out, Heather put her foot down. I wasn’t getting better, I wasn’t making much sense, and I was in a lot of pain. So back I went for more prodding and poking. At the height of it, before they worked out what it was and got me on the right drugs, the agony was unbearable. I was in tears. Nothing could hurt this much.
And then, at the point where I could hardly bear it, the pain just went away. It was sudden and stunning, like sunshine after a storm in New Orleans or White Lake, New York. I reached a point of absolute peace and tranquillity, a floating sensation that felt incredible, not just because the pain was gone but also because there was contentment.
For some reason, I was turned around, looking at my life as though I were someone else. First, my time in the Boys’ Brigade. Then the skiffle band, which provided solace from the horrors of school. Our debut as the Detours in Shepherd’s Bush. Reggie on bass. Harry on drums. Me on guitar. Then The Who. I thought about Woodstock and that moment when I knew we’d finally cracked America. The feeling of hard-won success, traced all the way to getting a CBE in 2005. How much that meant to me, not because it changed anything but because it was the final recognition that my headmaster was wrong when he told me I’d never do anything with my life.
We’re all unique. We all have our own unique lives. But seeing my life like that, I just felt overwhelmingly lucky. In the middle of this strange out-of-body experience, I said to myself, “Would you ever imagine the things you’ve done?” And then all I could think about was my family. I wouldn’t leave any of them in trouble. There was no debt. Heather would be okay. The kids were all set. I could see that I’d done enough. I lay there feeling at peace. It wasn’t a religious experience. There was no light at the end of a tunnel. No voice from on high. Maybe I’m going downstairs. But the sense of calm was wonderful. It was spiritual. It’s my belief that when you die, it’s not the end. It’s just the transferring of energy from this body to somewhere or something else in the universe. Today, as I write this, I have no fear of death. If and when I start going, I don’t want to be resuscitated. When my time comes, that’s it, a
nd I’m fine with that.
Of course, my time hadn’t come that summer. Here I am, three years later, and we’re still going. We did all those dates we had to postpone. We did more dates the following year. And more this year. It felt great. I have a little joke I tell interviewers. The Who was exciting in the old days because you didn’t know what would happen. Now, we’re exciting because you don’t know if we’ll get to the end of the show. It’s a joke that comes with an element of truth but the last couple of years have been good. I’ve felt good. Maybe it’s because I’m not trying so hard. Maybe it’s because, finally, I’m beginning to relax.
I still have to be careful. It took a long time for the pain to go away, and the meningitis can come back. I have to avoid doing too much. But I love what I do and I can still do it. I’m on our last tour. I just don’t know how long the last tour will be. When we launched it back in 2015, I said it was the beginning of the long good-bye. I guess now we’re somewhere in the middle. It will go on for as long as we can do it. I am resigned to the fact that one day, possibly quite soon, I’ll open my mouth and it won’t be there. And that will be the day I say, “Sorry, guys, this is over.”
What I hate about touring is the movement. A lifetime of planes, trains, automobiles, and hotels and you become allergic to movement. We now tour at the very height of luxury. Posh hotels, private jets, gold taps, and marble, bloody marble. It’s a million miles from how we did it when we started. Between Gordon, my wonderful wheeler-dealer assistant, and Rex, our ruthless tour manager, we’ve fine-tuned life on the road to make it as smooth as possible. It’s like a military operation. There is no hotel check-in. We just go straight to the room. There is no check-in at the airport either. And you should see the speed with which we go through security and passport control. It’s all organized to the last detail to avoid losing time, compared with five decades of flight delays, traffic jams, and overbooked hotels. Not to mention however many weeks or months or years of dressing-room incarceration because the gig’s running late. Not to mention Keith Moon’s own special way of unraveling our plans. Yes, I think I’ve done my share.
What I love about touring is the bits between all the movement. Onstage, performing Pete’s music the way it’s supposed to be performed. And that’s what we’re doing now and that’s why we’re happy now. The band is having fun, we can laugh at ourselves. We still have plans. We still have things to do.
You don’t retire from this business. This business retires you. You can play notes and you can sing notes but what you can’t do is cheat on the intention of the music. And I think that’s why we’re still successful. We still don’t cheat. The chemistry between me and Pete is still special. We were given that gift and now The Who is the two of us. He tells me I’m a “fucking romantic” but I know what I see with my own eyes. Empathy, that’s the root of it all. If I can empathize with where he was when he was writing it, I’m at the root of the song. And most of those songs were written from a place of pain, as well as spirit. I struggled at first to find that place and you can hear the struggle. But then I inhabited it. I didn’t have to become Pete. I just had to find my own vulnerability. I had to tear down all my own defenses, the defenses I’d put up to survive. And I’m lucky. Everything happened in a way to make that possible. The raw nerves. The fights. The constant criticism. The personal battles. The relationship with Heather that survived it all. My God, I’m glad she stuck with me and we’ve reached the value-added part of our relationship. People split up too easily these days. You’ve got to work at it because it only gets better.
All those elements, that exact, strange combination, made me what I needed to be. It could have gone a million other ways but it went the way it did. I could have been telling a completely different story or no story at all. When I sing the songs, it’s a balance of vulnerability and strength. When I’m onstage, the walls are down and I sing to you.
In the end when you come to think of it, when we’re all gone and dust, the music will live on. And I hope people will say about us that we held it to the end. And that will do for me. I’ve been lucky. I’ve had a lucky life. Thank you very much, Mr. Kibblewhite.
Mum and Dad on Hammersmith Broadway, 1938
Mum and me, 1945
Dad home from the war, 1945
Time for bed, I’m running away (with scratchy jumper), 1948
Outside 16 Percy Road, 1946
My school photo, age nine, 1953
School report card, 1955
School journey to Paignton, Devon, 1955. I’m on the second row, second from the right, and Mr. Blake is seated lower left.
School uniform and a kiss-me-quick hat, 1959
John, Doug Sandom, me, and Pete. The Detours van with the working door, 1962.
Bored of just standing here: first mic swing at the Golf-Drouot club, Paris, June 2, 1965
Blow!—me on trombone and John on trumpet, 1961
At the Goldhawk Social Club, Shepherds Bush, March 1965
The famous van that got stolen, 1965
Girlfriend Anna at my flat at Ivor Court, 1965
Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, 1968. Pete, Brian Jones, Rocky Dijon, Yoko Ono, Julian Lennon, John Lennon, Eric Clapton, and me.
Emmaretta Marks, 1970, after playing the New York Metropolitan Opera House
The Who live in Copenhagen, 1970
The Who live at the Isle of Wight, 1970
“My Generation,” Surrey Docks, 1965
Arriving in Finland, 1967. Chris Stamp with the band.
Chris’s Viking boat
Pete, Kit, and me at IBC Recording Studios working on Tommy, late 1968
Track Record, “Giving It All Away”
Old mods outside Goldhawk Club, 1977.
From left to right: Ian Moody, Tommy Shelly, Irish Jack, Lee Gash, me, Griff in the hat, Chrissy Coville with broken arm and a pint of Becks. First of the 100 Faces.
Bill Curbishley and me, 1975
“Back from the garage”—chamois shirt
Brand-new Corvette Stingray, 1969
Outside Percy Road, 1975
Riding Ollie, 1974
Who cares if you catch anything? 1979
Giving Jamie, age two, a bulldozer driving lesson, 1983
Heather and me at Elder Cottage, 1969
“Flossie,” 1979. Photo by me.
She likes me, 1989
Flying low
On the set of Tommy’s holiday camp with Ken Russell, 1974
Tommy
Me playing Franz Liszt in the Ken Russell movie Lisztomania, 1975
The Moon and the Goon. Me and Keith with Peter Sellers in the stage version of Tommy at the Rainbow, London, 1972.
McVicar, 1980
The Comedy of Errors, for the BBC. Clockwise from bottom left: Michael Kitchen, Dame Wendy Hiller, Cyril Cusack, and me, 1983.
Discussing team tactics with Arsene Wenger, 2011
Bruce Springsteen and me, Madison Square Garden, 1980
“Boys night out,” 1985 with Paul McCartney, Bob Geldof, and Phil Collins
Rehearsing in England for the Quadrophenia tour, 1973
The Who with Keith Richards and Mick Jagger backstage at Madison Square Garden for the Concert for New York City after 9/11, 2001
At the White House reception for the Kennedy Center Honors with Chris and Calixte Stamp, Bill, Marcela and Catalina Curbishley, and Heather with President and Mrs. Bush,2008
“Please speak up, Ma’am, I’m in a rock band.” At the Royal Albert Hall for TCT, 2005.
Neil Young Bridge School Benefit, 1999. Bringing us back together.
Daltrey, Ride a Rock Horse, and Under a Raging Moon album covers
Madison Square Garden, New York, 1974
Me and Pete recording, 1966
Quadrophenia in Hyde Park, 1996—”I Eye”
Two old geezers, 2005
Pete and I closing the Olympics in 2012
Illustration Acknowledgments
All images in this book are
courtesy of the author’s private collection with the exception of the following:
My first mic swing at the Golf-Drouot Club. © HBK-Rancurel Photothèque. Photo by Jean-Louis Rancurel.
At the Goldhawk Social Club. © Wedgbury Archive. Photo by David Wedgbury.
Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite Page 24