Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon

For all the children who never got to know their fathers

——

And for Campbell, may that never be the case

H
ow do you attempt to capture an exploding time bomb? These were the first words put to me by one of the vast number of people I talked to while researching the life of Keith Moon. They were spoken by Mark Volman who, as a member of the Mothers of Invention and half of Flo and Eddie, came to know Keith through their appearance in a Frank Zappa movie and then during Moon’s three years’ self-destructive downswing in Los Angeles. But Volman’s was merely the most succinct of many similar observations that revealed much about Keith’s evasive character in a few words while emphasising the difficulty of saying everything about him in a biography.

Even those closest to him in life sometimes found themselves stymied when attempting to define him in death. “It just felt like he was going to explode,” his former wife Kim McLagan, who through ten years of a turbulent personal relationship came to know the adult Keith best – and worst – said to me at one stage. “There was just so
much
in there.”

On another occasion, she told me, “He was a star,” only partly referring to him as a mortal celebrity. Her real meaning was revealed when she continued, “And he illuminated so many other lives.”

I prefer to think of him as a comet, blazing through and enlightening our earthly experience while burning himself put in the process. But I’ll take any form of cosmic comparison, including the double definition of the word ‘star’ and the lunar association of his name, if only because Keith Moon’s existence was so utterly – and in all senses – out of this world.

To be sure, the personality traits that mark us as individuals can usually be traced back through our bloodline. Musical prowess is often hereditary. Alcoholism is now recognised as a genetic illness. Spousal abuse tends to be part of an ongoing, hard-to-break generational cycle. Tendencies toward comedy, acting and public performing are all usually attributable, at least partially, to one’s parents and upbringing.

Not so with Keith. There was absolutely nothing in his family background that gave even an inkling as to what his life would become. Quiet and unassuming, disciplined and accepting, teetotal (yes]), loyal, and unquestionably loving, his parents were the living embodiment of every government’s dream subjects.

The subsequent life of Keith John Moon – the blazing comet, the shining star, the full moon brightening the night sky – had nothing, and yet everything, to do with this almost crushing normality. From the earliest age, Keith Moon proved himself an exception to all known rules, and upon discovering this about himself, he made it his purpose in life to challenge them in everything he did. He revolutionised the concept of the drummer in rock’n’roll and pop music by rejecting the previously accepted constraints, leading from the back as was almost unheard of rather than offering mere support as was then the convention, filling spaces that had always been left open, leaving gaps where usually lay the beat. He achieved greater international fame than his instrument was meant to inspire, only to treat that celebrity status as an ongoing opportunity to send up the whole notion. He sneered at the dominant British stiff upper lip, while appropriating it so effectively as to delete his working-class background at will; he threw his head into the cavernous jaws of certain disaster time and again, including tempting fate with an almost unparalleled intake of alcohol and drugs, and emerged on every occasion (but the last) just about whole, beckoning the world to laugh with him at his apparently charmed existence. He never encountered a situation so formal that he could not denoble it by stripping naked, never met an important person he could not cut down to size with an instant one-liner, never knew the meaning of the word ‘embarrassment’.

Money he treated with contempt. Certainly he craved it, but he ridiculed it too: the higher his income, the greater his debts, the very antithesis of his parents’ generation and their insistence on living within their means. Beautiful houses, fanciful investments and luxury personal possessions were acquired and dismissed – or destroyed – so rapidly as to become worthless. Hyperactive and peripatetic, he simply could not stay still. Keith Moon was forever running, always one step ahead of reality, his whole life a desperate, tragic battle to escape the normality into which he was born.

Or so I believe. The biographer takes on a Herculean task when inviting himself into the life of someone so complex as Keith Moon, a modern legend about whom so much has been said and written – and yet who his own parents did not really know, neither his wife nor his later ‘fiancée’ could control, his daughter was scared of and his fellow band members, much though they loved and suffered him, have never fully agreed upon.

But it’s a task I must accept if I am to do my subject any justice, and more than that, it’s one I sought out for myself. Like so many music fans, I have entertained a fascination with Keith Moon since his image first implanted itself in my impressionable young mind. (And what was that first impression? A drunken, toothy grin beckoning from the inside of a music weekly? A reprinted publicity still of the handsome teenage mod? A live clip of his on-stage primal energy from some long-forgotten Seventies television show? A frenetic roll through that endless sea of tom-toms that would have distinguished a Who song across the airwaves? Or a story of the great man’s excesses heard from elders in the school playground or on the football terrace and repeated as indisputable fact? All these and more, I suspect, for no one image takes claim as I write.] That I saw him once in his element (Charlton, 1976) and met him once at his most unguarded (London, August 1978) established his heroic status in my mind at the time, but that alone was not enough to keep him there: through my work (and play), I soon had met so many past idols and future stars that fame no longer garnered respect. Yet Keith Moon, his young death perhaps a contributory factor, only grew upon me as an icon.

And as to me, so to many others. Come the Nineties, and I found that mention of his name elicited a stronger reaction than ever – particularly from a generation that had come of age after his death. His image graced album sleeves (the Rolls Royce in the swimming pool on Oasis’
Be Here Now
), advertising campaigns (the picture of Keith with a champagne bottle embedded in his wall used by Primal Scream) and any number of nightclub invites designed to entice a young audience with an instantly recognisable totem of hedonism. His contemporaries, meanwhile, regretted that Keith’s life and death had been treated at the time not with the reverence demanding of an artist, but as an endless source of amusement and tabloid copy. The timing therefore appeared appropriate for a fresh and thorough appraisal.

It would be pretentious to say that I felt a calling to write this book. But Keith Moon touched my life personally, inspired me ideologically, influenced me musically and entertained me professionally. I write about music as part of my living. And nobody else seemed to have taken up what seemed such an inviting subject. When I considered all this, and then could not get the idea out of my head, I concluded that if his story fascinated me to this extent, then it must also intrigue others. Among those who proved my supposition correct were at least two book publishers, guaranteeing me an outlet and ensuring that I would immerse myself further in Keith Moon’s life than I had ever imagined.

I set out determined to prove that Keith was much more than ‘Moon the Loon’, more even than the best, most influential and revolutionary drummer rock music has ever known. I wanted to share the generosity I believed was hidden underneath his extrovert exterior, laugh at the comic genius that was never fully recognised as such, diagnose his inner confusion and private unhappiness, drown myself in the alcoholic, and cry along with the tears of a clown. I regret that I unearthed other, less savoury aspects of his personality too, but it was almost inevitable that in searching for the core of this blazing comet I should discover the dark side of the moon along my travels. Those who eagerly labelled Keith “a gentleman” who would “never hurt anyone” (two of the most common descriptions I heard from his many friends) were not the ones witness to his behaviour in the home, which was rarely gentlemanly and often physical. And after years of talking to those who knew Keith, about behavioural patterns unerringly consistent from childhood to premature old age, after hearing the same anecdotes over and again dressed in slightly different circumstances, reliving the chronic alcoholic’s empty promises of sobriety year in year out, I began to sympathise with his fellow Who members, on whom the jokes eventually wore thin and who finally, if not in public then at least among themselves, began to entertain the idea of life without Keith Moon.

When life without Keith Moon became for them a reality, however, it was more than drumming power the Who lost. Without Keith Moon, the group was absent its soul. A band that had never gelled before it found him never gelled again after it lost him, and the fact that the Who finally made the kind of money it should have earned back in the Sixties – or at least the Seventies – was scant compensation for an obvious lack of artistic merit. (Unless you were on the receiving end of the pay cheque, that is.) Which begs the issue: that as a physically fit, finally sober, mentally happy Pete Townshend in his early fifties explains for the millionth time why the words ‘Hope I die before I get old’ were never meant to be taken literally, no one asks why his drummer and companion, the passionate driving force behind the greatest rock’n’roll band of them all, took those words so closely to heart that he lived them out in less than 14 years.

Of course Keith was physically ancient at the time he died, if emotionally still a child – just one of many ironies that weave their way through his life and its myriad effects on other people’s. During the initial days of my research, while spending a thoroughly enjoyable six months back in the London of my childhood, I realised I had outlived my subject. At 32 I didn’t feel old, and neither I nor any friends my age could equate the tired-looking Moon in his last days – spread so far at the waist that his paunch was purposefully obstructed on the final Who album sleeve, his eyebrows having almost converged at the middle, his once beautiful face wrecked by the years of excessive drinking – with our current youthful state of mind and optimism for our respective futures. (This despite the fact that none of us claim to be angels: though Keith’s story may read as a morality tale, it is only intended so in regards to ruinous excess.) Later that same summer, the date passed when Keith would have turned 50. Many of his contemporaries were, of course, encountering that milestone themselves. It became customary for me to ask if they could imagine a 50-year-old Keith Moon, and the answer was almost always negative. Only Oliver Reed, then a survivor of a life the sauce, seemed certain of the possibility, but his death in May 1999 aged 61, while drinking in a pub in Malta, perhaps proves the point.