Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon (7 page)

Along the path of these (mis)adventures, it had become clear that Keith was not going to be among the new Alperton’s academic successes. His poor exam results at the end of his third year denied him the opportunity to take ‘O’ levels, and he was dropped to the ‘B’ stream for his fourth and now final year. There his reading was limited to his beloved
Marvel
comics, his music to his precious rock’n’roll, his maths to stretching his part-time income through the week, and his geography to learning the local back streets. All the same, Keith passed RSA exams at the end of that fourth year, in English and science, two subjects he would continue to prosper with throughout his adult life. This was a modest achievement that paled in comparison to the status of the ‘O’ levels that those 20 of his fellow pupils were staying on to take.

Officially, Keith was not due to leave school until July of 1961, when the school broke for the summer. Unofficially, he and the school agreed to stop seeing so much of each other around Easter time, after the RSA exams, when most of the ‘early leavers’, those who had already turned 15 and were finished with their education, departed. “I was asked to leave,” Keith later explained. “That meant either I had to get out or they would chuck me out. I didn’t mind, I hated school.” But he was not expelled. It was just that, given that those voluntarily staying behind after Easter were the hard workers, the ones keen to pass exams in the next year, it didn’t benefit anyone for a troublemaker like Keith to stay behind and make trouble just because he wasn’t yet 15. Keith Moon didn’t so much leave school as stop going.

P
hysically and intellectually mature for his 15 years, always well-groomed and impeccably well-behaved, Gerry Evans ought really to have been college material. But, like Keith Moon, he was a working-class boy who had failed his 11-plus four years earlier and was never even considered for ‘O’ levels. Gerry was spat out by the state system the same Easter that Keith Moon stopped attending Alperton.

Evans immediately secured a job in the drum department at Paramount Music on Shaftesbury Avenue in the heart of London’s West End, the deciding factor for his new employers being that he had a kit of his own, something almost unheard of at his age. As the new boy at Paramount, Evans did whatever he was told, which mainly involved packing and unpacking instruments all day with the occasional diversion to make tea, and he was only earning four pounds ten shillings a week, but the clientele, including some of the best-known pop and rock drummers, made it all worthwhile.

Then one day in that late spring of 1961 a small lad wearing a brown suit -cut Italian style, with the preposterously short ‘bumfreezer’ jacket and thin lapels that had been the teen rage for the last couple of years – wandered into Paramount. This kid definitely wasn’t a professional musician. The suit showed a certain dedication to style, admittedly, but he seemed too young to even be wearing such a thing. The healthy dollop of Brylcreem that was coaxing his mousy hair back into a quiff made him look faintly ridiculous. Also, the mischievous air he had about him, his eyes darting across the store, his fingers fidgeting at his sides, immediately marked him down to Gerry as a potential shoplifter. The West End, with its expensive stores and their constant turnover of staff and customers, was a magnet for theft and Gerry didn’t want anything disappearing on his watch. He approached the boy and asked if he could be of any help.

The kid’s nervous energy was soon explained. He was mad about the drums, he said, and he’d come down to Paramount because he’d heard that was the place to go for music equipment. He was hoping he could buy a kit one day soon, once he knew what it would cost and had started earning…. His speech fell out in excitable bursts, but Gerry recognised in it a genuine enthusiasm and sincerity.

“I play the drums as well,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Keith,” the boy replied in a working-class London accent Gerry thought he recognised. “Why, what’s yours?”

“Gerry. Where are you from?”

“Wembley,” said Keith, and Gerry knew what it was he’d recognised about the accent.

“I’m from Kingsbury,” he said. “We’re almost neighbours.”

At another time in their lives Gerry and Keith would never have become friends. They were the straight man and the funny man, with opposite outlooks on life that would drive one into a quiet business career and the other towards fame and fortune. But in London, in 1961, they were bound together by a love of the drums and by neighbourhood. Keith had never known anyone his age who owned a drum kit. Gerry had never met anyone with such enthusiasm and energy as his new-found friend.

“He was an off the wall character. And I think I’ve always been attracted to characters, good or bad. You either like them or you hate them.” Gerry liked them. And he came to love Keith. “We never rowed. We never had an argument in 18 months. And in a way I felt that I was his brother that he hadn’t had.”

As their friendship blossomed Gerry came to realise that his relationship with Keith was unusual in that the Wembley boy appeared not to have other close male friends. Yet this was not out of any lack of popularity: the pair of them couldn’t walk down Wembley High Street without Keith saying hello to everybody and their mother. And on the evenings that they’d be cruising the back streets and have to walk past gangs of older boys, Gerry would tense up, instinctively ready for the kind of name-calling and potential beating that has always been part of the adolescent ritual. But Keith would stop and crack a joke with the hard boys. “Because he was funny, they all liked him. He became the bully’s friend.” Still, it struck Gerry, Keith wasn’t
real
friends with any of these Wembley people. With Michael Morris across the street at Chaplin Road perhaps, but Gerry sensed that too was fading, as friendships often do when people’s lives change direction. It seemed as if now Keith was out of school, music was all he cared about, and with Gerry a friend who was also a drummer, well then, why did he need anyone else?

Gerry soon invited Keith to his home on Queensbury Circus to have a go on his drums (there was no way a 14-year-old could be let loose on the display kits at Paramount). Having talked so knowledgeably about the instrument over the short time they had known each other, Gerry expected Keith to be good. He was in for a shock.

“This bloke, he got on a drum set and he was Buddy Rich, Louis Bellson
⁸
immediately, he was like a madman let loose on a drum kit with no idea what he was doing. He was just hitting everything in sight, and making a load of noise. To me it was, a) the thing that you don’t do, and b) it sounded like rubbish. It was like dealing with a madman. I was saying to him, ‘No, don’t do all that, try and learn a paradiddle.’ And he wasn’t having any of that. There was no way that this guy was going to be a professional drummer, it was impossible, because he didn’t have a clue, he was like the worst drummer you’d ever seen in your life.”

Horrified, Gerry suggested to Keith he get a drum kit as soon as he could so that he could start
practising.
Of course, Keith replied, I’ll be getting a job any day now. But instead of finding work, Keith spent his summer days journeying into the West End on his own, always in that same brown Italian-cut suit as if it was the only decent clothing he owned. At lunch time, he would call on Gerry and the two of them would go to Berwick Street market, from where they’d sneak into a block of flats near the clip joints and take the lift to the rooftop to look over the Soho streets. Inevitably, once they were up there, Keith would produce a couple of apples or oranges he’d pilfered from the stalls on the way through Berwick Street: generous to a fault, if not completely honest, he never stole just for himself.

Then, towering above Soho, they’d point out all the relevant sights to each other. There to the east, on Old Compton Street, was the 21’s coffee shop where so many of the teen idols had been discovered; to the north was the Marquee, the trad jazz spot of the day. Further east was Denmark Street, where the music industry ran itself in a curiously insular fashion, all a matter of who you knew rather than what you knew and there, to the south, were the music shops of Shaftesbury Avenue. On the way back down from the flats, Keith would occasionally press the emergency button and stall the lift, then prise open the doors and jump up onto the ledge of the floor above. Gerry would complain about getting in trouble, but follow his new-found friend all the same.

Then Gerry would go back to work, Keith to wandering the streets of Soho, and they’d hook up again at Paramount near its six o’clock closing time. Gerry would tell Keith who had been in the store, who was going to be playing on whose records and what American acts might be coming over. On their way down Shaftesbury Avenue towards Piccadilly Circus tube station, as a matter of ritual they’d stop at the foot of Wardour Street to look in the windows of Cecil Gee, the clothing store that supplied stage outfits for the bands of the day. The styling of the suits on display was an obvious throwback to the Teddy boy era, but the colours were more outlandish than one would expect to see on the streets, bold proclamations of contrasting hues, like canary yellow with lilac blue pockets or blood-red crimson with lime-green fringes, and all with the round black shawl collars that were then in fashion.

Both teenagers dreamed out loud of one day wearing such clothes on stage. Except that every day, Gerry would then point to the most outrageous outfit of them all, a gold lamé suit priced at a princely 20 guineas – an entire month’s wages for these school-leavers – and turn to his friend and say, “But who on earth would have the guts to wear
that?”

And every day Keith would turn and grin, and state that not only did he have the guts to wear the gold lamé suit, but that he
would
wear it, just wait and see.

It was on the journeys back from Piccadilly Circus to the outskirts of north-west London that Gerry realised why everyone in Wembley knew the 14-year-old school-leaver. “He was all his life a sensation seeker. He did things for effect all the time. Everything was to have a laugh at somebody else’s expense. And you know, much as he was great and everybody loved him, he’d just drive you bloody insane.”

At first the antics were relatively harmless. They’d be on a crowded tube train, fighting for air, when Keith would turn to his friend and moan. “I’m going to be sick,” he’d say, and start making ominous guttural noises. As the carefully besuited businessmen looked suspiciously on at this obvious reprobate from the younger generation, Keith would stare back at them, warning, “I mean it, I’m gonna be sick.” Then he’d pull out a brown paper bag and make the worst retching noises you’d ever heard, loud enough to carry across the rattle of the tube as it hungrily ate its way through the inner city tunnels. “Baaaaaarrrrrrghhhghghgl Urrrrrrgghhghhhgl” The other passengers would wince and look away. Even Gerry would sometimes wonder if his friend was really all right. Eventually Keith would look up from the bag, his face pale, spittle across his lips, a final moan emanating from deep inside. The businessmen would have moved several feet away, pressing uncomfortably close on one another’s flesh in a desperate attempt to avoid seeing their valuable pinstripe suits splattered with vomit. Keith and Gerry would be left with yards of standing room all to themselves. Just in case, however, Keith would continue to wobble on his feet, holding the brown puffed up paper bag unsteadily as if he might drop its contents at any moment. If need be, or the mood took him, he would keep this up all the way home.

From Piccadilly Circus Keith could take the Bakerloo Line to Wembley Central, with Gerry getting off the stop after, but usually they would change to the Metropolitan Line at Baker Street, where trains from the upper platforms skipped most of the first ten stops on their way to Wembley Park. The pair would usually stop for a drink and a sandwich at the Baker Street tea bar. Often, when they were up on the platform, Keith would then produce a chocolate bar from nowhere.