The Who talk about KEITH MOON

ROGER: What can you say, he was like every chicks dream drummer. He really was, he was like, he was the glamour in the group, then he went mad.

KEITH: At Harrow Tech they started a band and the music teacher would just sort of say well there’s ah, they’re doing a bit of, er, extra curicula work. You know, and it’s on music, studying up on music, and convinced the headmaster that it was important. They gave us a room to ourselves and we just started a little sort of a jazz group then really, and I got my first set of drums. It was 16 quid I think, painted, you know, a nice Chinese laquer green. You know, just sort of a mickey mouse kit. First when I joined the band I’d gone up a step and I had a sort of thirty quid kit and ah, they took one look at it and said well, ah, you’ve gotta get something a bit decent. And so that was when I first started really to get into debt. And so I went out and bought this kit that I couldn’t afford and infact I probably still owe the H. P. on it. It’s about two quid a week you know, for a hundred years.

KEITH: When I first met the band I was bright ginger. I’d dyed the barnet, and I’d been out and bought this god damn awful sort of bright ginger suit and it just so happened that when I first joined the band I was wearing this thing. I mean it was horrendous, I mean the ultimate in bad taste, but then of course you know with the round neck collar and it was foam backed. Terrible if it rained you know, the suit stayed wet, it was like a sponge, you know it stayed wet for about three months. You went out in the rain and it looked like the Michelin man.

JOHN: We were playing in Green for one night with the session drummer and this fellow walked up to us and said my mate can play better than your drummer, and so we said well lets hear him then, bring him up. So he brought up this little gingerbread man and it was Keith with dyed ginger hair and a brown shirt, brown tie, brown suit, brown shoes and he just looked like a little gingerbread man. And he got up on the kit and we said can you play Roadrunner because we actually hadn’t come across a drummer that could play Roadrunner with us, and he played Roadrunner and we thought oh well this is the fellow. You know he played it perfectly and fitted in really well, and actually the first gig he actually turned up to with us was ah, I think it was a wedding. He turned up and he put his little blue drum kit up and then got this huge coil of rope and tied it all together, and we couldn’t understand why until he went into a drum solo and everything started to sway backwards and forwards.

KEITH: Well drums are the most physical and the most agressive. But it’s the way an instrument’s played, I mean Pete plays the most agressive chords and the most agressive guitar, with attack. I play the drums agressively and John plays sort of round all the agression. The agressiveness towards each other, the early agression, still comes through in the music when we’re on stage. It’s still every man for himself, and if you can’t take it, get out, because nobody is going to give way. And it doesn’t matter what instrument you’re playing, the drums certainly are the easiest to be agressive with because they’re the most physical.

KEITH: I can’t remember recording some of ‘em. I mean some of them we were going through, I was either drunk, drunk in charge, and I don’t remember. I don’t remember playing Substitute at all, I was just too stoned. And when it came out I accused the other members of the group of getting another drummer in. It doesn’t seem wild to me, I’m just clumsy. I mean, things get broken and things fall into swimming pools and it’s just ah, I’m a lousy driver ah ah, I’m very clumsy, I mean that’s about it. Erm, I’ve got better at it, over the years with the practice, I had lots of practice in the ten years with the ‘oo . The most particular ones I can’t remember, for the same reason I can’t remember playing on Substitute.

PETE: Keith Moon is an obvious actor, you know what I mean.