By 1978 Keith Moon was already a legend in his own Bacardi and Coke. Not just the one, mind. The Who’s perpetual-motion machine of a drummer was long established as the quintessential rock’n’roll reprobate, a man who would go out drinking on a Friday night, come back the following Wednesday and then ask his long-suffering girlfriend, “Why didn’t you pay the ransom?” This is the man who once drove his car through the glass doors of a hotel, who then drove all the way up to the reception desk, got out and asked for his room key. His antics were considered so outrageous that he made Keith Richards, Jim Morrison and Ozzy Osbourne all seem like mischievous altar boys.

It is extraordinary what he got away with: in the early days of The Who, their piñata of a performance usually ended when Pete Townshend smashed one of his guitars or stabbed it into a speaker stack. This was then followed by Moon – looking like a demonic Wotan, with a demented glint in his eyes – upending his drum kit and letting off various smoke bombs. When the band made its US television debut on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967, Moon loaded his bass drum with rather more flash powder than usual; the resulting explosion blew the band off the stage, blinded the TV cameras and – legend has it – caused their fellow guest, the actress Bette Davis, to faint. A few months later, on tour in the UK with pop band The Herd, he put firecrackers in their piano and rigged up a wire-and-pulley system to the gong used by their drummer, so every time he attempted to bang the gong it would slightly move just out of his reach.

There was more (there was always more with Keith Moon). He soon developed a habit for destroying his hotel rooms while on tour, deliberately breaking the furniture and throwing things out of the windows (particularly TV sets). In 1972, in Copenhagen, he asked Townshend to help him put his waterbed into the hotel lift, so he could send it down to the lobby. When it burst – when was it not going to burst? – he rang the hotel manager, complained that the bed had ruined his stage clothes and was promptly upgraded to a bigger, antique-filled suite. Predictably Moon destroyed the room later that night. He also enjoyed breaking into bandmates’ rooms, removing all of their furniture and then relieving himself on the curtains. He would drive through villages in his Rolls-Royce, blaring out bogus public service announcements, dress up as a bald vicar and swear at people in the street, hire people to throw lemon pies at friends at Hollywood film premieres and once marched into Marks & Spencer on a mission to buy some one-legged trousers.

“When you’ve got money and you do the kind of things I get up to, people laugh and say that you’re eccentric,” said Moon, “which is a polite way of saying you’re fucking mad.”

Everything you’ve ever heard about Keith Moon is true. And you’ve only heard a tenth of it (Alice Cooper)

One of the most famous stories regarding Moon’s behaviour – and one that seems to become embellished with each telling – revolves around his 21st birthday party at the Holiday Inn in Flint, Michigan on The Who’s first American tour in 1967. By 10am, The Who, Herman’s Hermits (who, bizarrely, they were supporting) and their entire road crews were celebrating in and around the hotel’s outdoor swimming pool. By noon, there was so much booze in the pool that someone christened it the world’s largest Martini. As the day dragged on, with more people arriving and more booze flowing and with people starting to get naked in the pool (some taking fire extinguishers with them), a gigantic five-tier birthday cake was produced, which Moon proceeded to throw at anyone he could see (even though at this point he was finding it difficult to see anyone). Unsurprisingly, the police soon arrived, which is when Moon thought it a good idea to jump into a Lincoln Continental in the forecourt (in other versions of the story it’s either a Cadillac or a convertible Roller) in order to make a speedy getaway. Without any keys and with the handbrake released, the car slowly drifted into the pool area before becoming submerged in the water. Chastened, but still paralytic, “Moon The Loon” was then arrested, while the band received an immediate lifetime ban from all Holiday Inn properties.

Another apocryphal tragicomic story has him riding in a limo on the way to LAX before insisting that they return to their hotel, saying, “I forgot something.” At the hotel, he apparently ran up to his room, grabbed the TV and threw it out the window into the swimming pool below. He then jumped back into the car, saying, “I nearly forgot.” Longtime friend and personal assistant Peter “Dougal” Butler said, “He was trying to make people laugh and be Mr Funny. He wanted people to love him and enjoy him but he would go so far. Like a train ride you couldn’t stop.”

Alice Cooper, the “School’s Out” goth rocker who experienced his own fair share of extravagance in the Seventies, says this: “Nobody could compete with Keith Moon. Think of it this way: about 40 per cent of what you’ve heard about me or Iggy or Ozzy is probably true. Everything you’ve ever heard about Keith Moon is true and you’ve only heard a tenth of it. He’d come to Los Angeles and he’d stay at the house for a week. So I’d go out to a recording session and come back and he would be dressed like a French maid.”

“Keith lived his entire life as a fantasy,” says the band’s singer, Roger Daltrey. “He was the funniest man I’ve ever known, but he was also the saddest; I’ve seen Keith in some terrible times. I saw him at his height, but then I saw him at his lowest. Keith is someone I love deeply, but who was a deeply troubled character. I think he was possibly autistic, maybe even with a touch of Asperger’s. He had an incredible talent but was completely uncontrollable. Not just a little bit uncontrollable, completely uncontrollable. So when it came to the things that he really wanted to do, like becoming an actor, he could do one take and it would be wonderful. But when you’re making a film you have to do that ten times and of course every take he did was completely and utterly different. But he was brilliant.”

© Getty Images

Daltrey himself has been busy of late. While still relentlessly touring the world with Townshend as part of The Who’s apparently never-ending farewell tour – and they are playing again this year – he has recently found time to release two unexpectedly dynamic records: the 2014 collaboration with Wilko Johnston, Going Back Home, a partnership kick-started when the pair bumped into each other at the GQ Men Of The Year Awards, and this summer’s solo release, As Long As I Have You. Largely an album of excellent cover versions, it contains Daltrey’s interpretations of everything from Stevie Wonder’s “You Haven’t Done Nothin’” to Nick Cave’s “Into My Arms”. The standout is obviously the title track, a cover of the 1964 R&B classic by Garnet Mimms, which, in Daltrey’s hands, becomes as much of an homage to the genre as to the song itself. If you are a Led Zeppelin aficionado you will have already heard many live versions of this song, although the original tends to be ignored by the people who sequence radio programmes and Spotify playlists. Considering that many out there won’t have heard it before, Daltrey’s version could actually act as the original for some, an urgent, refreshingly unfashionable record that houses a widescreen key change that can stun at 100 paces. Townshend plays guitar on most of the album tracks and actually encouraged Daltrey to persevere after the singer briefly abandoned it, while the collab could be seen as an arbiter of future Who recordings – possible with Daltrey and Townshend writing together. If there is to be one final Who album – Who’s Last, maybe? – it seems it might be the duo’s first and final collaboration.

Death has swirled around Daltrey recently. Not only did he live through Wilko Johnson’s gruelling battle with pancreatic cancer (the former Dr Feelgood guitarist electing to forgo chemotherapy in favour of radical surgery), but he also experienced his own brush with death when he contracted meningitis while on tour in 2015. After weeks of tests and yet more weeks of uncertainty, Daltrey – a rock star who has always seemed like the most robust survivor of his generation – felt that it might be his time, that mortality had indeed finally caught up with him.

“I’d started making the record and then we did a couple of very hot gigs in Europe when they had that huge heatwave. We were playing in 120F heat and I lost so much sweat, as I suffer from low salt. Within two weeks of that I was crawling into The London Clinic on my hands and knees with nothing working. It was scary, really horrible.

“They spent ages trying to find what was wrong with me. They took bone marrow, I had brain scans, four lumbar punches, you name it, they gave it to me. They didn’t know if it was leukaemia, TB, but after about a week they told me I had meningitis, which I know a lot of people don’t come back from. That first week I really didn’t think I’d make it. I was trying to fight it but I was going mad. Once the brain starts to get pressured, weird things happen. I kept trying to escape from hospital with all these wires and tubes coming out of me. I was a nightmare patient. I was on Skype to some of my mates one day and I said, ‘I don’t think I’m gonna get through this...’ because it was absolute agony. But then I laid there, I’ll never forget it, I laid there that night on the worst day and said, ‘Rog, it doesn’t matter any more, this is getting ridiculous. Think about what you’ve done in your life, where you started, could you have ever dreamed about what you’ve done in your life? All the gigs we’ve done, all the people I’ve met, all the wonderful experiences I’ve had, being in the White House, being in Buckingham Palace, where kids like me growing up, where we came from, you’d never dreamed you’d get there. I just laid down and thought about all my kids. I haven’t left anyone in trouble. No one’s in debt, my wife is fine, everyone is taken care of. What are you holding on for?’ And this incredible peace came over me and all I can tell you is that it’s like being wrapped in cotton wool. I just let go, I stopped fighting it. And within two days I was starting to feel a bit better. It was incredible. It changed my thinking completely. I never saw any lights at the end of tunnel, but I was being wrapped in something and it was wonderful. And after that I couldn’t wait to get back in the studio.”

The anticipation of great fun and frolics was always tempered by a latent fear that something terrible was going to happen

He had originally been so dismissive of the album that he tried to buy it back from the record company (“People don’t realise how much I hate my voice”), but spurred on by Townshend, who liked the album so much he volunteered to play on it, Daltrey eventually finished it and seems as happy with this as he has been with anything else in his life. “I suppose it was a brush with mortality, but even though I was energised when I came out of the hospital, I’ve always been driven. That’s never been a problem for me.”

This drive is something that every member of The Who had and Keith Moon was no exception – although his work ethic didn’t always manifest itself in the way you might expect. One of Moon’s favourite stunts was flushing explosives down toilets (he loved an explosive, did Keith, who once dubbed himself the “Patent British Exploding Drummer”). This began in 1965 when he bought a case of 500 cherry bombs, moving to fireworks and then eventually dynamite. “All that porcelain flying through the air was quite unforgettable,” he said. “I never realised dynamite was so powerful.” A hotel manager once called the drummer in his room and asked him to lower the volume on his cassette because it was making “too much noise”. In response, Moon invited him up to his room, excused himself to go to the lavatory, stuck a lit stick of dynamite in the bowl and shut the bathroom door. He asked the manager to stay for a while, as he wanted to explain something. Following the explosion, Moon turned the recorder back on before saying, “That, dear boy, was noise. This is The Who.”

The phrase “Phew! Rock’n’roll!” could have been invented for Keith Moon. So could “Imperial vandalism”.

“Moon came into a room and he wanted to be the one who was the light bulb,” said the band’s manager, Bill Curbishley. “He wouldn’t just walk into any room and sit down and listen. He was an attention-seeker and he had to have it. I could never see Moon growing old gracefully.”

I used to know someone who knew Moon extremely well and who hung around with him during the Seventies. My friend said that the excitement of spending time with Moon, and the anticipation of great fun and frolics, was always tempered by a latent fear that something terrible was going to happen. “You could never tell what kind of mood he was going to be in until, of course, he arrived and then you knew immediately. You could see it in his eyes. It wasn’t often premeditated, but when he was in moods like this you knew he was going to pick on someone and then all hell would break loose. He loved to cause havoc; one of his favourite things was going up to someone’s wife and saying, ‘You’re going to get dumped tonight.’ He wouldn’t just do this down the pub; he’d do it backstage at Madison Square Garden. Light blue touchpaper and retire, or rather light blue touchpaper and drink a bottle of brandy.”

© Getty Images

Since Moon’s death, almost 40 years ago, on 7 September 1978, the rest of The Who have become increasingly protective of their friend, while Townshend and Daltrey have both gone out of their way to present a different kind of Moon: one who didn’t just play the fool.

“When I think of him, it is not as a drummer or a crazy man who indulged in stunts, but as someone whom I admired, whom I enjoyed being with, whose small foibles all seemed attractive and engaging to me,” said Townshend recently. “He was, above all things, very funny, with a great memory for gags and finding ways to bring them into everyday conversation. But he was also earnest and imaginative and it was very rare that I bored of being in his company.

“Sitting opposite him at a table, one would watch him take a toothpick and pick absentmindedly and without reason at his front teeth. He always kept his mouth closed when he did this. His almost black eyes would look into the distance and his mouth would pout and then in one of his most characteristic mannerisms he would swing the pout to one side as though he was using it as a rudder. It would be a signal. The faraway look would disappear and he would return to the room and in the early days come up with some joke or secondhand story that he thought would amuse. In later days it might be the signal for him to demand money, without saying why, and generally I gave it to him.”

By 1978, after a decade of continuous hellraising, Keith Moon was a bloated, shadowy version of his former self, a man who figured he had a lot more behind him than in front.

“The ‘loon’ stuff was a big part of Keith’s world,” says Townshend. “His stunts created a constant flow of PR for The Who. Otherwise we might have discouraged him. They were mostly very funny, but not always. I often felt sorry for Keith when he was in his most ostentatious mode, off stage. It was almost as though he felt his stage work was not enough, that he had to keep performing.”

For some time now Daltrey has been working on a film of Moon’s life, although having had many false dawns he still doesn’t have a workable screenplay. His latest collaborator is Jeff Pope, who wrote Philomena with Steve Coogan. “Jeff gets what we’re trying to do with it,” says Daltrey. “We’re trying to avoid making Carry On Keith, because it’s much more of a story than that. He’s involved in something at the moment, but hopefully after that we can start working on a script.”

Every facet of Keith’s life was in his eyes. Joy. Humour. It was almost like he was schizophrenic in a lot of ways (Roger Daltrey)

His next task will be to cast it, which he says he’ll have to do from the eyes down. “Moon’s eyes had a look. You rarely see it but when you do, you see this incredible depth. Every facet of life was in his eyes. Joy. Humour. It was almost like he was schizophrenic in a lot of ways. Always different. But it has to be these big brown Moon eyes. And finding that actor is not going to be easy because he’ll have to be one hell of an actor. When Keith died he was 32, but he looked 60. He really hammered it. When it came to hammering himself, he was a professional.”

For years I had one of Keith Moon’s drumsticks, thrown into the audience at a gig in 1975. It moved everywhere with me, from bedsit to flat to – oh, damn, where did it go? I’d kept it as it was always the drums I liked most about The Who, the drums that first appealed to me, the drums that I thought made the band sound so wild, so anarchic, the drums that filled me with such an urgent sense of immortality. If you listen closely (in truth, you don’t have to listen that closely) to the drums on Who’s Next, it’s not only the supercharged “Baba O’Riley”, “Bargain” or “Won’t Get Fooled Again” that sound so important, it’s the other songs too: “My Wife”, “Going Mobile” and “Getting In Tune”. Take away Moon’s feverish bashing and the songs sound almost prosaic. On some songs, you can even imagine Moon sitting down, picking up his sticks and starting to drum away on his own little journey, obviously never oblivious to what was going on around him, but knowing he could make it to the end without needing to turn himself into a human metronome. “Six 34? Sure, I’ll set off now and see you at the end.” Moon’s magic was actually gold dust, adding a sparkle and at least an extra 40 per cent to every record he ever played on.

Pete Townshend is a genuine musical and lyrical genius who wrote generation-defining songs, sung by an accomplice – the incomparable Roger Daltrey – who had no problem singing them, yet, like no other band before or since, The Who were defined by their drummer. Moon’s style was so idiosyncratic, so brutal and so surreal, that it became impossible to imagine the band without him. Which is why it was so difficult for them when Moon died in 1978 and why their frenzied noise was never the same again.

The best way to understand The Who’s very particular dynamic is to read James Wood, writing in the New Yorker in 2010: “The Who had extraordinary rhythmic vitality and it died when Keith Moon died, 32 years ago... Pete Townshend’s hard, tense, suspended chords seem to scour the air around them; Roger Daltrey’s singing was a young man’s fighting swagger, an incitement to some kind of crime; John Entwistle’s incessantly mobile bass playing was like someone running away from the scene of the crime; and Keith Moon’s drumming, in its inspired vandalism, was the crime itself. Most rock drummers, even very good and inventive ones, are timekeepers. There is a space for a fill or a roll at the end of a musical phrase, but the beat has primacy over the curlicues... Keith Moon ripped all this up.”

We love the power chords (how easy it is to drown in the aural pyrotechnics of “The Kids Are Alright”, “Substitute”, “Pinball Wizard”, “5:15”, “How Many Friends” and all the rest; we love the abrasive complexity of Townshend’s stripped-down ballads (“Blue, Red And Grey”, “Too Much Of Anything”, “They Are All In Love”); we love the studied belligerence of the microphone-flailing Daltrey; and we love the way Entwistle used to walk on stage as though he were looking for his dog. Most of all, though, we love the madman on the riser, eagerly creating harmony from chaos.

Moon's primitive and impulsive drumming drove The Who's records and live performances before his death aged 32 in 1978, the year this photograph was taken © Getty Images

Keith Moon was born on 23 August 1946, spending his formative years in Wembley, not far from the famous stadium. His mother bought him a drum kit when he was 14 and it was soon apparent that he was a natural. His style was idiosyncratic, involving tom-tom work, cymbal crashes and incessant drum fills. As he had been a hyperactive child, this was perhaps not so surprising. His art teacher at Alperton Secondary Modern said, in his report, that Moon was “retarded artistically. Idiotic in other respects.” His music teacher meanwhile said that he “has great ability but must guard against a tendency to show off”.

Having bashed around for a while with bands such as The Escorts and The Beachcombers, in 1964, aged 17, Moon teamed up with Daltrey, Townshend and Entwistle to form The Who, a band that would soon turn out to be one of the greatest in the world. Moon’s manic, seemingly chaotic style of drumming helped the band become London’s most dynamic live attraction. Flamboyant and vaudevillian, in person he was like his drumming. There was no compressional wake like there is ahead of an earthquake: Boom! He was in the room. The song had started. Even the name “Moon” had a duality about it, “evoking both the round cherubic face and saucer eyes of the demonically possessed choirboy he appeared to be during the early years of The Who”, the rock biographer Charles Shaar Murray once said, “and the transformational powers ascribed to the nocturnal heavenly body”.

Like many of the more important creatives of his generation, Townshend’s work was informed not just by his post-war childhood, but with the highly particular melding of post-National Service freedoms and inherited Second World War trauma. This, coupled with an acute identity crisis (something that many others of his generation experienced) made him a more than formidable writer and performer. But then everyone in The Who was acting out some form of identity crisis, especially on stage, where it was possible to reinvent yourself as an amplified version of yourself (in The Who’s case, quite literally).

“Trauma is passed from generation to generation,” Townshend once said. “I’ve unwittingly inherited what my father experienced.” In his 2012 autobiography, Who I Am, he wrote, “So many children had lived through terrible trauma in the immediate post-war years in Britain that it was quite common to come across deeply confused young people. Shame led to secrecy; secrecy led to alienation. For me, these feelings coalesced in a conviction that the collateral damage done to all of us who had grown up amid the aftermath of war had to be confronted and expressed in all popular art – not just literature, poetry or Picasso’s ‘Guernica’. Music too. All good art cannot help but confront denial on its way to the truth.”

Keith thought the drums should be at the front and the singer out the back (Roger Daltrey)

This was one of the reasons Townshend was such a trenchant songwriter (the other reasons being his extraordinary gift for melody and dynamics). Denial. Frustration. Fear. Anger. Hate. Self-hate. It’s all still there whenever you see him on stage or on film slashing at his guitar like a frenzied windmill. For Townshend, music was physical, but then it was for the rest of The Who too (someone once said they formed a kind of collective sculpted destruction), especially the human hurricane that was Keith Moon. His freedoms, like many of his generation, were as confusing as they were liberating. Unable to articulate this newfound emancipation, he bashed things instead.

Moon’s style of drumming was obviously unique and yet his bandmates often found his unconventional playing frustrating, with Entwistle complaining that he tended to play faster or slower according to his mood. “He wouldn’t play across his kit. He’d play zig-zag. That’s why he had two sets of tom-toms. He’d move his arms forward like a skier.” Still, his style, as well as his persona, was the basis for Animal in The Muppet Show – the puppet even looked like him (as one critic observed, Wyndham Lewis could have dreamed him up just so Jim Henson could clone him). For such a larger-than-life character, it’s fitting that he came up with the name Led Zeppelin. When he briefly considered leaving The Who in 1966, he spoke to Entwistle and Jimmy Page about forming a sort of supergroup. He said the suggestion had gone down like a “lead zeppelin” (rather than lead balloon), a name Page kept in his back pocket for when he actually needed it a few years later.

Moon liked to play-act and would affect a pompous English accent, influenced in part by one of the band’s former managers, Kit Lambert. He also started using the phrase “dear boy” when addressing people, something else he stole from Lambert. He loved to waltz around London, too. Mayfair has often been the home of dandies and show-offs, especially during the Sixties, when nascent pop stars roamed the neighbourhood in search of entertainment and expensive trousers. At this time the postcode seemed to encourage a kind of sartorial extremism, almost as though it were some sort of fashion theme park. Over in Soho, on the other side of Regent Street, the Carnabetian Army may have been marching in time to the metronomic reveille of seasonal trends, but in and around Berkeley Square the fops, coxcombs and recently emancipated young musicians from the suburbs were wandering around in bright feather boas, snakeskin boots, Regency suits, kipper ties, extravagant scarves, fur coats and feathered hats.

And then there was Keith Moon. As the flamboyant drummer with the loudest, most anarchic group on the circuit, The Who’s baby-faced wild man was already carving himself a place in rock history because of his erratic behaviour and his phenomenal capacity for drink and drugs. So it was perhaps not so surprising that he also became something of a fashion plate, too, embracing the generational penchant for peacock fashions and proto bling. Before joining The Who he would look in the window of men’s outfitters Cecil Gee and stare at the outlandish suits on display – slightly retro teddy boy creations in canary yellow and lilac, for instance, or blood-red crimson and lime green. One day a friend pointed to one of the Cecil Gee suits, a monstrous gold lamé number, and said to Moon, “But who on earth would have the guts to wear that?” The drummer’s response was predictable: not only would he have the guts to wear it, one day he actually would. And he did.

His sense of humour was challenging, to say the least – the morning after Mick and Bianca Jagger’s wedding in 1971, the bride apparently remembers waking to find Moon abseiling through her window, naked except for novelty glasses and a pair of knickers on his head – and yet his self-deprecating nature made him dangerously appealing. He did, obviously, have a habit for leaving the house dressed as a nun or a member of the SS and while he would never limit his fancy-dress escapades to those venues that perhaps encouraged them, he was always mindful that he would be accompanied by photographers wherever he went. By which I mean that while he was often caught in inappropriate clothing, he made sure he looked stylish while he was being offensive.

Moon ingested a mixture of brandy and tranquillisers before the concert, then passed out behind his kit

Moon spent a lot of his time in New York, usually staying at the Hotel Navarro. In the Seventies, the Navarro was as much of a rock’n’roll hotel as 44th Street’s Iroquois Hotel became in the Eighties, playing host to everyone from The Who and The Rolling Stones to The Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin. As Tony Fletcher writes in Dear Boy: The Life Of Keith Moon, “The group had finally found a New York hotel that would not just put them up, but would actually put up with them. The Navarro, on Central Park South, had as its manager a genial Irishman by the name of Mr Russell who seemed, almost impossibly, quite content to let The Who stay on his premises for as long as they desired.” According to Fletcher, when the band was staying at the hotel during the abortive attempt to record Lifehouse (the follow-up to Tommy that ultimately morphed into Who’s Next), Moon was frustrated by his inability to get into the sound engineer’s room to hear some of the demos. Since the rooms were adjoining, Moon simply started carving a hole in the wall with a knife stolen from room service until he eventually loosened a brick and, covered head to toe in dust and looking like an Ealing comedy villain, appeared in the room to retrieve the tapes.

The Navarro was turned into a Ritz-Carlton, then an InterContinental before becoming the Westin Central Park South. Twelve years ago it was converted into condominiums, an anodyne building that echoes so much of what passes for modern architecture in the city. But although it is more than 40 years since Moon stayed here, you can still find various people in the hospitality business in the city who talk in hushed tones about the day that The Who drummer paid nine cab drivers $100 each to block off the street outside the hotel, then, having ensured the blockade was in place, proceeded to go back up to his room, where he threw the entire contents out the window. “Not even Led Zeppelin behaved like he did,” one aged Upper East Side concierge said to me recently. Moon was especially fond of touring, since it was not only a chance to regularly socialise with his bandmates, it was also an opportunity to socialise with everyone and anyone else. Moon loved to party so much it was almost an occupation in itself, an excuse to massively show off. At various points in his career he attempted to move into films, but while he had a cameo in Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels, the rock’n’roll film That’ll Be The Day and its sequel, Stardust, as well as the movie version of Tommy, he didn’t have the discipline to make a serious go of it. The producer David Puttnum said, “The drinking went from being a joke to being a problem. On That’ll Be The Day it was social drinking; by the time Stardust came around it was hard drinking.” And this was 1974.

Having said that, even when he was at home he behaved as though he was on tour. “People would come to deliver a pizza or do a mural and be there four weeks,” Richard Barnes, one of the band’s biographers, once said.

For Moon, life was a lark, an opportunity to cause chaos. He was the life and soul, a radiator, not a sponge. And it was no surprise when life caught up with him. Predictably, Moon’s legacy has been burnished by time and a complex character has become traduced by the music industry’s willingness to turn him into a cartoon. As the New Yorker wrote last year about Bob Marley, he became “a myth capacious enough to absorb every new revelation”. This happens with all dead rock stars, particularly the ones who spent their time on earth pushing their own personal envelope as hard as they could.

Keith was one of the few people who made Peter Sellers laugh (Roger Daltrey)

This autumn sees the publication of Daltrey’s long-awaited autobiography, a book that was eventually sold at auction for a figure rumoured to be more than £2 million. He isn’t one for setting the record straight – whenever Daltrey has needed to do that, he has tended to do it in person – although he describes in some detail the various ways in which the band complemented each other.

“Pete always said that we made a fortune out of misery and yet in the thousands of pictures of us we’re always laughing our heads off,” says Daltrey. “I’ve got a thousand pictures and we’re always in fits of laughter. Basically, I just wanted to see if I had a book in me. So I paid someone to do interviews with me and he wrote it all down and I started to piece it together. And then I wrote over it, because speaking is not the same. You have to kind of dig at it. You have to craft it. So lo and behold I now have a book and everybody seems to like it. My memory has been pretty good of the past, [but] if I’ve got anything wrong and I’ve insulted anybody in it, apart from the ones I’ve meant to insult, I apologise!”

There is also a lot of Moon in the book, perhaps because Daltrey doesn’t feel he’s been done justice elsewhere. “Moon could talk forever about things that you would never believe and he had an education way beyond his schooling. His vocabulary was unbelievable. He did a lot of reading. He was one of the few people who made Peter Sellers laugh. Peter Sellers loved him. He was a miserable bugger, but he made Pete laugh just by being Keith. He was fearless. Just to think he used to go to film premieres in LA dressed as Hitler! My God! He was mates with Mel Brooks so he got away with it, but can you imagine it today?

“He was the best mimic I’ve ever known. He did a wonderful John [Entwistle]. On John’s birthday, I think in 1976, we spent a whole day on John. I spent the whole day getting Keith a wardrobe, making him dye his hair, gluing on a Fu Manchu moustache, building a ‘John Entwistle’. And John got so pissed off. He had all the mannerisms, all the things John used to do. He had a strange gait, a John Wayne gait. He did it perfectly.”

By 1973 Moon’s excessive lifestyle started to effect his reliability. That year, at the Cow Palace in Daly City, California, he ingested a mixture of brandy and tranquillisers before the concert, then passed out behind his kit during “Won’t Get Fooled Again”. The band stopped playing while their roadies carried their drummer off stage to give him a shower and a cortisone injection. Half an hour later he was back on stage, before passing out again, this time during “Magic Bus”. The band continued without him for several songs before Townshend turned to the crowd and asked, “Can anyone play the drums? I mean somebody good?” A drummer in the audience, Scot Halpin, came up and played the rest of the show. Over the next few years Moon would do this time and time again. At the end of their 1976 US tour he spent eight days in the Hollywood Memorial Hospital.

Moon had already been marked by tragedy. In 1970 he accidentally killed his friend, driver and bodyguard, Neil Boland, outside a pub in Hertfordshire. Some regulars had started to attack Moon’s Bentley, and Moon, drunk, began driving to escape them. During the fracas he hit Boland. After the investigation, coroners ruled Boland’s death an accident, with Moon receiving an absolute discharge. However, he was haunted by Boland’s death for the rest of his life.

Is a Who record that doesn’t feature Keith Moon actually a Who record?

The Who released surprisingly few albums, only eight by the original band, if you discount their extraordinary genre-defying audio vérité album, Live At Leeds, from 1970. The Beatles managed 13 while, in their time, The Rolling Stones have delivered 25, about the same as The Kinks and David Bowie. Each Who album is its own curiosity. Their debut album, My Generation, from 1965, is vital, incendiary, but, even by the band’s own standards, uneven; A Quick One, from 1966, is full of nonrepresentative song choices, accessorised by Townshend’s growing penchant for experimentation; The Who Sell Out, from 1967, is genuine pop art, but a bugger to play live. Then in 1969 came Tommy, the original concept album, a behemoth that would eventually overshadow many of the excellent songs it contained, an album that would go on to influence the band’s second great concept album, 1973’s mighty Quadrophenia. In between came 1971’s Who’s Next, not just the group’s greatest album, but justly acknowledged as one of the greatest albums of all time. There would be one more album – 1975’s masterful curate’s egg, The Who By Numbers – before 1978’s Who Are You, a record that stands as their last great studio excursion.

Who Are You was released in August 1978 but had started life a year earlier as Townshend’s riposte to punk. It was not only the last Who album to feature Moon, it was also really the band’s last hurrah, as after this they were never able to fully engage with the zeitgeist. (I remember being at the band’s comeback performance at the Rainbow in May 1979 and watching as Townshend continually berated their new drummer, Kenney Jones, for what looked like minor percussive misdemeanours, but which were probably more fundamental: he was berating him because he wasn’t Keith Moon.) They would continue to tour sporadically, becoming one of the biggest live attractions in the business, and perform at some of the most high-profile events of the next 40 years – Live Aid, the closing ceremony of the 2012 Olympics, 2016’s Desert Trip – but in the studio this was the last time they came out of the blocks with anything resembling their old panache. One of the fundamental reasons is because this was the last time Moon would be heard on a Who record. Which answered a question no one in the band ever wanted to ask: is a Who record that doesn’t feature Keith Moon actually a Who record?

“The word I would use to describe Keith’s drumming is ‘free’ rather than ‘anarchic’,” says Townshend, “he knew no boundaries. Buddy Rich liked Keith’s playing and so did other jazz drummers I met. Charlie Watts also loved Keith’s fluid style. I think Keith’s biggest fan was John Bonham, who always watched Keith intently when he could, sitting in for the entire recording of ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’.”

“My relationship with him was quite strange, really, because I was kind of an antagonist to him in the beginning, because I stood in front of him,” says Daltrey. “Keith always thought the drums should be at the front of the stage and that the singer should be out the back. But that was Keith, so what can you say? So we started off as kind of enemies and ended up as the best of friends. But maybe that’s because I was the only one who was solid. Because the other two were addicts, too. You know, maybe I was always the serious one, the one who flushed the drugs down the toilet because I cared about the music, [the] band. Maybe underneath all that there was something of what I was, something solid and grounded that stayed with him. Maybe. Or maybe I was just the last one who answered the phone.”

There were the occasional fisticuffs in the studio, but then this was par for the course with The Who

The title track of Who Are You has been called The Who’s greatest “Christ! I’m hungover... what happened last night?” song. The lyrics recount an incredibly drunken day in which Townshend followed a rancourous meeting at the band’s accountants with a trip to London’s Speakeasy club, where he bumped into Steve Jones and Paul Cook from The Sex Pistols. The trio drank themselves into musical oblivion, with Townshend apologising for his band’s dinosaur status and the ingenues paying homage to one of their few genuine musical heroes. On leaving the club, he passed out in a Soho doorway before being woken up by a policeman and told to scarper. It was at this point that Townshend apparently slurred, “Who the fuck are you?”, although on record the cry is directed also at Cook and Jones as well as himself.

“Who Are You” has become something of a classic, a status confirmed by its use as the title theme of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, a blustering, almost anthemic crowd-pleaser with something of a complex middle section. It juxtaposes bombast and tenderness in a way that only The Who (and maybe Led Zeppelin) could ever do convincingly. The other classic song on the album is “Love Is Coming Down”, a tale of alienation with a terrific melody that wouldn’t have been out of place on Quadrophenia. Another song worthy of inclusion in any greatest hits package is Entwistle’s “Had Enough”, a trundling road film of a song that could have been designed to be listened to in a large vintage car driving through the streets of West Hollywood. Elsewhere, the quality varies. “Sister Disco” and “Music Must Change” wear their ambitions rather too vividly on their sleeves, while the chug-a-lug “New Song” sounds like something they’d rattle through during a sound check. The album occasionally sounds a little dated today, although there is more than enough here to keep both devoted and new fans happy. And even though Moon wasn’t in the best physical or emotional state, his performances are just fine. The only song he had a problem with was “Music Must Change”, which was in 6/8 and something Moon couldn’t play (they ended up putting footsteps on the track instead). Unlike on previous Who albums, most of the band’s parts were recorded separately, mainly due to Moon’s faltering abilities. Recording wasn’t helped by a maintenance engineer announcing every day at 6pm, “Gentlemen, the bar is open.” There were the occasional fisticuffs in the studio, but then this was par for the course with The Who. “We used to fight regularly,” remembered Moon in later years.

Released in August 1978, Who Are You was a huge hit, reaching No2 on the US charts and going platinum in the process. The title track, released as a single the previous month, reached No18 in the UK and No14 in the US, yet all of this was overshadowed by the untimely death of Keith Moon on 7 September, dying in his sleep having accidentally overdosed on sedatives. Ironically, on the album cover he is sitting in a chair labelled “Not To Be Taken Away”. At the session, the photographer Terry O’Neill had asked him to straddle the chair Christine Keeler-style in order to cover up his paunch.

“Who Are You seems like yesterday but, more importantly, it’s 40 years since we lost Mooney,” says Daltrey now, finally free of meningitis but forever mourning the passing of his friend.

The Who on stage at Paris' Fête de l'Humanité musican festival, 9 September 1972 © Getty Images

Moon’s death happened after another night partying, caused by an accidental overdose of Heminevrin, a sedative that was intended to combat alcoholism. Police reports indicate that he took nearly a third of his 100-pill prescription, although Moon had always had a habit of taking pills by the handful. “It was just a habit that he had,” said Townshend. He had been taking the medication for some time. Quelling any craving for alcohol, it nevertheless left users in a docile state, but it worked. In the days before his death, Moon had apparently been seriously cutting back on his intake.

On 6 September, Paul McCartney had thrown a party at the Covent Garden diner Peppermint Park to celebrate what would have been Buddy Holly’s 42nd birthday. The former Beatle had acquired Holly’s publishing rights and a biopic, The Buddy Holly Story, was premiering the same night. Along with many other celebrities, Moon turned up to the party, along with girlfriend Annette Walter-Lax, the paparazzi cameras clicking like cicadas. She had warned him about drinking too much and guests remember seeing the drummer in a surprisingly sober state. After the party, the couple went across to watch the midnight premiere of The Buddy Holly Story at the Odeon in Leicester Square, although after about an hour into the film Moon insisted they go home. Once there, she cooked him some lamb cutlets – a favourite – before he swallowed his pills and went to bed around 4am. Three-and-a-half hours later he was awake again, demanding more food – lamb cutlets again – taking more pills and going back to sleep. When Walter-Lax woke up just before 4pm she found him dead. An ambulance was called but he was officially pronounced dead at 5.50pm at Middlesex Hospital. The autopsy revealed he had 26 undissolved Heminevrin tablets still in his stomach. He was just 32.

As he has been ever since, Daltrey was immediately protective of Moon, irritated by the media’s almost instant desire to turn him into a clown. “I was very close to Keith towards the end,” says Daltrey. “[My wife] Heather and I were really the last people picking up the phone to him at four o’clock in the morning, almost every morning, with him crying on the phone because he was trying to sober up. It was a terrible time. Everybody had given up on him. And I was trying to get him fit. I said, ‘You get fit, Keith, and I’ll get Pete back on the road.’ And Keith just... well, look, that’s part of the story.”

To paraphrase Charles Shaar Murray’s fitting testament, it was Pete Townshend who wrote, “I hope I die before I get old,” it was Roger Daltrey who ended up singing it, but it was Keith Moon who actually went and did it.

Roger Daltrey's autobiography is out in October. As Long As I Have You is out now. Follow us on Vero for exclusive music content and commentary, all the latest music lifestyle news and insider access into the GQ world, from behind-the-scenes insight to recommendations from our Editors and high-profile talent.

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