Saturday, August 18th, 1973

Bad Moon rising

The Who’ top loon talks to RM’s Rick Sanders

KEITH MOON, drummer with The ‘oo, film star, radio DJ, probable British hovercraft racing champion and celebrity, has been talking all afternoon.  Let’s have a breather, he suggests, and, armed with chinking glasses of delight, we set off on a tour of Moon’s Little Acre.  Well, four acres to be precise, and set in the north Surry country just down the road from Elton John, the amazing Moon module house/ pool./ sauna/ice machine/patio/juke-box complex in the middle.

We head south across the law.  “This used to be a monastery”,  says Keith, “until they blew it up for a film.”  As we walk up a wooded hill, he points out the monks’ walk.  “They used to do their penances here”. he says, picking up two (used) beer cans. The gradient increases, and we reach the top, a tree-shaded slop/.  “And this is where they pushed the wicked ones over.”

We spent a good hour scrambling up and down the slop as Keith shows me where his neighbors live — there are badger setts, fox-holes and, further down the slope, a rabbit housing project.  He’s sat up and tried taking night photos, and knows that they’re there from the threads he’s strung across the entries which have been broken in the morning.  And when the foxes got at Billy Fury’s barn owls. “I was looking after them for Billy after he had a bit of a barney with his wife.  I’d taken precautions to keep the foxes out but they dug under the wire.  The owls didn’t have a chance against seven of them.”

Keith Moon, strange enchanted nature boy, is not, maybe, what you might have expected from the man who sank a thousand clubs.  “Unlike most of my neighbours,” he explains, “I grew up in Shepherd’s Bush.”

On the west side of the estate we come across Keith’s gamekeeper, 12-bore in his hand, and a couple of rabbits in the fridge.  He’s been after wood-pigeon, and grey squirrels, and discusses shotguns and policemen with Squire Moon.

“I don’t want you to think we jut go round killing for the sake of it”, says Keith, when we get back. “It’s not that at all, but squirrels cause untold havoc with the trees. You have to keep them down.”

And refreshed, it’s back into the house to listen to a preview of the Moon assault on British radio — his holiday relief job for John Peel on Top Gear.

It’s a different matter being funny on a stage and inside a studio, but Wonderful Radio Moon, despite a few longueurs, is a tonic.  “Allo! (grand music) It’s me, Keith.  Keith Moon of the ‘Oo.  The one at the back” and off into the Beach Boy’s Surfer Moon.  As he says after the record, it might well have been Moon River or even Moon Bobby McGee.  More records, David Bowie, James Gang, and then the imitation of Dave O’Leary Tompkins, D.O.:L.T., with his sloppy spot for mums.

And even better, they’ve found a promotion record by Al Green of pre-recorded answers to questions spoken in by any radio station that wants it’s listeners to think that they’ve got Al in the studio.  It’s remarkably funny, as is the Life With The Moons segment.  Wait till you hear it on August 21.  That’s Augst 21, on your favourite spot on the dial.

It all started when Viv Stanshall asked Keith to do some character parts in on of his radio programmes.  John Walters, Top Gears producer, liked it and asked Moon to do Peel’s holiday relief spot.  At first Keith was enthusiastic, then a little apprehensive, and then he finally realized that he did want to do it.

“By this time I’d done That’ll Be The Day (in which he did an excellent portrayal of a hack rock and roll drummer) and plenty of live theatre work with  the Who and studio work too. (How many know that it was Keith playing drums on Beck’s Bolero?)

“It was a challenge to do something that didn’t depend on expressions, something without visuals. Mind you, filming’s much easier than radio work.”

But surely anything seems hard when you start…how about playing at first in the band? “Starting drums came pretty naturally to me. I think I was born a performer.  I couldn’t work in an office and I couldn’t work on a factory floor.  My greatest pleasure is working iwht an audience — after all, it is my job, I am a professional entertainer.

“A professional musician is a very different thing, I don’t see myself as that.

“I’ve never believed in practicing, I just do it.  Whether it’s right or wrong, at least then you’ve laid your balls on the line.  As long as your wrists are supple, the practicing comes from your mind.  I never play the same thing in the same song twice — that’s why it’s great to work with Roger, Pete and John.  We all feel the same, we couldn’t play the same thing night after night.”

Why does Keith think the group have stayed together so long? “I know why, and it’s difficult to say because it’s so easy — because we love each other, at time we bloody well hate each other, but at least we’re always honest.  I don’t think a lot of groups are — it’s often much easier to lie, which eventually is bound to lead to a break-up

“Someone might say ‘that bloody Moon, he’s been a right flash bastard the last couple of weeks’, so they’ll pull me down a peg or two. I’ll walk away with a bruised ear and say they’re a load of wankers, but I’ll come to realize it was me, not them.  It’s happened to all of us.

“It took a period of years to get the group right, until we saw there was no point in anybody trying to bullshit — all you do is put yourself backwards.  You’ve got to think about what you’re doing because it affects everbody in the group.

“People see Roger making his own records, all of us doing our own things, me in films and on the radio, and say ah, I see you’re breaking away from The who, but the whole idea is that the group is the most important thing.  Whatever we do relates to the group. I can never get away from being Keith Moon of the Who.”

Just before leaving, Keith played a track from the new Who album, soon to be in your shops.  For the first time — well, if you don’t count Uncle Ernie on Tommy — for the first time, he’s singing.  At first I thought it was Daltrey, and then Keith has been wasted all these years.  It’s a number called Bell Boy and you never heard such a tremendous explosion of music.  It’s pure Who, the band playing with the skill and adventurousness of Who’s Next and the sheer power of Anywhere, Anyway, Anyhow.

“It’s going to be a monster”, says Keith “I’ve never felt so involved in anything the Who’s done before.  I can’t say much more about the album than that.  Yes, it’s a concept album, but for me it’s like a jigsaw and you don’t find out until you hear the final thing.”