October 2013

Did anyone take any decent pictures of last night’s show?

October 10, 2013 David Hepworth 0

I was somewhat preoccupied so I didn’t. Which is a shame because it seemed to go very well. Can’t tell you how much simpler it […]

Word In Your Ear

David Hepworth, Mark Ellen and chums cast an occasionally jaundiced eye over the goings-on in the worlds of music and entertainment.

The life of Keith Moon can be seen as Animal from the Muppets or as a dark, psychological odyssey. And the two co-exist in Tony Fletcher’s magnificent ‘Dear Boy’, first published in 1998, never out of print and now ‘remastered’ with new pictures, updates, epilogues and a foreword by Mandy Moon who “has to keep reminding myself this person was my father”. Tony looks back here at events along the way, many of which now seem unimaginable. Among them …

… fact versus fiction: his fudged birthdate, his hidden marriage, the Roller in the swimming-pool

… Tony’s meeting with Moon two months before he died

… the letters to his wife Kim when touring America

… Mel Gibson, Mike Myers, Jason Schwartzman, all once in line to play Keith onscreen

… “I killed a man”: the terrible incident with his chauffeur

… the legs in the bath, the head in the bed, the loudspeaker in the bushes: the punchline of all his pranks was “someone’s going to suffer”

… “working-class rock stars who conquered the world like pirates without a map”

… would things have been different if he’d been hailed as a pioneering drummer?

… the times he met Larry Hagman and Oliver Reed

… do book publishers look down on drummers the way musicians do?

… to Golders Green with Viv Stanshall in German uniforms and an open-topped car: #DifferentTimes

… and a sad and telling moment on the Stardust film shoot.