The domestic arrangements of The Who were never a mystery to journalists. Alone among acts of their stature during the early 1970s they welcomed music writers into their homes for interviews, and it was no secret that Roger Daltrey owned a manor house in the village of Burwash on the Kent-Sussex border, that John Entwistle lived in a relatively modest semi-detached house in Ealing, and that after staying in a series of rented flats in central London Pete Townshend had moved his growing family into a large house next to the River Thames in Twickenham, a stone’s throw from Eel Pie Island where on October 30, 1968, The Who had performed in the dance hall of the island’s small hotel.
As might be expected,
Keith Moon was less settled than his three colleagues, moving from his
birthplace in Wembley to a flat in St John’s Wood, then to the top half of a
house in Maida Vale, then to a flat above a garage in Highgate and then to a
substantial house in North London’s Winchmore Hill. Along the way he had
married a model named Kim Kerrigan and become the father of a daughter but
while at Winchmore Hill his marriage to Kim faltered and she went back to live
with her parents in Bournemouth, taking daughter Mandy with her. Keith promptly
abandoned the North London house for a bachelor flat in Chelsea, but when Kim
decided to give him another chance they bought a property off St Ann’s Hill
Road, on the outskirts of Chertsey in Surrey. I would visit Tara House, as it
was called, many times, both before and after it became notorious as Moon’s
ultra-modern pleasure-dome, a futuristic fantasy house consisting of five
pyramids, four at each corner with a giant one in the middle. It was set in its
own grounds but not too far away from a pub, The Golden Grove, conveniently
located at the end of a 300-yard lane that led to chez Moon and, unhappily for
its occupants, one other property.
Keith and Kim bought the
house for £65,000 (approximately £925,000 in today’s money) and moved in during
the early months of 1971. On two of its corners were bedrooms, each with
en-suite bathrooms, another housed a ‘den’, its walls decorated with murals of
superhero comic characters, and the fourth the kitchen which led to a guest
bedroom and thence to the garage. The strange layout of Tara consisted of rooms
within rooms, and the main bedroom housed a bathroom within it, ie you could
walk all the way around it. The bed-head was up against the outer bathroom
wall, facing a huge wall-sized window, and there was a spherical TV hanging
from a chain fixed to the ceiling. The loo was within the bathroom, and John
Lennon’s gold disc for ‘She Loves You’ was mounted on the wall next to a mirror
above the basin. Keith told me he’d swopped it for his gold disc for ‘My
Generation’.
In the centre of the
huge main room was a sunken conversation pit with seating on three sides, a
brass chimney pipe descending from the apex of the pyramid to an open fire next
to a built-in TV. Around the pit was a spacious raised area on all four sides.
Three sides of the building boasted glass walls to a height of about six feet, a
decidedly rash choice since the master of the household had a habit of walking
into them, sober or otherwise.
In the manner of the
modern day trend of B-listers for welcoming photographers from celebrity
magazines into their homes in exchange for a sum of money and a picture spread
within, the Moons announced their acquisition to the world by opening up the
grounds for a July housewarming party that doubled as a celebration for the
release of Who’s Next. The press were
bussed in from London, many other rock stars were in attendance – among them George
Harrison and Ronnie Wood as I recall – and the evening concluded with a
firework display that climaxed with the words ‘Long Live The Who’ illuminated
in the sky. Predictably there were complaints from neighbours and the police
were called, a taster of things to come.
The likelihood that
Keith Moon would settle into quiet domesticity in his new home was remote. The
household consisted of Keith and Kim, their daughter Mandy, Kim’s mother Joan,
who was separated from Kim’s father, and her son Dermot, and despite the
presence of two young children the atmosphere at Tara was constantly chaotic.
Keith was at all times performing, at least when I was there, though he did let
his guard down late at night when no one else was around. He had a habit of
playing Beach Boys’ music extremely loudly, often the same song – ‘Don’t Worry
Baby’ – over and over again on his juke box in the den. Such was the regularity
of police visits that he and they became affably acquainted, largely because
Keith was invariably genial towards the long arm of the law. “Come in chaps,”
he’d say. “Have a brandy. Let’s listen to some music while we discuss what
seems to be troubling you. I’m sure we can work things out.” In the fullness of
time a relationship developed between ma-in-law Joan and a member of the
Chertsey Constabulary that further reinforced the unlikely but convivial
rapport between the drummer of The Who, rock’s wildest extrovert, and the
forces of law and order in this deeply conservative corner of rural Surrey.
I never kept a diary, so
I can’t remember all my visits to Tara that well. On one occasion, though, I
rashly drove Keith in his great big lilac Roll-Royce to the Fox & Hounds
pub in nearby Englefield Green, where I once lived. It was hell to drive, like
a big truck with very soft suspension, a mattress on wheels, and the bonnet
with its Flying Lady mascot seemed to stretch out before you for ever, and each
time you went around a corner you had to turn the wheel round and round and
round again to make it. Keith sat in the back playing 8-track tapes at
deafening volume. The drive back, in the dark after a few drinks, was even more
nerve wracking. On this occasion I spent the night there, as I recall in Tony
Fletcher’s definitive Moon biography Dear Boy. Keith gave me a sleeping pill that knocked me out
until well into the following afternoon but before we hit the sack he had a
disagreement with Kim, something about the soup she had made being
insufficiently spicy, and he threw it at her. I thought she was an angel and I
wanted to disappear.
On one of my last visits
to Tara, in the spring of 1973, Keith was having a swimming pool built,
complete with wave machine, and I remember riding around the grounds on tiny
motor bikes he’d bought. During his occupation he acquired many expensive cars
that were parked outside: two Rolls-Royces, one the lilac Silver Cloud III that
I drove, the other a white two-door Corniche with an open roof; a white
Mercedes coupé; a red Ferrari Dino 426 that bit the dust on a nearby
double-carriageway; a silver AC Cobra that had once belonged to Led Zeppelin
drummer John Bonham; and his ‘fun’ vehicles, a milk-float, an old American ‘Al
Capone’ style car with running boards at the sides, a hot rod and a hovercraft,
not to mention the ‘ordinary’ cars for other members of the household. “Cars
were simply toys for Keith,” says Peter ‘Dougal’ Butler, Moon’s long-suffering
PA and chauffeur. “Most people see cars as transport, as a means of getting
from A to B but for Keith they were things to play with, usually late at night
when he was in the mood for a fast drive. He didn’t even have a driving
licence.”
Keith’s bar bills from
the Golden Grove were outrageous. He invariably bought several bottles on the
slate to take home at closing time, usually vodka and Courvoisier, along with several
of the customers. I had Keith’s phone number, which in itself was pretty remarkable
as rock stars never gave out their phone numbers to anyone other than family,
group associates and drug dealers, and after a while I thought nothing of
calling up to ask what he was up to. If he was in he’d as likely as not say,
“Come on over dear boy,” his typical greeting to all and sundry.
I was by no means the
only late evening visitors to Tara, and eventually Kim decided enough was enough.
She left Keith for the second and final time in the autumn on 1973,
subsequently moving in with Ian McLagan of The Faces whom she would eventually
marry and settle down with in Austin, Texas. Keith remained at Tara for another
year, hopelessly adrift in his ocean of disorder, and one night invited Jeff
Beck, whom he had bumped into at the Speakeasy, back to his home, ostensibly to
sell him the hot rod. “I realised that he was a bachelor in the true sense of
the word although there was this girl lurking about [a girlfriend from
Staines],” Beck told Tony Fletcher. “He showed me around the house and it was
covered in dog shit. I’d never seen such a mess in my life. He hadn’t made the
slightest attempt to clean it up. He was like, ’Mind the dog shit,’ like it had
been there and it was going to be there. I mean, everyone has accidents, but
this was in every room. [He hadn’t] any idea how to look after a dog. He opened
up all the closets he had custom made, every single one was a disaster, stuff
fell out on the floor and he didn’t put it back. It was as if a director had
said, ‘Action!’ and coordinated the most incredible stunt of collapsing things…
When we finally drank ourselves into oblivion, [the girl] tapped on the room
where I was and said, ‘Do you mind if I come in?’ and I said, ‘No,’ and we
wound up sleeping in the same bed even though she was purporting to be with
Keith. She said, ‘I can’t take it any more, he’s driving me berserk.’”
Keith Moon sold Tara in
1975, the proceeds winding up in Kim’s bank account. It was bought by Kevin Godley
of 10cc who in 1990 sold it to Vince Clarke of Erasure. Clarke demolished the
house and built a new one on the same site, complete with a commercial recording
studio called Ammonite. Moon found a second partner, Swedish model Annette
Walter-Lax, and relocated to California where he lived in hotels and a series of
rented homes until he settled down on Victoria Point Road in the Trancas area
of exclusive Malibu. There, on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, he built a
split-level house from the ground up, no expense spared, and became the Beach
Boy of his dreams. The actor Steve McQueen and his wife Ali McGraw were his
next-door neighbours, but the relationship was not cordial. Keith would remain
there until September 1977 when, tired of America and virtually penniless, he
returned to the UK, eventually moving into Flat 12 at 9, Curzon Square in the
Mayfair district of London. It was here, on September 7, 1978, that Annette
found his lifeless body and the rock world mourned one of its best loved sons.
14 comments:
Nice one CC!
I remember Tara too! Chaos!!
And I remember you as a little girl in the midst of it. Loved your mum. x
Thanks for sharing, that was an interesting read!
A very troubled but wonderful man.
I remember Keith and Kim's housewarming at Muswell Hill. An excellent 'mine host' that night and Kim was radiant. New neighbours came in and I remember Keith getting on famously with a right old 'colonel type' and his wife. They looked so stuffed shirt to us early twenties - but they were really into it. At one point Keith announced that he had the new Beatles single - it wasn't yet out and nobody had heard it. 'Revolution'. On the sleeve it said PLAY LOUD - oh, well!!!! You can guess the rest.
Quite a life, i just love unusual people, actually keith did live in some rather nice locations, i was a near neighbour of his living in virginia water, also in a tathet strange house , but i chose and loved it, so well done keith, a pity both our houses have now been demolished a shame!!
my dad CJ SMITH used to visit Tara House regularly as he owned and ran the local TV repair shop in Chertsey ,
happy days and he had some wonderful stories to tell ..
I'd like to hear those stories one day. CC
unfortunatley dad passed away in 2008 , but he told so many great stories about keith , i'am rather obsessed about keiths time in chertsey . me and dad were hoping to gather some stories from local people possibly write a book about it . dad didn't know who keith was when he first went in shop . he was dressed scruffy in an afghan coat with just "y" fronts on underneath !! dad quickly took him in the shop made him a cup of tea , he then went round the shop ordering one each of all the latest gadgets ! . which dad delivered to TARA house ( which he loved ) . he spoke of keith coming into CHERTSEY to pay his debts , with a flourish he would write a cheque , which usually bounced !! , Roger who ran the pet shop in chertsey had the foresight to keep the returned cheque and had it framed . when i have more time i will pass on some more stories .
Thanks Martin. I look forward to any more stories you have about Keith in Chertsey.
Thanks for linking to the "Keith Moon's Living Arrangements" article on the Just Backdated blog. This is a fascinating story about the life of Keith Moon and his unusual interior solutions. I enjoyed reading this article and learning more about creative home decorating. When it comes to the need to refresh the interior of the house, this company can be your reliable partner. They specialize in wall painting and can help you create a new atmosphere and update the look of your interior. The team has experience and professionalism in the field of wall painting. They offer a wide range of colors and shades to help you express your personality and create a unique environment in your home.
Wonderful Moon stories. Thanks.
Some friends of my parents bought the house in Winchmore Hill off Keith Moon. When they viewed it he was away on tour, so they never actually met him. It was on Old Park Ridings in Enfield, just around the corner from Grange Park railway station. I was lucky enough to stay there in the summer of 1974 when my parents visited them. Two things struck me. All the door frames had been converted into a "gothic style" with pointed tops, so the doors were the same shape. Very unusual. Secondly, there were plug sockets everywhere! I had never seen so many in one house.Whilst staying there I visited the Windsor Free Festival for the day...but that's another story.
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