DEAR BOY: THE LIFE OF KEITH MOON

EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW 

ABOUT HOW THE BOOK CAME ABOUT

Of all the many hundreds of books I commissioned and edited for Omnibus Press during the 33 years I worked as the company’s Managing Editor, none gave me greater personal satisfaction than Dear Boy: The Life of Keith Moon by Tony Fletcher. There are many reasons for this. Firstly, it was a best-seller, spectacularly so by rock book standards; secondly, it was an exceptional book, beautifully written, researched in enormous detail and very long, especially bearing in mind that its subject died at the age of only 32; and thirdly – and perhaps most importantly – it treated the highs and lows of Keith Moon’s extraordinary life in equal measure, truly a ‘warts and all’ biography of the highest quality, as was reflected in innumerable positive reviews. 

There was one other reason, of course. The book would focus on The Who, the rock band I admired more than any other, about whom I had written two books myself and for whom I had worked as an archivist sourcing tracks for their 1994 box-set and subsequent upgraded catalogue CDs. Also, I had known Keith and interviewed him at length for Melody Maker back when I was a staff writer on the paper. My relationship with The Who might therefore have led some Who fans to assume that Dear Boy was in some way my initiative but it wasn’t. First and foremost, Dear Boy, the title and everything else, was Tony’s idea. 

        It was in early 1994 when Tony presented me with his lengthy proposal, a list of potential interviewees and how he was going to set about the project, complete with timeline, chapter breakdown and word count. It was his idea to publish it in the first week of September 1998, almost exactly 20 years to the day after Keith Moon’s death. Tony assumed, correctly, and I agreed, that this anniversary would stimulate media interest that might help promote his book but in order for this to happen it had to be delivered in plenty of time for it to go into production and be available in bookshops on the requisite date. To this end it was contracted four years before we planned to publish, Omnibus acquiring UK and Australasian rights, and Avon, under their Spike imprint, publishing in the USA where it was titled Moon: The Life & Death of a Rock Legend [1]. Now published in the US by Harper Collins, there are also German, French and Brazilian language editions, as well as a graphic novel, and 2026 sees its 28th year in print across different editions [2], the latest an Omnibus title in their ‘Remastered’ series due for publication on April 9. 

The US Edition

Back in 1995, the book’s meticulous advance planning gave Tony two years in which to complete his research; around 130 interviews with people who knew Keith, fellow musicians, Who staff, friends and lovers, music journalists, anyone and just about everyone whose paths crossed with that of The Who’s mercurial drummer. Naturally, his first port of call was the group: Entwistle said yes [3], Daltrey no [4], Townshend dithered, ultimately declining as he felt that dredging up memories of Keith might jeopardise his newly-found sobriety [5]. Former co-manager Chris Stamp said yes, as did Bill Curbishley who took over the Who’s management from Stamp and Kit Lambert in the mid-1970s. Perhaps more importantly, the three people who had lived with Keith as an adult – ex-wife Kim, subsequent girlfriend Annette Hunt, then Annette Walter-Lax, and personal assistant/driver Peter ‘Dougal’ Butler – all said yes.

From his home at the time in Manhattan, Tony, along with his then-wife Posie and their six-month-old son, moved to the UK for six months in 1996 so he could better conduct the European research. He travelled up and down the UK interviewing everyone he could get hold of, went to Ireland to meet Oliver Reed and visited Stockholm, twice, to interview Annette (who initially asked for payment, ultimately declined). Quite late in the day, back in the States, he spent a weekend in Austin, Texas, where Kim lived with her second husband, Faces/Small Faces keyboard player Ian ‘Mac’ McLagan. This was the only interview that Kim, who died in 2006, ever gave to anyone. Quite a few noted musicians were also interviewed, among them, in alphabetical order, Mick Avory, Ginger Baker, Jeff Beck, Alice Cooper, Ian Dury, Dave Edmunds, Bobby Elliott, Steve Ellis, Chris Farlowe, Steve Harley, Roy Harper, Bob Henrit, Bruce Johnson, Howard Kaylan, Jim Keltner, Corky Laing, Carlo Little, John Otway, Reg Presley, Viv Prince, Noel Redding, Dave Rowberry, John Sebastian, ‘Legs’ Larry Smith, Zak Starkey, Mark Volman and Joe Walsh. From the acting world came Ann-Margret, Larry Hagman, Karl Howman and Oliver Reed. Tony even tracked down all the members of The Beachcombers, the group for whom Keith played before he joined The Who. 

His research complete, Tony spent the best part of a year in the writing, delivering his manuscript 10 months before publication date, thus enabling me the luxury of ample time to edit and do whatever work was necessary before handing it over to our production department. He had hoped to finish the book by the summer of 1997, at which point he had a UK holiday booked, but when this didn’t happen I asked to read the chapters he had written thus far. So keen was I to read what Tony had written about Keith that I took a draft of this home on the Friday night after it arrived which, as it happened, ushered in the same weekend that Princess Diana died. I’d stayed up late glued to our home computer screen on Saturday night and well remember our five-year-old daughter Olivia waking me quite early on Sunday morning to complain that the cartoons she wanted to watch on TV had been supplanted by the sad news from Paris. That day we took Olivia and her two-year-old brother Sam to a sparsely-attended London Zoo where the name-plate on the cage of ‘Diana the Gorilla’ was covered over by a dark cloth to avoid offending royalists with tender sensibilities. 

But I digress. Once the complete text was delivered to me on Halloween, I quickly realised that Tony had produced something very special and decided to go all out on editing and production. I suggested one change to the chapter structure to which Tony complied [6] and brought all my reserves of Who knowledge to bear in making subtle changes here and there. I commissioned Richard Evans, the Who’s go-to graphic designer, to design the book’s jacket and Tony, Richard and myself spent an afternoon visiting big London bookshops to inspect covers of biographies that we thought the retail trade regarded as prestigious. The big seller at the time was Diana: Her True Story In Her Own Words by Andrew Morton which featured on its cover a black and white picture of the late princess against a white background, so we opted for something similar with a head and shoulders portrait of Keith [7] and an embossed title in gold lettering. For the insides I commissioned an artist friend of my wife to create a postage-stamp sized drawing of a snare drum flying over the moon to use at the start of each chapter, and a tiny jester’s hat, drum and wine bottle to indicate breaks in the text where asterisks are normally placed. Once the manuscript was typeset I commissioned my friend Johnny Rogan to prepare an index and, being the English language and rock scholar that he was, he suggested further amendments to the text to polish what I knew would be a jewel in Omnibus’ crown. 

I didn’t stint on the photo research either, and between them our staff researcher Nikki Russell, Tony and Richard came up with everything we needed; childhood pictures, Keith in pre-Who groups, Who shots, Keith with Kim and many others and several that illustrated particular instances in the text, 51 pictures in all across three eight-page sections. I also communicated my enthusiasm for the book to everyone else at Omnibus, not least sales manager Frank Warren, his PA Hilary Donlon and our Contracts Manager Andrew King, all of whom readily jumped on the Dear Boy bandwagon. “You were like a record company when it’s flying,” says Tony. “You had the set-up that would make writers want to be on your label. I recall a lovely publication lunch for all the staff at the restaurant where the Marquee used to be. You allowed me to order a Chateauneuf-du-Pape blanc that was both rare and expensive, and you’d have okayed a second bottle but that was the only one they had. I think we downgraded.”

Our hunch about the 20th anniversary of Keith’s death proved correct. In the month of Dear Boy’s publication Mojo magazine featured Keith on its cover, and our Rights Manager Helen Donlon somehow achieved serialisation in the Sunday Mail. Charles Shaar Murray’s extensive review occupied the whole of the front page of the Daily Telegraph’s arts section. In the week of publication we threw a launch party at The Borderline in Soho where we gave away Dear Boy t-shirts, and among those who attended were Dougal Butler, Richard Barnes (Pete Townshend’s one-time flatmate who coined the name ‘The Who’), former Who tour manager John ‘Wiggy’ Wolff, Doug Sandom, the drummer in The Detours whom Keith succeeded in the spring of 1964, and Paul Kemp, the drummer in Who tribute band Who’s Who. A spitting image of the real Keith, Paul managed to get a group of revellers thrown out of an after-hours bar later in the evening. “Keith would have approved,” notes Tony, who was among them. 

Furthermore – and much to our delight – on the Sunday before it arrived in the shops we were able to sell it at a Who fan convention held at the Astoria Theatre in central London, which 11 years later would be demolished to make way for a Crossrail station. The date was September 6, the day before the 20th anniversary of Keith’s death, and in many ways the convention acted as a tribute to him.

The queue of Who fans snaking past our trestle table to snap up Dear Boy remained in place throughout the entire afternoon. While UK fans who bought a copy got it one day early, many American fans who flew over for the convention got theirs three months early as the US edition wasn’t published there until the following January [8]. In the event many US fans bought several copies as Christmas presents for their Who fan friends back home, blithely overlooking how its weight might impact on their baggage allowance. Tony was on hand at the convention to read extracts from the stage and sign copies of his book, as did Kitty Moon, Keith’s mum, who also turned up, accompanied by Lesley, the younger of Keith’s two sisters.

CC and Tony at the convention, 

and a pile of empty boxes that once contained copies of Dear Boy.

In all we sold 400 copies of Dear Boy at £20 a throw directly to fans that day, and late in the evening – after the Who’s Who tribute band had performed – I took the tube home to Shepherds Bush clinging on to a plastic bag containing the best part of £8,000 in £10 and £20 notes. It was a fantastic result, a precursor to the book’s ongoing success, and dumping that bag of cash on my boss’ desk the following morning was as satisfying for me as everything else connected with Dear Boy, not least the subsequent realisation that it eventually outsold Thatcher’s official biography. 

And so we come to the 2026 edition, published as a pocket paperback, though at almost 600 pages it’s a bit too chunky to fit into anything but an XXL pocket. At the start there’s two new forewords, one by Tony and the other by Keith Moon’s daughter Mandy, now Amanda De Wolf. Mandy, who became a grandmother in 2023 and now lives in California, admits that she was only eight when she last saw her father and never really knew him, only his life and legacy as detailed in Dear Boy. 

        It’s slightly bizarre to realise that, had he lived, Keith would have become a great-grandfather at the absurdly early age of 77 – but then again absurdity clung to Keith Moon like moss to a stone – and evidently continues to do so 48 years after the Dear Boy’s death. 

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[1] The US publishers felt the title Dear Boy might lead some to believe it was a book aimed at a gay audience. 

[2] In 2005, Omnibus published a revised trade paperback edition with a new 20-page Afterword comprising material Tony gleaned from interviews with acquaintances of Moon who contacted him after the book’s initial publication.

[3] John gave Tony one his frankest ever interviews, revealing not only his love of Keith but his deep frustration at the stop-start nature of The Who’s career following Keith’s death, for which he blamed Townshend. 

[4] I don’t believe Roger grasped the scope the project. No doubt assuming Tony was planning to write a brief, sensationalist paperback full of scandalous stories, he was approached and declined several times and was probably shocked by the eventual appearance of a 576-page hardback that in his opinion didn’t portray him as he would have preferred. In an interview with Record Collector magazine shortly after Dear Boy’s publication he suggested the book was merely the recollections of ‘alcoholics and drug addicts’. This prompted me to write to Record Collector pointing out that of the Who’s inner circle of six (Townshend, Daltrey, Entwistle, Moon, Lambert and Stamp), he was the only one who wasn’t an alcoholic or drug addict at one time or another. It later transpired that Roger felt its publication might impact unfavourably on his commercial interests in a film he planned to make about Keith, a film which, incidentally, has yet to go into production despite having gone through multiple scripts and prospective directors and lead actors. Incidentally, Dear Boy was optioned almost immediately on publication as source material for a movie, and when Roger was interviewed by Sky News some years ago a copy of Dear Boy was prominently displayed on a shelf behind his head. 

[5] Pete faxed Tony to the effect that he, ‘no longer had anything to say about Keith that is kind’. Shortly before the book went to press Tony heard that Pete apparently regretted his decision, which is exactly what those close to him intimated would happen. A few weeks after its publication, backstage at the Shepherds Bush Empire following a solo show, Pete told me that Tony ‘should be very proud of the book he had written’. 

[6] The dramatic opening to Chapter 27 was initially towards the end of Chapter 26. I felt it warranted a more prominent position. 

[7] The photograph of Keith on the cover of Dear Boy was taken by David Magnus in 1965. 

[8] The US publishers actually requested that I delay our publication so that it coincided with theirs, but I was having none of it.

(Thanks to Tony for help with this post. tonyfletcher.substack.com )

KEITH MOON BECOMES A GREAT GRANDFATHER

My friend Mandy De Wolf, Keith Moon’s daughter, tells me that she has become a grandmother, which means that her father has, in absentia, become a great grandfather. “Our daughter Sam and her boyfriend Nate welcomed lovely little Zoe on October 3, 2023,” she writes. As far as I am aware, Zoe is the first great granddaughter offspring from The Who. I think she has her great grandfather’s eyes. 

        Mandy and I have stayed in touch since our aborted plan for her to write a memoir about her life. When it became clear to us that book publishers weren’t interested in our proposed book, in 2019 I posted my synopsis of the book – Moon Girl: My Life In The Shadow Of Rock’s Wildest Star – on Just Backdated, and to date it has received 34,600 hits, making it the second most read post on the blog. This is the link: https://justbackdated.blogspot.com/2019/09/moon-girl-my-life-in-shadow-of-rocks.html

        Mandy also drew my attention to this podcast in which she is interviewed about her life on Billy Brew Radio. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?extid=CL-UNK-UNK-UNK-IOS_GK0T-GK1C&mibextid=w8EBqM&v=544275519750261

    [Unfortunately I cannot seem to transfer live links onto my blog but they work if you copy and paste - CC]

KEITH MOON IN 200 MOTELS

A 52-year-old copy of Melody Maker reproduced last week on a Facebook page devoted to old MMs reminded me that in February 1971 I was invited by Keith Moon to watch him appear in Frank Zappa’s movie 200 Motels, which was being filmed at Pinewood Studios, and Keith suggested that beforehand I meet him at the Castle Hotel in Windsor where he was staying with the rest of the cast. 

As it happened, Keith’s chauffeur in those days – Peter ‘Chalky’ White, this being before the redoubtable Dougal Butler took over – had been given the day off, leaving Keith stranded at the hotel when an unexpected call came through to say he was required on set. He was in a bit of a panic when I arrived but I saved the day driving Keith to Pinewood myself. Fortunately, my orange Mini had an inbuilt cassette player and a copy of The Beach Boys’ Greatest Hits was lurking in there somewhere, so Keith wasn’t too bothered at having to ride in a car somewhat less well-appointed than the lilac Roller to which he was accustomed. He was a bit heavy on volume, as I recall. 

It was this cassette that I had in my car. 

Half an hour later we pulled up at the celebrated film studio and I spent an agreeable afternoon watching him, Frank, Ringo and assorted cast members doing their thing in a surreal movie that in many ways foreshadowed the rock videos that about ten years later would become essential for bands with chart ambitions. 

This occurred the week before The Who began a series of unadvertised shows at the Young Vic Theatre near Waterloo Station, which were to be filmed and recorded for Pete Townshend’s Lifehouse project, and it is likely that Keith mentioned to me that The Who would be “rehearsing” there the following Sunday while I was with him that day. As a result, I went down to the Young Vic on February 14 to see for myself, only to be greeted by Pete yelling, “What’s fucking Melody Maker doing here?” He told me not to write about it because the theatre would be swamped by Who fans if the group’s presence at the YV became public knowledge. I was as good as my word

        Here’s what I wrote about Keith in 200 Motels for MM: 

Keith Moon, dressed up as a nun with a painted white face, was chasing Ringo Starr through an orchestra pit set in a concentration camp. Ringo was carrying a harp and Keith’s wimple was poking out of the eyes of a violinist. The whole scene was surrounded by barbed wire so there was no chance of escape, and machine guns from the timpani level were trained on the conductor. 

Sounds rather bizarre, even in these days of Monty Python mania – but it’s all part of Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels which was being shot at Pinewood last week. 

The part of the nun was to have been played by Mick Jagger but Moon took over principally to get some experience of appearing before film cameras before work started on the Who’s own film on Sunday. 

It was fortunate that I met Keith at his Windsor Hotel at the appointed time for his genial chauffeur Chalky, who had been wrongly informed that he had the day off, was nowhere to be seen – and Keith wanted to get to the studio. An emergency call had come through to say he was wanted on the set but Keith was penniless and stranded at the hotel.

“We’ve been filming all week and last week and it’s just like being on the road again,” he told me as I drove him hastily towards Pinewood while he played my cassette of his beloved Beach Boys. “I was only supposed to be doing two days filming but it turned out to be much longer because I keep cropping up in crowd scenes as well. 

“The whole movie is based on a group’s life on the road so those with experience of that are used to what is going on. We had Wilfred Bramble in one part but he gave up in despair because he didn’t know what was going on. Ringo’s chauffeur took the role instead.”

Pinewood is situated in the green fields of Buckinghamshire near Iver Heath. Hidden from the road, it encompasses acres of film sets, both inside and out, linked by corridors resembling tube stations. It is centred on what was once a rambling country home, which today houses offices, dining rooms and bars. 

The film set for 200 Motels was street in “anytown” USA. Keith showed me round, explaining who was what and apologising for his late appearance. Shooting starts very early in the morning – at a time when most pop people are midway through their night’s sleep. 

Someone suggests Keith pits on his nun’s costume for a procession scene and I am left to watch the action. Ringo is eating a custard pie and leaning against a wooden hut. He’s made up to look like Frank Zappa, with black hair everywhere, moustache and tiny beard below his bottom lip. The real Frank Zappa is rushing around with directions. Director Tony Palmer is not on the set. He’s in an office with monitor TV sets showing him what’s going on and speaking through a closed-circuit radio to the stage director.

Various members of the Mothers are wandering around in bizarre costumes, in particular Mark Volman who is wearing a black bra, panties and girdle. Girls taking the parts of groupies are in abundance.

Half an hour later Keith returns in his nun’s outfit with his face painted white. There’s a delay while a dance sequence is being shot and Keith shows me the orchestra set where his chase with Ringo was filmed. 

“I was rushing around there and it was no joke with half a ton of denim around me,” he said, indicating his nun’s habit. “I think I poked out the second violinist’s eye. They were all clutching their Stradivari in horror in case Ringo’s harp smashed them.”

I asked how this scene fitted into the plot but he didn’t seem to know. He did mention something about being raised from the ground on wires and flying into the sky.

“We had Tony Curtis down on our set yesterday and I was chatting with him,” Keith continued. “He does all his own stunt work and apparently he did a death-defying act yesterday but they discovered the camera wasn’t working properly. He didn’t want to risk his luck by doing it again.”

At last the procession scene is underway. To a background of ‘Penis Dimensions’, just about the entire cast walk down the street carrying lighted torches. There were about 20 guys dressed as Ku Klux Klan and their torches create enough smoke to reduce visibility down to a few yards. For effect Keith makes a big show of picking his nose during the scene. Nobody seems to mind.

At 5.20 exactly filming stops. Film technicians are strict union men and everything shuts down with remarkable speed. Keith changes and most of the cast make for the bar where talk centres of the organisation of the party on Friday night, the last day of filming. Not surprisingly, Keith figures pretty high in the organisation of the party, directing Chalky – who has since reappeared – to purchase bottles by the dozen and arrange music for all. 

Back at the hotel over dinner Keith talked about his role in the film and the Who film. “I’m really only doing this film to get the hand of working before cameras. I’ve never been on a film set before so the experience will come in useful for our own film. I’m not doing this for the money and I suppose anyone could dress up as a nun and do what I do. But it’s great to do and nice to get out of London for a while. I am thinking of buying a house near Windsor too.* 

“With our own film, each of us in the group is being given a section to write for themselves so I’m thinking of having my bit shot in Bermuda so we can all go over there. I don’t know what the film company will think about it though,” he added, with some doubt.

A few drinks later and I’m in no state to drive back to town. The spare bed in Chalky’s room looks inviting and the next thing I know it’s Friday morning. Keith is already down for breakfast, looking as if he’s never been to bed at all. Maybe he hasn’t but he has as much energy packed into his frame as three of me. It’s always been evident in his drumming and it now looks as if it’ll evident on the movie screen too.

*About a couple of months later Keith would buy Tara House on the outskirts of nearby Chertsey. It would become the playhouse of his dreams.  

 

 

THE LAST FOUR YEARS: A ROCK NOIR ROMANCE by Annette Walter-Lax with Spencer Brown

The reputation of Keith Moon, once much-loved as the most genial of rock stars, has come in for a bit of a hammering since his not entirely unexpected death 41 years ago, and this latest addition to my ever-expanding library of books about him is unlikely to reverse the trend. While it could be argued that every Who book is a Pete Townshend book, his old drummer has had several more books written about him than Townshend, Roger Daltrey or John Entwistle, seven on my shelf and I don’t think I’m missing any. Moon was just what the doctor ordered in The Who’s percussion department but was also dangerously unhinged, unpredictable, funny, alcoholic, debauched, exciting and/or tiresome to be around and prone to fits of inexplicable rage, all of which explains why he’s an ideal subject for the biographer. Now, here comes the eighth book, The Last Four Years, Annette-Walter Lax’s topsy-turvy account of the period she spent as Moon’s romantic partner, which lasted from the spring of 1974, when they met in London, to September 1978, the month that Moon died.

         The Last Four Years: A Rock Noir Romance, to give it its full title, has actually been written by Spencer Brown, Annette’s friend and collaborator, and is constructed from a series of lengthy interviews with her that he has transcribed, all of which are punctuated with his own text or prompts which act as links. It is a privately produced publication, printed by Amazon, presumably on demand, and the production quality is below the standard you might expect from a book that is heavily illustrated and costs £15. It is sloppily laid out, poorly edited and the many illustrations, 83 b&w pictures in all, suffer from being reproduced on the same stock as the text pages and, as a result, are washed out and lack contrast. Sourced from Annette’s private collection, as far as I can establish they have not been seen before in previous Who or Moon books, which is a plus. They are like holiday snaps which, indeed, some of them are; amateurish but homely, and all are captioned in the same unpretentious way as those old family albums we all have tucked away: ‘Mum and Dad on the beach at Southend, summer 1964’. There are no Who pictures and, curiously, no mention of Keith Moon on the front cover.

         Much the same could be said for the text. It is unpretentious, garrulous and strangely naïve, with Annette as both an insider to the curious world of Moon at his looniest, yet an outsider insofar as she’s well out of her depth and knows of no way to control his unrestrained impulses. Time and again she is faced with impossible situations in which the love of her life becomes his own worst enemy, with calamitous results that are funny the first time, less funny the next and, eventually, exasperating.

         Annette met Moon just as she was starting a modelling career in London, a career that never really materialised. It’s evident she doesn’t know much about The Who or their affairs or what being their drummer entails, and having arrived on the scene relatively late in their career – at least as far as their career with Moon is concerned – she’s a girl-come-lately compared to the partners of the others, who don’t get a mention anyway. It is telling that the first rock show she ever attended was The Who at Charlton in ‘the summer of ’74’, presumably May 18, when she sat on stage ‘not far behind Keith’. It’s probably true to say that of all the Who-related books on my shelf, 57 in all, this one contains the least about The Who. Her co-author is clearly a fan but their book inevitably contains a few minor errors concerning the group’s history.

         Most of the text dwells on Moon’s crazy, unpredictable, drunken behaviour, firstly in London, then in California and finally back in London again. Annette recounts as best she can various incidents she witnessed wherein Moon went berserk, wrecked hotel rooms or houses in which they lived and embarrassed her in front of others, and how she was powerless to prevent this from happening. Chronically unfaithful, Moon brings groupies back to their homes for sex, leaving Annette to shut herself away until morning when her dishevelled man emerges from somewhere or other saying he’s sorry and won’t do it again. He invariably does. Contradictions abound but this surely reflects the contradictions in Moon’s character, caring one moment and uncaring the next. Annette knows that for the sake of her sanity she should leave him, but she’s drawn back by Moon’s pleading and her own misplaced loyalty, and perhaps also because she knows that without her Moon won’t survive, not that he did anyway. She deserves a medal for perseverance.

         I think too many years have passed for her to recall the chronology of all these episodes accurately, with the result that reminiscences overlap or merge and all hope of a linear narrative is lost amongst the wreckage. Perversely, the book is divided into three parts, all dealing with the same time period from slightly different standpoints, so repetition and inconsistency are rife. The first part is a resume of their four years together, the second a meandering interview with Annette and the third a selection of random reminiscences, many of them deeply unpleasant. Most of what’s here can be found in the vastly superior Dear Boy: The Life of Keith Moon by Tony Fletcher or Dougal Butler’s two books Moon The Loon (aka Full Moon) and Keith Moon: A Personal Portrait.*

         I have no wish to be uncharitable towards Annette who clearly loved Keith Moon and tried her best to protect him, and she clearly still carries a torch for him, nor to Spencer Brown who’s probably done the best he could with a paucity of material that, in truth, is more suitable for a decent length magazine article than a 200-page book, 60 of which feature pictures only, leaving a lot of blank space. Nevertheless, the fact remains that for one pound less you can buy Fletcher’s definitive and widely-admired biography, all 632 pages of it, and for even less you can buy Butler’s popular and amusing memoir of their time together, both of which represent immeasurably better value than The Last Four Years. 

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* I must declare an interest here. I commissioned and edited Dear Boy and ghost-wrote A Personal Portrait for Dougal, which was designed by my wife.

MOON GIRL by MANDY MOON - Sample Chapter

This is a sample chapter that Keith Moon’s daughter, Amanda De Wolf, and I wrote in the hope of enticing literary agents to represent us and get a deal with a mainstream book publisher. Unfortunately it didn’t happen, and neither of us was prepared to go with a specialist music company or the self-publishing route. We picked a fairly obvious period to write about, the dramatic week in which Kim, Mandy’s mum, left her husband for good.

GOODBYE DAD, HELLO MAC

I would have just turned seven when mum decided to leave my father for the final time. It was August 1973, another hot day in an endlessly hot summer made all the more unbearable because, unusually, my father was home for weeks on end. By ‘home’ I mean he was based in the UK, not that he was at home [Tara, the Moon’s house in Chertsey, Surrey, UK – Ed.] every night as he sometimes stayed in London, never letting mum know where he was, but when he was at Tara there was trouble afoot more often than not.

         The Who were recording and rehearsing their Quadrophenia record that summer and wouldn’t go back on the road until October, and this was the reason he was always likely to be around, and the more often he was around the more turmoil there was. When he went off on tour for a few weeks a state of calm descended on the household, less noise, less chaos, less uncertainty, less danger. Mum was always happier when he was away, like a great weight had been lifted from her shoulders, at least temporarily. I think if it was up to her she’d have preferred to leave him for good when he was out of the country on the road somewhere. That way she could have arranged it properly, had time to deal with all the practicalities involved, but it didn’t happen that way. In fact, it couldn’t have happened at a worse time really.

         The summer term had ended but even before that Dermot [Kerrigan, Kim’s mother’s son, therefore Mandy’s uncle, but only a few months older than her, who was also living at Tara – Ed.] and I were not attending school consistently. The mood in the household was simply not conducive to getting children up early, giving them their breakfast and taking them to school by 8.30, just like every other family with young kids at the school we went to. How mum explained all this to the teachers I have no idea.          Nowadays you read about ‘broken families’ whose kids don’t attend school because their parents are poor and can’t feed them or spend all their money on drink and drugs. Well, we were just like that – a ‘broken family’ – except that we lived in a big house in its own grounds in a posh part of Chertsey in Surrey and our father was supposedly earning plenty of money, but it still disappeared on drink and drugs and heaven knows what else. We might just as well have been a poverty-stricken ‘broken family’ on a run-down council estate for all the difference it made.

         I’m pretty sure now that mum made the decision to leave Keith and never come back to him because one of their fights actually involved me, at least indirectly, and this incident happened one night just before she decided we would leave Tara for good. Dad had turned off all the lights in the house for some reason and he began to throw things around madly in the dark. He was obviously drunk. Something hard hit me on the side of my left leg and cut me, not badly but enough for me to cry and need medical attention, and I still have the scar. Mum was furious that he’d hurt me, scared that it might happen again and maybe worse, and it degenerated into yet another terrible screaming match. I guess it was the last straw for her.

         Mum didn’t tell me she’d finally made the decision to leave dad and never come back, not at first anyway. We had left a few times before, sometimes in the middle of the night when dad was sleeping. Mum knew that when he’d taken a handful of sleeping pills on top of the brandy then nothing was going to wake him up for hours on end, so the early morning was a good time to make a break.

         On one of these occasions Dermot and I had been taken to Verwood in Dorset where Billy, my grandfather on my mum’s side, lived with Trisha, his second wife, who died in a car accident. Dad was frightened of Billy because he stood up to him. To Billy Keith Moon wasn’t some big rock star, he was just some idiot that his daughter had stupidly married, and he wouldn’t stand for any of dad’s nonsense. So, there was no way that dad would ever come to Verwood and try to get us to come back. Billy would just have smacked him in the teeth.

         This last visit to Billy’s lasted for two months or so and I hated it because it was obvious they didn’t want me there. I’d have preferred to stay with Nanny Kit, my other grandmother [Keith’s mum – Ed.], in Wembley, in the same house where dad grew up. I would have been much happier living with her than Billy but the truth is what I really wanted to be was alone somewhere with mum, just the two of us.
         But back to the morning when we left Tara, I remember waking up and mum not being there. It was always the scariest feeling, not knowing where she was and being alone in the house with dad, though of course he didn’t get up when I did. He certainly wasn’t a morning person! It was unusual for mum not to be there, most unlike her to leave me with dad. Many bad incidents had happened over the years and when they did and mum scarpered she always took me with her. This time she didn’t, so I didn’t know what was happening. Joan, my grandmother, was there, of course, but she wasn’t much use in the mornings either. Most nights she threw back the booze as much as dad, matching him drink for drink which is saying something.

         Mum had evidently had some lunch and gone to see some friends in Egham, then checked into the nearby Great Fosters Hotel at Thorpe Green. It was like she’d woken up that day and just said to herself, ‘I’ve had enough. I can’t take it any more’. She must have called from the hotel and rang up Tara to speak to her mother because Joan put Dermot and me in a cab and we were driven to the hotel where mum was waiting for us. I ran into her arms and hugged her. It was such a relief to see her. I never went back to Tara again, ever, but mum went back to fetch some things the next day. She told me later that she was really scared dad would find her there but he was in the pub down the lane, the Golden Grove, and didn’t see her, not at first anyway. Later she told me how she ran around the house collecting paperwork and things before fleeing in a taxi and being so afraid of what dad would do to her if he caught her. She managed to fill a suitcase with our clothes, running around the house and then getting away from Tara before he could stop her.

         We stayed at the Great Fosters Hotel for a couple of weeks. It seemed only natural that Dermot would be with us there too, as if he was my brother, but he went back to Verwood after a while. The hotel was amazing, an ancient Grade I listed building with a maze and history dating back to Henry VIII, and the gift shop had dolls of him and all his wives. It was big, beautiful and we felt safe at last. It was supposedly haunted but I didn’t experience anything like that. While we were there mum was on the phone all the time to the Who’s managers trying to get some money from them to pay our bills. We also spent a few nights at another hotel near Runnymede but that wasn’t so nice.
         When we moved out of the hotels we stayed with a couple named Molly and Bob who were friends of Kim’s mother Joan and who lived near Egham. I didn’t know who they were but they were very kind to us and had model horses for me to play with which was great and they had a dog. I really missed the dogs at Tara and pretended to be a dog most of the time, even eating and drinking from a bowl on the floor… not too emotionally sound already, I guess! I also used to sleepwalk at their home and would stand at the top of the stairs, so I am told, which was disconcerting for the adults so they locked me in my room.

         After about a month there we moved to a little house on Campbell Close, a cul-de-sac in Twickenham. I really liked living there, on a tiny street. It was one of five terraced cottages, quite sweet really, just the opposite of Tara, and I liked having my own room upstairs and looking out from the front window at people and dogs coming and going. We could walk down to a nearby shop which was a treat for me because Tara was really isolated, other than the pub at the end of the road. I suppose I craved normalcy and structure, which is why I liked being at Nanny Kit’s, just a normal house in a normal street with a normal family.

         Mum was renting the house in Campbell Close for £20 a week and she and I were alone there which was lovely, but after a week or two dad somehow found out where we were living and left things by the front door. I vaguely remember an incident where there were supposedly bad men with guns who had been ordered by dad to take us back to Tara. I remember I was kept away from the windows. I was never quite sure if that was real or just another story, like the story about dad setting some heavies on to Mac [Ian McLagan, the keyboard player of the Faces, whom Kim would marry in 1978 – Ed.] who was coming over to see mum a lot soon after we moved there. I heard later that dad did pay this heavy to break Mac’s fingers, but Pete Townshend heard about it and paid the heavy not to.

         It slowly dawned on me that Mac was courting mum, and mum was happy about this. They’d known one another for a long time, way back from when he was in the Small Faces I guess. So it was only a matter of time before we moved in with Mac, into another big house that wasn’t normal, in his case a five-bedroom Gothic style house in half an acre overlooking Richmond Park on Fife Road in East Sheen.

         I remember mum and Mac listening to lots of Marvin Gaye songs there, very romantic! Unlike dad, he treated her really well which must have been wonderful for her after all she’d had to put up with. It seemed like we would be there for a while so I started at another primary school in Twickenham. Mum and I took the bus, but I was usually late! I was made to stay in at lunch for being late and mum got so upset, telling the teachers it wasn’t my fault. She would come to the school and sit in at lunch but she had to be told it didn’t work that way!

         I do remember waking up at that house one night and no one was home. It was the middle of the night and I went outside and wandered down the road calling for mum. A kindly neighbour took me in and I slept in their front room until we heard mum yelling down the street for me at about four in the morning.
         After we moved in with Mac in East Sheen I remember dad coming to the house. It only happened once I think, but it was traumatic for everyone. Dougal [aka Peter Butler – Ed.], dad’s PA and driver, brought him over in his pink Rolls-Royce. I answered the door. It was frosted glass but I recognized his silhouette and was scared even before opening it. He asked Mac to babysit while he took mum out. Mac said no he wouldn’t do that and asked him to leave but dad insisted on seeing mum, so they spent some time together in the front room while Mac and Dougal and me waited outside in the back garden. Then dad left. I was always kind of afraid he would come back again but he never did, so this was the last time I ever saw him, and I didn’t even say goodbye.

         Dougal told me later that when they got back in the car dad cried his eyes out. He told Dougal he knew now that he’d lost mum for ever. I guess he must have finally realised that it was all over. Whenever mum had left him before there was never another man involved, but this time there was and that made all the difference. Deep inside I knew it too.

         Something had told me the break with dad was permanent after we moved in with Mac at Fife Road in East Sheen. This wasn’t like any of the other times we’d left dad. This wasn’t temporary, it was the future. The madness was finally over, and it was like a great big black cloud had been lifted, such a massive relief for me and mum. In front of me was a life that might just be normal – or so I thought.