EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW
ABOUT HOW THE BOOK CAME ABOUT
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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.
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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.”
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.
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.)
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