The artist that turned Roger Daltrey into a singer: “That really hit me”
It’s probably no surprise that most musicians hit a point growing up when they know that’s all they want to do. For some, it’s all they know they can do. As Bruce Springsteen recently said, “I knew I would be a musician whether that meant playing in a small club on a Friday night or Madison Square Garden. I was happy as a musician. I had no other skills.”
Roger Daltrey’s upbringing followed a similar pattern. Like many, Daltrey knew he was only cut out to do one thing, looking up to figures like Elvis Presley and sharing the same visceral reaction as many who would go on to become his contemporaries. But the thing is, Daltrey didn’t just get into trouble at school for the same reasons most of us did, or dislike certain subjects like English because he excelled in Maths instead; Daltrey had a genuine, bone-deep itch that made it impossible to focus on anything else.
In other words, he loved music so much that his mind held no space for anything else, making him what his teachers would likely call a nightmare student. And that’s when he was actually there; most of the time it seemed like he’d bunked off to play music with his friends, enjoying the satisfaction of having stolen himself away from the mundanity of life to focus on something that actually had meaning. And Elvis Presley was merely a stepping stone in realising who he wanted to be and where he wanted to go.
Like Springsteen, Daltrey developed an insatiable kind of tunnel vision, searching out colour where all around seemed desaturated. As Springsteen told The Times: “Though I struggled intensely with [life], being a musician gave me a sense of joy that I don’t think I could have got in any other way. It was in my soul.” For Daltrey, it was much the same, but this journey into the wonderful world of technicolour, where everything seemed soundtracked to ‘Pure Imagination’, actually began the moment Daltrey discovered Lonnie Donegan.
“My imagined future was nothing other than becoming a rock singer,” he told Big Issue, echoing Springsteen’s earlier sentiment. “It was already my drive and my vision. I was 11 when I saw Elvis, but it was Lonnie Donegan that really hit me. One reason I got slung out of school is that I didn’t want to know about anything other than music. And every night I was out playing with the band. We were just starting to get paying jobs in social clubs.”
Like Springsteen, Daltrey also experienced a lot of difficulty in his home and school life, not just because he had no other interest elsewhere but because music was like an escape that let him ignore all of those challenges, or the places on the playground where “my flight or fight switch was always on”. Obviously, choosing the road less travelled (pursuing a career in music) would be infinitely harder, but Donegan set him on the straight and narrow, showing how it was all possible.
Like Presley, Donegan was as crucial to many 1960s rock stars as the framework that started the whole movement in the first place, but the King of Skiffle likely introduced Daltrey to a new kind of beast that favoured energy and umph, the inexplicable kind that sort of peers out of nowhere and takes you along for the ride without even letting you in on its secret as to why or how it’s done so. But for Daltrey, that indescribable allure eventually primed his own artistry, owed to early jazz and blues pioneers who just had the knack for it.
