The fight that got Roger Daltrey fired from The Who: “It took about five people to hold me off”
Though they didn’t receive the same acclaim as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, for a time, The Who represented the bubbling youth movement of the 1960s. If the two juggernaut bands represented the glamorous side of rock and roll, The Who were the dirt under the fingernails of every British kid. Each member of the band felt like they represented London’s bubbling music scene, not only on stage but off it too.
Like any Acton boy in the 1950s and ’60s, Roger Daltrey was never afraid to stop talking and start throwing fists. Daltrey’s temper was legendary and was known to blow up on occasion, even when it was his bandmates. It was something Keith Moon, another ducker and diver in the group, experienced first-hand. It was a temper that almost cost the singer his stardom.
Back in 1965, The Who were the burning question on everybody’s lips. The band began eviscerating audiences with their live shows and subsequent instrument destruction. Their brand of fire-breathing performance enthralled an audience hell-bent on transferring the newfound energy of a post-war Britain into everything they did. But, off stage, tensions were running high along with a lot of the band members.
Caught between two musical powerhouses—though for slightly different reasons—Daltrey often acted as the middle man between Pete Townshend and Keith Moon. The guitarist was known for his cantankerous personality, often quick to lash out verbally with his sharp tongue. The drummer was, instead, a bonafide party animal. While Moon’s increasing substance abuse was fraying tempers at one end, Townshend was pushing Daltrey increasingly out of the limelight at the other.
In the lead-up to the bruising incident, though, The Who were famed for their live shows, but during this period, the band had been on an unusual run of poor performances. One show even saw lead singer Daltrey mauled by fans, injuring his back in the process. Another show saw the band’s van stolen along with all the equipment inside. Then, to cap it all off, there was the band’s infamous set in Denmark, which, after a few minutes of furious rock and roll, saw the crowd rush the stage and cause £10,000 worth of damages.
During that now-infamous tour, Daltrey’s patience for the increasingly incoherent Moon finally ran out, and he could no longer take it. After a show of particularly bad playing from the drummer, Daltrey found Moon’s stash of drugs. Rather than take the bag to his percussionist and highlight it as the reason for his poor performance, Daltrey flushed it away in an attempt to make a serious point about his growing dependency. Naturally, Moon was not pleased and soon appeared in the face of the singer, ready to scuffle.
As any Acton local will tell you, that’s enough to wind up with some new knuckle marks on your head and, sure enough, Daltrey let rip across Moon’s soon-to-be-bloodied nose with a heavy throw. “It took about five people to hold me off him,” the singer remembered in Roger Daltrey: The Biography. “It wasn’t just because I hated him, it was just because I loved the band so much and thought it was being destroyed by those pills.”
In a turn of events that would be unthinkable in today’s clinical rock climate, Townshend and bassist John Entwistle took the side of Moon during the debacle and agreed that Daltrey, by flushing Moon’s pills, had simply gone too far. They fired him from the group with immediate effect and signalled the end of his career before he could really get started. Of course, it was a decision that didn’t exactly last long, and Daltrey was soon handed the microphone.
Once The Who’s management duo Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp got involved with the antics of each member, the argument soon settled down. Once the manager’s explained the serious damage losing Daltrey’s vocals at this stage in the band’s career could do to their trajectory, the argument ended entirely. Sadly, Moon’s time in the band would come to a close prematurely with his death in 1978 after struggling to ever control his substance abuse.
It would allow The Who to not only jump on the success of their zeitgeist anthem ‘My Generation’ but to establish themselves as one of rock’s biggest acts.
