The biggest regret of Roger Daltrey’s life: “Very painful”
From a professional perspective, Roger Daltrey looks back upon his career with immense pride. The Who have ensured their place as rock icons for eternity and have a cultural legacy attached that will guarantee his name, as well as his art, is remembered long after his time on this earth reaches its natural conclusion.
The fact that Daltrey remains healthy enough to still be committed to his craft is a blessing not lost on him. The vocalist knows first-hand how fortunate he is to have survived the dark side of the entertainment world, which continues to build stars up only to spit them out and throw them on the scrap heap. It’s a vicious business which he has seen at its worst, but fortunately, he’s one of the lucky ones.
Although The Who are still active, the formidable four-piece line-up that sent them to superstardom is no more, with Daltrey and Pete Townshend the only surviving members. In all honesty, The Who have never been the same band since the death of Keith Moon. He was more than The Who’s drummer; he was the heartbeat of the band and an embodiment of mayhem that followed them everywhere they went.
All these decades later, the loss of Keith Moon still plagues Daltrey’s mind, and he often painfully considers if there was anything more he could have done to preserve the life of The Who drummer. Moon’s battle with addiction was widely known at the time. However, the knowledge surrounding the issue was minuscule compared to today, and it was firmly a societal taboo. His bandmates felt helpless as they watched their friend and drummer deteriorate in front of their very eyes, and their singer still wished that he had done more to prevent the tragedy.
The drummer was aged 32 when he died. At the beginning of their career, his substance use didn’t impact his performance, but it didn’t stay that way forever. It had become a regular occurrence to see Moon pass out during concerts, and it was a mental slog for the band to get through his final tour in 1976. All the warning signs were there, but addiction is a cruel disease with no easy answers, and unfortunately, his death didn’t surprise many. Moon passed away after consuming clomethiazole pills, which he was prescribed to calm his alcohol withdrawal symptoms as he attempted to get clean.
The solemn air of preventability which surrounds his death has made it incredibly hard for those who knew him to deal with their grief, and all these years later, Daltrey still beats himself for not stopping it from happening. “Huge mistakes? Not saving Keith Moon,” he told K-SHE-95. “I wish I had known more about rehab, and all those things back then, but, you can’t put the clock back and go back there. We tried at the time with the best of our ignorance, and we lost. If it was now, it might be a different story.”
Additionally, The Mirror quote the singer as saying, “We were all floundering watching Keith self-destruct. It was very painful. In those days we knew very little about rehabilitation, we knew very little about AA, NA, all of those groups you could join to get help. I just wish – I don’t know how I would have done it, maybe it’s just deemed to be how it ended up – we could have done more.”
While Moon’s premature death sadly seemed inevitable, Daltrey has seen plentiful other people in the music business bounce back from similar circumstances. He also had a belief that Moon was invincible due to the vast number of times that he successfully swerved death. “He seemed to have nine lives,” he continued. “There were so many times where he kind of almost should have died for what he had done to himself, but he kind of pulled through it. You always thought he’d bounce back and then one day he didn’t.”
Although Moon is often celebrated for his hedonistic behaviour and the dangerous life that he lived is viewed through rose-tinted glasses, there was also a distinct bleakness to the vice grip that addiction put him in. As much as he tried his utmost to beat his horrible disease and had avoided death many times when others wouldn’t, his immortal cloak tragically didn’t last forever.
