Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon (64 page)

Bob Henrit, Adam Faith’s former drummer and one of Keith’s few pre-Beatles British inspirations, was also living in Winchmore Hill at the time and became increasingly accustomed to 3 am poundings on the door from Keith, looking for company. One night, the Who’s drummer slurred, “I just want you to know I stole it all from you.” (After Keith’s death, Townshend told Henrit that he was exactly the kind of drummer they had been looking for in 1964 when Keith came their way.] Henrit, who says he never tried to keep up with Moon because “it wasn’t my scene”, came to the conclusion that “He must have been close to a nervous breakdown a lot. I’m sure he was hiding a multitude of sins. I’m convinced that he knew he was looking for something that wasn’t there, but that didn’t stop him.”

Keith long ago appeared to have come to his own conclusion that the only way to cope with the turmoil he created for himself was to create yet more of it. As long as he was active he could convince anyone, himself included for the period such activity lasted, that he was happy. For years, it was the Who’s constant touring that had kept him in motion, but now the band no longer played quite so often. While a couple of weeks off between shows provided much-needed respite for the other Who members, for Keith’s driven personality it offered only the potential for boredom. And boredom quickly led to depression. So he kept moving.

Literally. He abandoned Old Park Ridings, the dream home he had bought for his family just over a year ago, putting it up for sale and moving into a rented flat in Chelsea. His possessions he placed in storage – at the Crown and Cushion. Local pubgoers were astonished when their famous landlord showed up one day with his washing machine in the back of the Rolls alongside a multitude of other personal effects, proclaiming to have been burgled while on tour and wishing to take no further chances – when the reality was that he couldn’t face admitting that his wife had left him.

His bedroom furniture he housed in room number three, directly above the hotel restaurant, which he kept permanently reserved for himself. The rest of his possessions went into the loft above the garage. Already he had stored one of his old drum kits there; now it was joined by the expensive toys he had accrued but no longer had room or desire for. It was a characteristic that would become increasingly prevalent in his life: obsessing over, buying, playing with, boring of and then discarding (or even forgetting) expensive acquisitions. For all that he awarded himself the most lavish of lifestyles, he could exist out of a suitcase if need be, and for now, he did.

He spent more and more time at the Crown and Cushion. Back in July he had tried to convince Rob Partridge of
Record Mirror
that “The thing about the hotel is that it’s so restful,” but that lie no longer applied even in theory. The locals became increasingly used to Keith rolling in after his shows were done with, on a Monday afternoon, say, and keeping the bar open almost around the clock until he was off again. Some of these locals – particularly the equally mad-for-it trio of Much, Smith and Crosby – would be invited to stay up with him, and they’d abandon work for a couple of days to make the most of it; others, particularly autograph-hunters, would be shooed off the premises at the official closing time. At that point, 11pm, Keith’s friends from London would bring out the pot, Keith and some of the others would pop a few pills, a card school would form and the lunacy would begin: the country pub would have turned into a rock’n’roller’s backstage lair. Quite what the tourists who were staying in the hotel at the time thought of all the noise and disturbance was never fully established; suffice to say that Ron and Yvonne Mears struggled to run the premises at a profit.

Somewhere in the midst of all this partying, over Christmas Keith broke his collarbone – yet another serious injury for a man the public saw as an invincible super-hero. Keith told his band-mates it happened while he was carrying a tray of drinks across the courtyard – as if they would appreciate the irony of his being injured while working the bar, rather than falling off it. To
Rolling Stone
magazine, however, he admitted that he and his friends had got so drunk at the Crown and Cushion that they carried him to bed – and promptly dropped him down the stairs by accident.

The locals understood the story quite differently, a reminder, as if Neil Boland’s death had not been enough, of what could happen when alcohol and aggression met head-on on foreign turf. Keith was reputedly at one of the other pubs in the town, the White Hart, where John Mears’ girlfriend came under close scrutiny and a few cat-calls from some of the tough lads there. Keith then stuck his nose in a little too firmly in defence of his friend Mears, and in the resulting scuffle was knocked to the ground with such force that his collarbone broke in the process. From that day on, he never set foot in any Chipping Norton pub but his own.