Keith Moon

• 1. Introduction

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  Keith John Moon was born on the 23rd of August 1946, and dead by the 7th of September 1978 - a span of just 32 years that somehow contained enough chaos, genius, and wreckage for several lifetimes. His nickname was "Moon the Loon". His idol was Gene Krupa. His favourite explosive was dynamite. His final words, directed at his girlfriend Annette Walter-Lax when she refused to cook him lamb cutlets, were: "If you don't like it, you can fuck off."

  Moon was the drummer for the Who, and he remains one of the most discussed, praised, and mythologised figures in the history of rock music. But what made his playing genuinely revolutionary is harder to pin down than the anecdotes. He hated drum solos. He kept time in a way that baffled and frustrated his bandmates for years. He played zig-zag across his kit rather than in the conventional sweep. And somehow, all of that produced a sound that critics and fellow musicians have spent decades trying to describe.

  This documentary follows that sound to its source - through the teenage shops of Wembley, the splintered drum kits of American theatres, exploding hotel toilets across two continents, and a flat in Mayfair where, in September 1978-32 clomethiazole pills brought everything to a stop.

• 2. Wembley Origins

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  Chaplin Road in Wembley, northwest London, was where Keith Moon grew up - restless, hyperactive, and already in trouble. His father Alfred was a motor mechanic; his mother Kathleen, known as Kit, came from the Hopley family. Moon failed his eleven-plus exam, which barred him from attending a grammar school, and landed instead at Alperton Secondary Modern. His art teacher's report card was unambiguous: "Retarded artistically. Idiotic in other respects." His music teacher was more measured, noting that Moon "has great ability, but must guard against a tendency to show off."

  Moon joined the local Sea Cadet Corps band at twelve, taking up the bugle - then quickly abandoning it for drums when the bugle proved too difficult. On his way home from school he would stop at Macari's Musical Exchange at 46b Ealing Road to practise. He left school around Easter 1961 at fourteen. A stint at Harrow Technical College led to work as a radio repairman, which finally gave him the money to buy his first drum kit.

  His early influences ranged wide. He took lessons at ten shillings a time from Carlo Little, who drummed for Screaming Lord Sutch and was known as one of the loudest players around. His favourite musicians were jazz artists, especially Gene Krupa, whose flamboyant style Moon later consciously imitated. He also admired DJ Fontana, Elvis Presley's original drummer, Tony Meehan of The Shadows, and Viv Prince of the Pretty Things. He idolised the Beach Boys so completely that Roger Daltrey later said Moon would have left to play for that California band even at the peak of the Who's fame.

  His first serious band was the Escorts, where he replaced his best friend Gerry Evans. Then, in December 1962, he joined the Beachcombers, a semi-professional London cover band. Moon worked days in the sales department at British Gypsum and was far keener than his bandmates on turning professional.

• 3. Joining the Who

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  In April 1964, aged seventeen, Moon auditioned for the Who as a replacement for drummer Doug Sandom. The story that has followed him ever since - and that Moon himself told often - concerns a show shortly after Sandom's departure, where the band had brought in a session drummer. Moon showed up dressed head to toe in ginger, his hair dyed to match; Pete Townshend later called him a "ginger vision".

  Moon claimed he could play better than the session man. The band let him try. In his own words: "I got behind this other guy's drums and did one song - 'Road Runner.' I'd had several drinks to get me courage up and when I got onstage I went arrgggGhhhh on the drums, broke the bass drum pedal and two skins, and got off. I figured that was it." He was sitting at the bar when Townshend and Roger Daltrey approached. Daltrey, then the group's spokesman, asked what Moon was doing the following Monday. Moon said nothing. Daltrey told him there was a gig. "If you want to come, we'll pick you up in the van," he said. "I said: 'Right.' And that was it."

  Moon later claimed he was never formally invited to join permanently. When Ringo Starr once asked how he had come to be in the Who, Moon replied that he had "just been filling in for the last fifteen years".

  His arrival changed the group's chemistry in ways that went beyond music. Sandom had acted as a peacemaker between the feuding Daltrey and Townshend. Moon was not a peacemaker. The group now had four members frequently in conflict. "We used to fight regularly", Moon recalled. He also clashed with Daltrey and Townshend: "We really have absolutely nothing in common apart from music", he said in a later interview. Yet Townshend described him as "a completely different person to anyone I've ever met", and in the early years the two bonded over practical jokes and improvised comedy.

• 4. The Sound Behind the Sound

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  John Entwistle, the Who's bassist, was the first to notice that Moon's internal clock ran on its own schedule. He tended to play faster or slower according to his mood, which Entwistle initially found maddening. But the description Entwistle eventually settled on is more precise than "erratic": "He wouldn't play across his kit. He'd play zig-zag. That's why he had two sets of tom-toms. He'd move his arms forward like a skier."

  Daltrey put it differently: Moon "just instinctively put drum fills in places that other people would never have thought of putting them."

  Who biographer John Atkins, examining the group's early test sessions for Pye Records in 1964, concluded that the band already understood how important Moon's contribution was. But early recordings sounded, in Atkins' assessment, tinny and disorganised. The turning point, in the view of biographer Tony Fletcher, was the recording of Who's Next - where producer Glyn Johns' no-nonsense approach, combined with the need to keep time against a synthesizer track, pushed Moon toward studio discipline for the first time. Fletcher considers the drumming on that album to be the best of Moon's career.

  Moon's kit grew steadily throughout his tenure. During 1964 and 1965 he used Ludwig drums and Zildjian cymbals; in late 1965 he began endorsing Premier Drums and stayed loyal to the company for the rest of his career. By 1966 he had moved to a larger configuration without a customary hi-hat, and with two bass drums, making him one of the early pioneers of double bass drumming in rock, alongside Ginger Baker. The famous "Pictures of Lily" kit, used from 1967 to 1969, had two 22-inch bass drums, two 16-inch floor toms and three mounted toms. In recognition of his loyalty, Premier reissued that kit in 2006 as the "Spirit of Lily".

  By 1970, Moon had added timbales, gongs and timpani. Premier's marketing manager Eddie Haynes began consulting him about specific requirements in 1973. When Moon asked for a white kit with gold-plated fittings and Haynes said it would be prohibitively expensive, Moon replied: "Dear boy, do exactly as you feel it should be, but that's the way I want it." The kit was eventually made with copper fittings and later given to Zak Starkey, Moon's godson.

  Unlike Ginger Baker or John Bonham, Moon hated drum solos and refused to play them in concert. At a Madison Square Garden show during the Who's 1974 tour, Townshend and Entwistle spontaneously stopped playing during "Waspman" to force a solo from Moon. He played briefly, then stopped and shouted, "Drum solos are boring!"

• 5. Destruction as Performance

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  At an early show at the Railway Tavern in Harrow, Townshend accidentally broke his guitar and, when the audience demanded he do it again, smashed it deliberately. Moon, not to be outdone, kicked over his drum kit. What followed over the next decade was what the band later called "auto-destructive art" - an escalating ritual of equipment demolition that became inseparable from the Who's live identity.

  Townshend later estimated that a set of skins cost about $300 - then £96 - and that after every show Moon would "just go bang, bang, bang and then kick the whole thing over." Haynes from Premier noted, somewhat incongruously, that Moon actually kicked his kit over carefully, and it rarely needed repairs. It was the stands and foot pedals that he "would go through... like a knife through butter".

  Moon's favourite personal stunt was more architecturally ambitious. According to Tony Fletcher, it began in 1965 when Moon purchased a case of 500 cherry bombs. Townshend walked into Moon's hotel bathroom to find the toilet had disappeared entirely, with only the S-bend remaining. Moon showed him the case of explosives. "And of course from that moment on," Townshend recalled, "we got thrown out of every hotel we ever stayed in."

  Moon moved from cherry bombs to M-80 fireworks to sticks of dynamite. "All that porcelain flying through the air was quite unforgettable," Moon remembered. "I never realised dynamite was so powerful. I'd been used to penny bangers before." Entwistle later admitted in a 1981 Los Angeles Times interview: "A lot of times when Keith was blowing up toilets I was standing behind him with the matches."

  On the Who's early US package tour at the RKO 58th Street Theatre in New York in March and April 1967, Moon performed two or three shows a day and kicked over his drum kit after every one. Later that year, during an appearance on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, he bribed a stagehand to load gunpowder into one of his bass drums. The stagehand used about ten times the intended amount. The explosion singed Townshend's hair and embedded a piece of cymbal in Moon's arm. Footage of the incident became the opening scene of the concert film The Kids Are Alright.

  The most notorious set piece came on the 23rd of August 1967 - Moon's 21st birthday - at a Holiday Inn in Flint, Michigan, where the Who were opening for Herman's Hermits. Moon was drunk by the time the band played Atwood Stadium that evening. Back at the hotel, he started a food fight. Cake flew. He knocked out part of a front tooth; hospital doctors could not administer anaesthetic because of his state of inebriation. Fire extinguishers were set off at the hotel, guests and objects were thrown into the swimming pool, and a piano was reportedly destroyed. The chaos ended only when police arrived with guns drawn. The Holiday Inn management presented a bill for $24,000, reportedly settled by the Herman's Hermits tour manager Edd McCann. Andrew Neill and Matthew Kent estimated that Moon's hotel destruction over his career cost as much as £300,000.

• 6. Personal Cost

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  Moon's first serious relationship was with Kim Kerrigan, who first saw the Who play at Le Disque a Go! Go! in Bournemouth in January 1965. She was sixteen. By the end of that year she was pregnant. Her parents met with the Moon family; she moved into the Moon home in Wembley. Moon and Kerrigan married on the 17th of March 1966 at Brent Register Office; their daughter Amanda was born on the 12th of July. The marriage and child were kept secret from the press until May 1968.

  Kim later described Moon's jealousy: "If someone talked to me, he'd lose it. We'd go home and he'd start a fight with me." She also said: "He had no idea how to be a father. He was too much of a child himself." From 1971 to 1975 Moon owned Tara, a home in Chertsey, where at one point he ordered an employee at Track Records to purchase a milk float and store it in the garage. In 1973 Kim concluded that neither she nor anyone else could moderate his behaviour, and left, taking Amanda. She sued for divorce in 1975 and later married Faces keyboard player Ian McLagan. Biographer Dave Marsh believed Moon never truly recovered from this loss. Kim died in a car accident in Austin, Texas, on the 2nd of August 2006.

  On the 4th of January 1970, Moon accidentally killed his friend, driver and bodyguard Neil Boland outside the Red Lion pub in Hatfield, Hertfordshire. Pub patrons had begun attacking his Bentley; Moon, drunk, drove to escape them and struck Boland. The coroner ruled the death accidental. Those close to Moon said he was haunted by it for the rest of his life; according to Pamela Des Barres, he had recurring nightmares about the incident and said he had no right to be alive.

  During the 1973 Quadrophenia tour, at the Who's debut US date at the Cow Palace in Daly City, California, Moon ingested a mixture of sedatives and brandy and passed out on his drum kit during "Won't Get Fooled Again". Roadies carried him off, gave him a shower and an injection of cortisone, and sent him back on after a thirty-minute delay. He passed out again during "Magic Bus". Townshend addressed the audience: "Can anyone play the drums? - I mean somebody good?" A drummer named Scot Halpin came up from the audience and finished the show.

  At the opening date of the band's March 1976 US tour at the Boston Garden, Moon passed out over his drums after two numbers. That night, he destroyed his hotel room, cut himself in the process, and passed out again. Manager Bill Curbishley found him, took him to hospital, and told him: "I'm gonna get the doctor to get you nice and fit, so you're back within two days. Because I want to break your fucking jaw... You have fucked this band around so many times and I'm not having it any more." Doctors told Curbishley that Moon would have bled to death without the intervention. Marsh suggested that at this point Daltrey and Entwistle seriously considered firing Moon, but decided it would make his situation worse.

• 7. The Last Year

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  In mid-1978, Moon moved into Flat 12 at 9 Curzon Place in Mayfair, London - a flat he rented from Harry Nilsson. Singer Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas had died there four years earlier, at thirty-two. Nilsson was reluctant to let Moon have it, believing the flat was cursed. Townshend assured him that "lightning wouldn't strike the same place twice".

  Moon began a prescribed course of Heminevrin - the trade name for clomethiazole - to manage his alcohol withdrawal. He wanted to get sober but was frightened of psychiatric hospitals and wanted to detox at home. The drug was prescribed by a physician named Geoffrey Dymond, who was unaware of Moon's actual lifestyle. Dymond gave him a bottle of 100 pills and instructed him to take one when he felt a craving for alcohol, but no more than three per day. Clomethiazole is not recommended for unsupervised detoxification; it is addictive, prone to inducing tolerance, and fatal when combined with alcohol.

  Roadie Dave "Cy" Langston saw Moon struggling in the studio that September, trying to overdub drums for The Kids Are Alright: "After two or three hours, he got more and more sluggish, he could barely hold a drum stick."

  On the 6th of September, Moon and Walter-Lax attended a preview of The Buddy Holly Story as guests of Paul and Linda McCartney. Afterwards they dined at Peppermint Park in Covent Garden, then returned to the flat. Moon watched The Abominable Dr. Phibes, asked Walter-Lax to cook him lamb cutlets, received her refusal, spoke his last words, and took some clomethiazole tablets. When Walter-Lax checked on him the following afternoon, he was dead. Police determined there were 32 clomethiazole pills in his system; six had been digested, 26 had not. Moon was thirty-two.

  He was cremated on the 13th of September 1978 at Golders Green Crematorium in London. His ashes were scattered in the Gardens of Remembrance. The Who Are You album cover, released just before his death, shows him straddling a chair to conceal his weight gain; on the back of the chair are the words "Not to be taken away".

• 8. What He Left Behind

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  Rolling Stone's 2011 readers' poll ranked Moon the second-greatest drummer in history. In 2016 the same magazine placed him second in their list of the 100 Greatest Drummers of All Time, behind John Bonham. He was posthumously inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame in 1982, becoming the second rock drummer chosen. The New Book of Rock Lists put him first in its list of the fifty greatest rock and roll drummers.

  Nick Talevski described Moon as "the greatest drummer in rock", and said "he was to the drums what Jimi Hendrix was to the guitar." AllMusic's Bruce Eder wrote that Moon "probably represented the youthful, zany side of rock and roll, as well as its self-destructive side, better than anyone else on the planet." Clem Burke of Blondie recalled that as a boy of eleven or twelve, the last ten minutes of his drum lessons - when he could play along to records - were spent on "My Generation": "At the end of the song, the drums go nuts. 'My Generation' was a turning point for me."

  Adam Budofsky, editor of Drummer magazine, said Moon's performances on Who's Next and Quadrophenia "represent a perfect balance of technique and passion" and that "there's been no drummer who's touched his unique slant on rock and rhythm since."

  In November 1978, Faces drummer Kenney Jones joined the Who. Townshend said Jones "was one of the few British drummers who could fill Keith's shoes"; Daltrey was less convinced, saying Jones "wasn't the right style". From 1996 to 2025, the Who's drummer was Zak Starkey - Ringo Starr's son, who as a child had been given a drum kit by Moon, the man he called "Uncle Keith".

  In 2008, English Heritage declined an application for Moon to receive a blue plaque, with Christopher Frayling saying they "decided that bad behaviour and overdosing on various substances wasn't a sufficient qualification." The UK's Heritage Foundation disagreed. A plaque was unveiled on the 9th of March 2009, with Daltrey, Townshend, Robin Gibb and Moon's mother Kit present at the ceremony.