From the earliest age, Keith Moon proved himself an exception to all known rules, and upon discovering this about himself, he made it his purpose in life to challenge them in everything he did.
He revolutionised the concept of the drummer in rock’n’roll and pop music by rejecting the previously accepted constraints, leading from the back as was almost unheard of rather than offering mere support as was then the convention, filling spaces that had always been left open, leaving gaps where usually lay the beat.
In January 1968, the Who, the Small Faces and Paul Jones (the former singer of Manfred Mann) took a 10,000 mile plane journey to the southern hemisphere to play a short tour of Australia and New Zealand.
Once Steve Marriott smashed the player with his fist, And in the madness of the moment, he picked his broken birthday present up and threw it out of the window.
But as Steve Marriott recalled in the Small Faces biography The Young Mods’ Forgotten Story, that “was the wrong thing to do in front of Keith Moon, because the next thing that went out was the telly, armchairs, the lot went out of the window, the whole room … It was just mad.”
Keith walked in, complimented the hotel on their redecorating job, admired Marriott’s new record player – and promptly threw it straight out the window.
“Me and Wiggy looked at each other in amazement,” recalled Steve Marriott, “and we screamed ‘No! No! No!’ And Keith was going ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’, bunging things out and smashing things. The whole room gets duffed up again. Fucking wrecked.”
There was no way of escaping the blame this time and the Australian tour wound up with armed guards outside Marriott’s door and an expensive bill for damages.
What happened in a other new hotel was when the noise from Keith’s room got particularly excessive one day, the Wilshire management cut off his electricity. Infuriated, Keith responded with a now famous course of action. He moved himself and his furniture out into the hallway, plugged his stereo into the sockets there and sat down in his armchair – naked. It was altogether easier for the hotel to let him return to his room to make a noise than invade everyone else’s personal space.
One incident that particularly stands out, however, occurred on the afternoon of August 25th, 1972, when the Who were staying at a luxurious hotel in Copenhagen, Denmark. Moon, fascinated by the waterbed in his suite, attempted to enlist Pete Townshend to help him lug its water-filled mattress into the elevator, whereupon they would send it down to the lobby; unfortunately, it burst before the
y could extricate it from its frame, unleashing foot-high waves out into the hallway. It looked like the Who were about to be on the hook for tens of thousands in damages, but Moon (realizing that the best defense was a good offense) quickly rang the manager, told him that the bed had burst and destroyed all of
