How do you attempt to capture an exploding time bomb? The subsequent life of Keith John Moon – the blazing comet, the shining star, the full moon brightening the night sky – had nothing, and yet everything, to do with this almost crushing normality. 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
Beautiful houses, fanciful investments and luxury personal possessions were acquired and dismissed – or destroyed – so rapidly as to become worthless. Hyperactive and peripatetic, he simply could not stay still. Keith Moon was forever running, always one step ahead of reality, his whole life a desperate, tragic battle to escape the normality into which he was born.
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. The groups were popular ‘down under’
They were greeted off their plane journey, jet-lagged to all hell, by the obligatory press conference that welcomed every band to a foreign country in the Sixties. Ian McLagan, the Small Faces keyboard player, had just got married at the start of the year – to the Ready Steady Gol dancer Sandy Serjeant that Keith had used as a diversion for his own marriage. McLagan had also just been busted for possession of pot. He recalls that he was singled out for the first question: “Mr McLagan, is it true that you’re a drug addict?”
“I said, ‘Oh fuck off,’ “he recalls, “and that was it, they started packing their equipment up. And they hounded us after that. Everywhere we went there’d be these arseholes. It was hell.”
On the flight that took the bands back from Adelaide to Sydney at the end of the Australian leg, an altercation between a stewardess who obviously believed the groups’ bad press and an entourage that had given up on trying to be polite any more escalated rapidly until someone called the stewardess by a four-letter word, and the captain landed the plane at the nearest airport to have the entire 19-person entourage removed by force. 
Three hours later, they were finally ‘escorted’ onto another flight to Sydney, airline security riding shotgun. The Australian papers immediately dedicated their front pages to this latest example of the touring party’s violence and belligerence and the incident was picked up by a scathing British tabloid press too. The Who vowed never to return to Australia and it was a promise they kept. Moon, though he loved touring with his friends in the Small Faces, was particularly aggrieved at their treatment and took to blaming it on his management, as groups are habitually prone to do.
On January 30, the occasion of Steve Marriott’s twenty-first birthday, the bands took a plane ride from Auckland to Wellington in the morning and, ensconced in their high-rise hotel in the latter city, gathered in Marriott’s room for a party.
The Small Faces’ record company EMI had kindly bought Marriott a portable record player, and singles to go with it. With the night off and the booze in, it looked like being a good party. But when one of the records skipped, an excited and inebriated Steve Marriott smashed the player with his fist, unwittingly breaking it in the process. Realising his error, the former Artful Dodger decided to make a proper job of his destruction, and in the madness of the moment, he picked his broken birthday present up and threw it out of the window. Everyone rushed to the balcony and watched the player turning as it fell, the fans who were gathered on the forecourt several floors below parting like the Red Sea before Moses as it landed in their midst. “It looked so good when it went down,” recalls John Wolff, “and the smash it made was fantastic, it was music to our ears, that we shouted, ‘Leave those bits there!’ I rushed downstairs in my dressing gown, gathered it all up and brought it back upstairs so we could throw it out again!”
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.” Marriott was stunned. Even though he had started it, he didn’t realise anyone went in for that kind of behaviour, and he was right; for all that Moon had been building up to something like this, his actions represented a new high – or low – in on-tour vandalism, an over-the-top reaction to Marriott and Wolff’s already crazed actions in a moment of collective, chaotic high spirits.
As best as conflicting recollections of what happened next can be correlated, with his furniture now on the hotel forecourt Marriott invented a stupendous lie about unknown intruders breaking into his room and destroying it. Apparently (and amazingly], the hotel took him at his word, the room was redecorated, and the next day EMI supplied Marriott with a new, even better record player. The bands played their two shows each at the town hall and came back for an end of tour party, again in Marriott’s room. 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. New Zealand newspaper The Truth sent them off with this farewell: ‘We really don’t want them back again. They are just unwashed, foul-smelling, booze-swilling no-hopers.’
