Pete Townshend recalls. “He reminded me a lot of Jimi Hendrix, who, in the flesh, had no light. But as soon as he started to play music, light would happen, like a shaman. (Irishtimes) Phil (left photo) was like that. He’d work at my studio in Isleworth, and when he played, he kind of caught fire.
“We had a great night out in [promoter] Steve Strange’s Club for Heroes in London once, with people like Paul Weller and Chrissy Wood, Ronnie Wood’s ex-wife. I woke up with a needle in my arm and Phil standing there, looking at me passed out. Do you know what my big disappointment was? That I wasn’t on the front page of the newspaper the next day. I was in a club with Paul Weller and Phil Lynott, and it was the only time in my life I was ever going to overdose, and nobody knew!”
“it’s not as bad as it has been before. Back in 1979 and 1980, it was chaos. I’m avoiding getting myself into those kinds of muddles. I do a lot of saying no. No I’m not going to talk to them, no I’m not going go on X Factor .
“I didn’t like being in a rock band, and I didn’t like the rock business, and I don’t think I would have stayed in there had I not been a drinker,” he says. “It was what it enabled me to stay, because I didn’t use drugs for a long, long time. I wasn’t quite as pure as Roger Daltrey claims to be, but I stopped smoking marijuana in 1967, so I was 22. I didn’t start using any kind of drugs again until briefly in about 1979, just after Keith Moon died.
“We couldn’t work out what the hell was going on with Keith. His sister, for example, is still alive and perfectly normal.She had the same parents, she’s a year older than him. Why isn’t she a nutter? His mum just died recently. Lovely lady, very normal. And I know his aunts. They’re lovely and normal and you look at Keith and wonder what was it that made him so strange. His self-destruction was poetic and creative.”
When I came down in the party room the cake was squashed all over the floor, on the walls, on the face of Keith. In the pool a Lincoln Continental was in precarious balance between the water and the edge. After they told me that Keith had removed the handbrake and the vehicle had started by itself towards the pool.
As I tried to return it to the room Keith gave in outburst, a young man approached and asked for an autograph. He then gave him against a lamp hitting the head. Keith even managed to break the teeth slipping as he was running in the hall with cake on the floor and was not arrested just because we took him secretly to a dentist. After that night The Who were banned for life from the Holiday Inn.
