On the morning of his 50th birthday, Roger Daltrey opened the post and saw a photograph of a stranger smiling back at him.
Immediately he saw the resemblance: the young woman was his daughter.
According to NME The rock icon, 74, says that he was never told of their existence after their mothers gave them up for adoption. They only contacted him after his 50th birthday and were born in the period between his divorce from first wife Jackie and marriage to his second wife Heather.
“They all came into my life after my 50th birthday,” he told The Mirror.
“It was great – it’s all worked out. They stay in touch and they’re close, so that’s great.
“I’ve tried to do my best about a situation that couldn’t change because it happened a long time ago.”
Two more women would, in time, contact him after finding the name of The Who’s frontman listed as their father on adoption papers.
Roger, now 74, had no idea they’d been born in the 1960s, sometime after the collapse of his first marriage but before he met his second wife.
Roger’s other children are, Simon, 55, with his first wife Jackie; Mathias, 50, with Swedish model Elisabeth Aronsson; and Rosie, 46, Willow, 43, and Jamie, 37, with his second wife, model Heather Taylor.
Heather – immortalised by Jimi Hendrix as Foxy Lady in his futile attempt to woo her – is surely the most understanding wife in rock history.
Because during Roger’s wild touring years with The Who, he played away while she turned a blind eye.
“Heather is amazing. To find a woman who understood what this business was like, who I was and who we were, and to accept that and still want to be with me when I came home was a gift from the universe,” he says.
