Excellent Guardian Article, Part II

[L. Bird]

A week later, Roger Daltrey picks me up at Stonegate station in East Sussex 
in a new black Mercedes, and as he drives the short distance to his 400-acre 
estate he talks of how proud he is of Pete and the new album, and what a 
terrible time it is to be a farmer.

Wealthy rock musicians are traditionally assumed to inhabit baronial 
mansions, and Daltrey really does. 'It's 1610,' he says. 'It's coming up for 
its birthday.' He says that he bought the place 35 years ago for the 
magnificent view, but he's had a separate career just trying to maintain it. 
'I lose money every year,' he says as he looks out onto his grazing cattle 
and freshwater fisheries. 'I have to go on bleeding tour just to pay for 
it.'

We settle in the lounge, while his second wife, Heather, and a grandchild 
amuse each other in the kitchen. The conversation drifts to the coverage of 
rock music on television ('The sound's got better, but the visuals have got 
f**king awful! All that swooping, whooping ...') and Live8 ('Absolutely 
appalling! All the things that Live8 was about in Africa, we did the same 
thing in Hyde Park - "them and us" with the Golden Circle [the 
privileged-access area at the front]. By the time we went on, the Golden 
Circle was exhausted, paralytic and asleep, and the real crowd at the back 
were going bananas').

At 62, Daltrey is stocky and exuberant. His golden locks have long been 
supplanted by a light brown crop. He says he is 'absolutely blind' without 
his blue-tinted granny glasses; he has considered laser treatment, but is 
frightened of error. He thinks he may have lost a few top notes over the 
years, but he is pleased how well his voice held up while recording the new 
material.

Not that he ever thought there would be new material. 'It's been a tortuous 
process,' he says. 'I thought, the idea was finished, this time last year. I 
thought, "Pete's got to let go of the Who." But the next thing I know Pete 
says, "I've done all the demos."'

Daltrey says he wrote six songs himself. 'None of them suitable, of course. 
I'll never be the songwriter Townshend is, I don't kid myself, but at least 
I came up with something. It's been a rough five years for us both, and how 
he's come through it, I don't f**king know.'

He told me he came through it because he had you and Rachel.

'I really love him. I do have to deal with the madness of some of his 
schemes. He's a technomaniac. I don't like the internet. I don't like the 
world he lives in. I don't think we've created a better society from the 
internet. Virtual relationships - I can't deal with that.'

I wondered whether the tension between the two of them - so evident and 
important onstage - was something they were keen to cultivate; not for the 
public image, but for their own creative wellbeing.

'Well, I feel very close to him,' Daltrey says. 'But we don't have to see 
each other all the time. It's a different closeness, and I really treasure 
it for that. The Who is the energy that exists between Pete and I, and that 
energy is increased by doing it separately. I don't care when people say 
we're not getting on - it's not f**king important. All that matters is what 
exists onstage and in our music. In that music is our relationship, is our 
love. I have such a deep love and respect for him, and that goes through all 
of it. He forgives all my foibles, and I forgive all his, and underneath all 
that I love him dearly.'

Daltrey says that it is getting a little harder every year to sing the old 
material, but it has never been easy. 'With the Who and Pete's music, you 
cannot cheat it,' he says. 'You cannot go through the f**king motions, 
because the music is just so gut-wrenching. It's so different from most of 
the other stuff that's out there, and you're got to be incredibly courageous 
to even attempt to do it.' He adds that there is still nothing that gives 
him greater artistic satisfaction than performing Townshend's songs. 'I 
don't get paid for the singing - that's free. It's the schlepping I get paid 
for.'

I had heard that the impact of John Entwistle's death four years ago was 
particularly sustained for Daltrey. 'I got very depressed,' he says. 'Very, 
very: it was much more of a shock to me than I ever thought it would be. I 
thought I had learnt to deal with those sorts of things, with mum, dad. John 
was John - you could never change him, a real rock'n'roll character and a 
real rock lifestyle. I mean does it matter, the sudden ending with the line 
of coke and the hooker in Las Vegas - I mean, is it that bad at 57? What's 
the alternative? The alternative may be very slow and smelly, as George 
Orwell said. All I know is that I f**king miss him.'

Daltrey had opted out of that hard rock lifestyle a long time ago. 'I wanted 
to sing. I had to decide very early on, especially when his writing got into 
the Tommy era - this stuff needs some interpretation and it needs an awful 
lot of discipline. You can't do the other stuff as well.'

And so Daltrey's other stuff has taken a different course - most notably 
towards charity and film work. I had asked Townshend why he had produced 
everything on the new album except Daltrey's vocals, and he said that 
Daltrey had a studio technique 'which is really quite eccentric. It's 
intense and extraordinarily self-obsessed.' But what really gets to 
Townshend is the thought, 'God, does Roger actually believe that all he does 
is sing?'

He also spends much time organising charity concerts for the Teenage Cancer 
Trust, a project he says has kept him sane following Entwistle's death. He 
is also trying to get a film made about Keith Moon, with Mike Myers playing 
the drummer. It's hard to get it exactly right, Daltrey says, because he 
doesn't want it to be Carry On Moon, the story that everyone knows. 'If I've 
done anything, I've stopped a bad Keith Moon film from being made.'

I ask him how he will know when the Who really is over. 'Oh, it will give me 
up,' he says. 'I just won't be able to sing it.'

But this may not be for a while. 'Can you see us onstage in wheelchairs?' he 
asks.

Not really.

'Why not? It will still be us, still be the same music, and it's only the 
music that matters.'

You'd have troubling swinging your microphone lead.

'Not necessarily. Pete may have trouble with the guitars, I suppose. He does 
like to jump around. I'm not saying I want to be in a wheelchair, but it 
could happen.'

It would certainly be a novelty.

'It would! I would never rule it out.'

Daltrey then took the photographer and his publicist and me on a little tour 
of his grounds in his Land Rover. We passed a woman who keeps the hawks that 
keep his rabbits down. We passed several fishermen by the edge of the 
beautiful lakes which he had made. At a fishing lodge, we paused to pick 
sweet plums from a tree. 'Just think,' one of us said to Daltrey, 'those 
lakes that you built are now going to be part of the English landscape for 
ever.'

'Nah,' Daltrey said. 'Nothing lasts for ever. Nothing. We're just pushing 
dust around.'

· Endless Wire is released on 31 October on Universal Republic