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'We'll go on until we drop dead' 
(Filed: 07/07/2003) 

After Pete Townshend's arrest and John Entwistle's death, the Who's Roger
Daltrey tells Michael Shelden why he's still raging against authority 

It's been almost 40 years since Roger Daltrey first shouted and snarled and
famously stammered his way through the Who's classic rock anthem My
Generation, defiantly declaring: "Hope I die before I get old".
 
Though band member Keith Moon seemed to take the lyric to heart - dying in 
a blaze of excess, 25 years ago - Daltrey is now on the verge of 60 and is
still going strong, his voice almost unchanged and youthful rage still
bubbling near the surface.

Indeed, it explodes in full force when we meet backstage at the Hollywood
Bowl, where he has been rehearsing for a solo appearance. Blue eyes bulging,
he bounces angrily in his chair, pounds the table and says in a voice rising
with emotion: "Not many people think for themselves now. They're like
wallpaper.

"Well, they'd better wake up and think about what happened to Pete, because
that wasn't the end of anything. It was the beginning of a witch-hunt and
nobody's safe."

He is referring, of course, to the recent troubles of the Who's lead
guitarist and principal songwriter, Pete Townshend, whom police investigat-
ed earlier this year for allegedly downloading child pornography from the
internet.

After an exhaustive search of his computers, he was cautioned and put on 
the Sex Offenders' Register for five years.

For months, Daltrey has been seething over his friend's treatment by the
authorities, but he has refrained from lashing out at them. Until now. The
trigger for his rage on this sunny day in California seems to be Townshend's
own music, which he has just been singing in rehearsal. When I arrive at the
Hollywood Bowl, I hear his voice on the loudspeakers. He is launching into
the haunting lyrics from Townshend's rock opera about an abused boy, Tommy -
"See me, feel me, touch me, heal me" - Daltrey's voice sounding like a raspy
angel's.

"The thing is, Pete's a genius. He's given the world some of the best music
it's ever heard. He didn't deserve to be treated like a criminal because
that's the last thing he is. I've been singing his songs all these years, 
and I'm in awe of them. They're brilliant, and anyone who loves his music
should stand up and show some support for Pete.

"There was a huge breach of his civil liberties, and I don't think we should
sit back and watch that kind of thing happen without fighting it. If this 
was the Sixties, more people would see this witch-hunt for what it is and
start a protest. It's not just about Pete. It's about having some control
over our lives and not letting the police do whatever they want."

According to Daltrey, 14 computers were removed from Townshend's home in
Richmond and examined with "military precision". The fact that nothing
incriminating was discovered on the machines after months of investigation
makes Daltrey livid.

"What are we becoming? The fucking Taliban? Pete's an artist and may have
been naive, but he did nothing wrong and told the truth from the start. But
he was treated as though he was guilty of the worst crimes and crucified
without a trial by people with no accountability. It's a fucking disgrace.
Everything they did to him was appalling."

Daltrey is convinced that his old friend was innocently surfing the net and
simply wandered by accident into a website containing some illegal images.

After "stumbling" into the site, Townshend admits that he used a credit card
to access its pages, but only because he was "conducting research" for a
longstanding project on child abuse.

"It's absolutely true," Daltrey insists. "If he had told a pack of lies, 
they wouldn't have come after him. But he didn't hide anything and paid a
price for being honest. He has a long history of working to help abused
people, and has spent a lot of time thinking about the problem. That's just 
a fact. But nobody wanted to listen to his explanation, and now - too late -
they find he's guilty of doing nothing."

With passionate intensity, he leans across the table in his dressing-room 
and tells me: "You have to understand, Pete is a Lennon character. Just like
John, he's a creative artist who wears his heart on his sleeve and draws his
own boundaries. The Establishment didn't like John for doing that, and now
they want to get Pete."

For most of their lives, Daltrey and Townshend have been at war with
authority and, not infrequently, with each other. They used to have enormous
rows as they fought over their music and control of the band. Roger often
found release for his quick temper by using Pete as a punchbag, landing some
fierce blows on his friend's rather prominent nose. Their view of each other
is not rose-coloured, but they have always closed ranks against outsiders,
especially those who - in the opening words of My Generation - "try to put 
us down".

As teenagers, they took delight in being rebels against the quiet conformity
of postwar Britain, railing against their elders for enforcing a strict
morality that felt suffocating to them.

"When we said: 'Hope I die before I get old', what we meant is that we
didn't want to end up like the old people back then. It was about keeping
your mind young and free. I thought that, as a society, we were making some
progress, but now I don't know. The old strict morality seems to be making a
comeback."

He still vividly remembers a pivotal encounter with a teacher who embodied
everything he hated in the older generation. He was only 14 and had seen
Elvis perform on television and was full of enthusiasm, telling friends that
playing rock music was just the job for him. But when he went to a teacher
and asked his opinion of the American rocker, he was told, with smug
condescension, that Elvis was "disgusting".

"That was one of my teachers at Acton Grammar School, and I guess he was
only about 30 at the time. But his attitude was old. He was already dead as
far as I was concerned. I hated him and everything he stood for. He and his
kind were just training people for a life with a briefcase. Give me Elvis
any day, I thought to myself. At least he's free."

A year later, at 15, Daltrey was expelled from school and soon joined a band
called the Detours, with his friends Pete Townshend and John Entwistle.

"We were the kind of guys who stood out in a crowd. We always looked a bit
different from the other people around us, and I think we were drawn to each
other because of that. It was a natural chemistry for us, and the music was
great. I never looked back."

After the group became the Who, with Keith Moon playing drums, the four
kindred spirits took every opportunity to rattle the older generation,
making the Beatles and the Rolling Stones look tame with their wild antics,
ending their concerts with deafening outbursts of random noise and
destroying their instruments in onstage fits of mayhem.

Daltrey laughs gleefully when he recalls how much they shocked the audiences
of the time. "People didn't know what to make of us. We went to America and
they put us on the same tour as Herman's Hermits. Can you believe it? We
would come out and play this hard-driving stuff and people would look at us
in amazement and say: 'Where the f--- is all this noise coming from?' It was
the time of the Vietnam War, yet they were shocked when we just exploded in
front of them, breaking guitars and throwing stuff. It was like a little war
right in their faces."

Such craziness couldn't last long. The group lost its way in the Seventies
and the days of one hit record following another came to an end. In 1978,
Keith Moon died of a drink and drug overdose and, for a time, Daltrey
wondered whether the Who could continue without him.

"Keith was an amazing drummer who was so inventive that he rarely played
anything the same way twice. But what I loved about him, and what a lot of
people don't know, is that he was one of the funniest men in England. He
used to hang out with the Monty Python gang, and Graham Chapman once told me
that Keith was funnier than any one of them. He was real-life Monty Python."
But the Who managed to survive the loss of their drummer and continued to
record and give concerts for much of the past 20 years, with mixed success.
Where the group goes from here is uncertain, given not only Townshend's
troubles, but the fact that another member died last year.

Daltrey says that he wasn't surprised when the news of John Entwistle's
death reached him.

"John hadn't looked healthy for a long time. I'm a big believer in
alternative medicine and healthy living, and I can tell when someone looks
ill. I saw it in John's pallor and his eyes. He lived hard and he took
risks. Whenever I saw him in the last few years, I always made a habit of
giving him a big hug before I left him. I was never sure I'd see him again."

The fact that Entwistle died in the arms of at least one stripper in his Las
Vegas hotel room is something that makes his old friend smile. Daltrey
regards it as a perfectly appropriate exit for a Sixties rebel.

"Ask any man what he would prefer - to live to a ripe old age and die alone
or to go out shagging your balls off with strippers in Vegas?" He laughs,
and shouts: "Come on, let's be honest. It's not a death that any man should
be ashamed of."

The wonder is not that Keith and John are gone, but that the two most
important - and most volatile - members of the Who are still kicking.
Daltrey vows that he and Pete will soon reunite in the studio and record a
new album, then tour once again.

But will they perform as the Who?

"Of course. We're not going to give up now. As long as Pete's there on
guitar, and I'm there to sing the lead, you're going to have the Who. The
sound is still there. And in my opinion, Pete's getting better as the years
go by. Nothing is going to stop us, not the government or the press or
anybody. We're going to keep playing until we drop dead."

Which, in Daltrey's case, seems very unlikely any time soon. He was always
the most robustly healthy member of the group, and he has aged well. Married
with four children, he has also enjoyed a relatively ordinary domestic life
and is in no danger of being tempted by various evils on the internet. He
doesn't even own a computer.

A big-hearted man with simple tastes, he has mellowed a little with age,
giving a lot of his time to his favourite charity - the Teenage Cancer
Trust. Over the past few years, he has managed to raise more than #2.5
million for the cause, largely through benefit concerts and CD sales.

The trust helps to provide special hospital units for teenagers with cancer,
allowing them to give each other support and to receive special attention
for their needs.

"Without teenagers, the music business wouldn't exist. I've done well in
this business, so I think I need to give something back, and this is a great
cause that's starting to make big waves. It's changing the way that
teenagers are treated when they get cancer. They aren't children and they
aren't adults. They are stuck in the middle and can be overlooked if we
don't pay them the attention they deserve."

Another sure sign of mellowness is Daltrey's new respect for his
working-class parents, both of whom are now dead. In a rare moment of soft
reflection, he leans back and speaks almost wistfully of his mother and
father and their struggles, and decides that it may be time to let a few
ghosts fade away.

"They weren't responsible for the things we fought against. They weren't
part of the Establishment. But I used to ridicule them for accepting the
life that was given to them. I wanted them to fight back, like me. But now I
see that my dad and mum had all the fight taken out of them by the war. My
dad had enough excitement on the beaches at D-Day. That was enough for a
lifetime. I understand that now."

He pauses and looks at me as though he wants to convey his regrets to
somebody, then shrugs and admits: "I feel the need to apologise to them." At
a loss for a response, I ask why.

"I don't know. I just do. But I think I know what my dad would say."

He closes his eyes and laughs. "He'd say: 'Don't worry, son. You did well'."

The Who: Live at the Royal Albert Hall is out now on CD. To make a donation
to the Teenage Cancer Trust, call 020 7387 1000, or see www.teencancer.org
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