Dear Boy - Tony Fletcher

Dear Boy - Tony Fletcher


1998 Omnibus Press
ISBN 0.7119.6625.7

Subsequently reissued in paperback

One of the definitive rock biographies. Goes beyond the usual stories about Keith Moon’s antics and gives a better appreciation of Moon the person.

Richard Barnes, Mojo

“We spend years building up our myths then this bloke comes along and ruins ‘em” joked Pete Townshend when told of Dear Boy’s attempt to invalidate some of the Moon legends. However, Keith’s real life was so incredibly over-the-top, the truth transcends the myth anyway.

This bloke, Tony Fletcher, has written a lengthy, well researched biography which is neither ‘Moon Behaving Badly” nor a fan’s hagiography, rather an intelligent bid to present the complete works, warts and all (and what warts!). Mythfinder General Fletcher interviewed over 100 key people including Moon’s wife, Kim, his subsequent fiancee, Annette, his long suffering assistant, Dougal Butler. He didn’t however get Townshend, Daltrey or Keith’s mum.

Moon revolutionised rock drumming, transforming the drums into front line instruments. He knew none of the rules yet broke all of them. He refused to practice but played by intuition. His work on I Can See For Miles, among others is sublime. Yet regretably, his lifestyle overshadows his musicianship. He was Britains top eccentric, boozer, practical joker and all round wild man. But He was not simply Moon The Loon. More Noel Coward than Noel Gallagher, his hotel rooms were always trashed with a certain amount of panache.

It’s the sheer scale of his excesses, detailed in this book, that’s so shocking. Fletcher tries to analyse Moon but he fits none of the usual stereotypes. Townshend tells me he thinks Moon’s motivation might have been power - tasted presumably when their upper class manager, Kit Lambert introduced the working class boy to the power of posh 1964 london society.

At 25 he was living out his fantasies, a handsome wealthy rock star, married to a beautiful woman, living in a modern funhouse, friends with everyone including the Beatles, in great demand socially, perpetually radiating warmth and (jobsworths and hoteliers apart) universally loved.

Yet the book details his already crazy life spiralling increasingly out of control. Keith’s love letters to Kim reveal a disturbing, obsessive jealousy into seriously unreasonable behaviour (a footnote tells us that he broke her nose three times) forcing her father to attempt to hit him. Fletcher politely comments “One can’t help but feel it was time that someone did”. He moves to LA filling his days (and nights) with serious partying, inevitably turning into a coked up, pharmaceutically damaged, inebriated waistral. A sad broke, broken, Bloated Beach Boy acting as court jester for Californian musos and assorted wealthy Tinseltown lowlife. People started avoiding him and when The Who eventually regrouped he’d become too unfit to play - a liability. After his death, The Who reassured the world they would continue - no longer shackled by Moon. I Can See For Miles by the unshackled Who can be experienced on The Who: 30 Years of Maximum RnB video. “I rest my case, dear boy”


PD, Record Collector


He’s been dead for 20 years, and was only a pale shadow of his original percussive glory for half a decade before that. He couldn’t sing, he didn’t write - so why has Keith Moon passed into legend as a rock icon?

It’s that word legend that offers the clue. The way the stories go (and there are plenty of them). Moon’s explosive, chaotic, sometimes incoherent drum technique was a blueprint for every aspect of his life. Even if you werent born until after he died you’ve read the myths - Rolls Royces into swimming pools, TV sets out of hotel windows, his body a reservoir af chemical and alcoholic excess. He was Moon The Loon the ultimate rock n roll party animal whose body gave out after one party too many.

Stretching the caricature out to 550 pages would tax anyone, but Dear Boy is much more than the tedious collection of over familiar stories you were expecting. With detailed research and access to almost all the key players in Moon’s life, Tony Fletcher has written a book which punctures some of the legends, confirms others, but never fails to count the human cost. The Moon that emerges from his compelling narative is an utterly flawed, totally desperate individual, viciously cruel, ridiculously kind and always racked with insecurity. Fletcher’s history of the eternal cheeky schoolboy and his sudden transformation into an international sex object, is the archetypal rock n roll myth. To his credit, he never shies away from exposing Moons darker side, or detailing the toll his behaviour took on his band, his friends and his victimised lovers. But he doesn’t slip into judgemental mode, either leaving the reader to assess the glory and the damage and draw their own conclusions.

Along the way, Fletcher paints vivid pictures of pre Beatles pop culture, the mod scene, and the spiritual emptiness of 70s rock stardom. Hes also an excellent critic of Moons contribution to The Who, who effectively died as a group when their drummer Oded on life in 1978. Tender but clear sighted, this is one of the great rock biographies.


Dave Ling, Classic Rock

Equal parts tragic and comic in content, this intimate portrait of The Who’s hell raising drummer is well researched and lovingly written, although not always flattering. As well as a groundbreaking musician, Moon is here also portrayed as a wife beater and a vain yet self doubting and pitiful alcoholic hell bent on his own destruction.

Although Who vocalist Roger Daltrey felt the author went a little to far, the book is definitely fascinating prose. The Whos earliest internal rivalries, and Moon’s hotel wreckings and imbecilic drugs and booze binges, his resulting paranoia, the Nazi impersonations, the drinking and driving and Moon’s role in the senseless death of bodyguard Neil Bolland all are well documented. Amid all the insanity, one of the most revealing windows into Moon The Loons whoopp-cushioned-cluttered world is his oft-repeated prank of lobbing flour bombs through the open windows of passing cars, dumb, dangerous. But brilliant.