CHAPTER FOUR

SAWDUST CAESARS

‘Retarded artistically … idiotic in other respects.’

Keith Moon’s school report, autumn 1959

‘The unhappy faces of mods and rockers reveal profound, pitiful and precocious dramas of sorrow, of distrust, of vice, of nastiness and of delinquency.’

Pope Paul VI, August 1964

On a rainy Thursday afternoon in March 1964, the Labour Party leader Harold Wilson met The Beatles. The Variety Club of Great Britain had voted the group Showbusiness Personalities of the Year. As MP for Huyton in Merseyside, Wilson was asked to present the Liverpudlians with their Silver Heart awards. The guest list for the ceremony at London’s Dorchester Hotel included The Beatles, Dirk Bogarde, Julie Christie, The Avengers actors Honor Blackman and Patrick Macnee, and James Bond star Sean Connery.

In his introductory speech, Wilson gently chided Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home’s Conservative government, and jokingly quoted from a recent Times review that had praised The Beatles for their ‘pandiatonic clusters’. Wilson, with his snowy hair and three-piece suit, was clearly part of the old guard, but it would have been difficult to imagine the aristocratic Douglas-Home or his predecessor Harold Macmillan cracking jokes and appearing so relaxed in a similar situation.

‘One at a time,’ Wilson ordered The Beatles as they crowded around him to collect their awards. Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr held their plaques up and said a polite ‘thanks’ into the microphone, but John Lennon, the last of the four to collect his award, had other ideas. ‘Thanks for the purple hearts,’ he said, to a ripple of knowing laughter. ‘Ooh, sorry Harold.’

A ‘purple heart’ was the common name for the US military decoration awarded to servicemen killed or wounded in action. But Lennon’s reference was more subversive. He was referring to the nickname for the heart-shaped antidepressant pill Drinamyl. These ‘purple hearts’ contained dexamphetamine sulphate, which provided an exhilarating rush and a barbiturate to ease the comedown. They were completely legal and prescribed by doctors to exhausted and anxious patients, including, it later transpired, several MPs

There was nothing new about musicians, writers or artists taking drugs. The Rolling Stones were about to be turned on to speed by the blues bands they travelled with on their first US tour. ‘I felt like I’d been let into a secret society,’ said Keith Richards, who was soon scoring speed at truckstops across America. However, the musician that gave Keith Richards his first speed pill also told him to ‘Keep it dark, and keep it among yourselves.’ By late 1964, though, the word was out, and the British press had discovered that pop groups and many of their teenage followers were popping ‘purple hearts’ and similar amphetamines for fun. Before the year was over, most of The Who and many of their fans had joined the not-so-secret society.

In the meantime, the sight of an MP glad-handing The Beatles demonstrated pop music’s growing importance to politicians wooing a potentially powerful young electorate. Shortly before meeting The Beatles, Harold Wilson had given a speech at Birmingham Town Hall in which he assiduously courted the youth vote. ‘Our young men and women have in their hands the power to change the world,’ he told the 2,000-strong audience. Seven months later, Labour were voted into power at the general election on the back of Wilson’s promise of a ‘New Britain’. The man who’d given The Beatles their Silver Heart awards became Britain’s new Prime Minister.

Also at the Dorchester that afternoon was another man caught up in Wilson’s youthful revolution: The Beatles’ manager, a thirty-year-old former furniture salesman named Brian Epstein. For anyone who wanted to make money out of pop music but lacked the necessary hairstyle or musical nous, Epstein was the perfect role model.

Helmut Gorden had Brian Epstein’s success in mind when he began managing The Who in early spring 1964. Born in Germany during the First World War, Gorden was a Jewish refugee who now lived with his mother in Golders Green, north London, and was already forty-nine years old when he encountered the former Detours. ‘He was,’ said Pete Townshend, ‘a single man who wanted some excitement in his life.’

Gorden ran a brass foundry, making door handles in Wendell Road, Shepherd’s Bush. Just the mention of his name now prompts an instinctual negative response from Doug Sandom: ‘I hated the bastard.’ But although their relationship would turn sour, it started well enough. Sandom’s sister-in-law Rose Kume worked at the foundry, and Helmut and Rose were frequent visitors to the Sandom household. Before long, the subject of Doug’s band came up: ‘So, in the end, he got curious and came to see us.’

Gorden showed up at The Who’s regular Sunday night gig at the White Hart, and was impressed by the sound of the band but also the noise coming from the audience. He’d seen The Beatles on TV being mobbed by screaming girls. ‘And,’ says Sandom, ‘he thought he could have some of that with us.’

Helmut Gorden didn’t have any music industry experience, but he offered The Who money and promises. ‘He was this short, balding guy who spoke in this incredibly thick guttural German accent,’ recalls Richard Barnes. ‘But he was a successful businessman, who worked hard to build up this strange niche business, and he had money to spend.’

Gorden told The Who that he could get them a record deal, and more gigs, and produced a list of music business contacts, most of whom came from the pre-Beatles era. It was a less than compelling pitch. But when the band told him that their van had just broken down on the way home from a gig in the Midlands, Gorden immediately offered to buy a new one. ‘He decided he wanted to waste some money on a pop group, so we thought, well, we’ll waste your money for you,’ said Roger Daltrey, Before long, Daltrey had taken to referring to Gorden as ‘the cash register’.

On their frequent trips to Wendell Road, Townshend and Barney were both fascinated and appalled by their benefactor’s squalid workplace and strange demeanour. ‘The foundry was like something out of Dickens: dark and filthy, with this big black bloke melting metal in one corner,’ says Barnes. ‘Pete and I were in Gorden’s office once, stoned out of our heads, when the phone rang. It was someone ordering door handles. Helmut was confirming the order and shouting, “Yah, a gross! A gross gross!” He really sounded like an actor doing a bad Shylock.’ Outside the foundry, the stoned pair collapsed in fits of giggles.

Yet Gorden was as good as his word. Over the coming months, ‘the cash register’ would keep paying out. Roger Daltrey had previously built the band oversized wooden cabinets in which to conceal their modest-sized amps. It was, he said, a way to psychologically intimidate other bands on the circuit. With Gorden’s help, The Who now had money to spend on the real thing.

Jim Marshall had started playing drums in the 1940s, before becoming a drum teacher and opening his first music shop in Ealing in 1960. Among his pupils was Pete Townshend’s estranged school friend Chris Sherwin, who was soon managing the shop. Marshall’s soon expanded and began producing its own amps, starting with the JTM 45, in 1962.

From the mid-1960s onwards, Marshall’s was supplying amplification to The Who and every other band in west London. It was John Entwistle who first purchased a Marshall 4x12-inch cabinet. It doubled his volume, so Townshend, determined not to be left behind, bought one for himself. For Townshend, bigger speakers were another way of keeping The Who’s audience in line. ‘We made loud music because we were playing in pubs that were full of yobbos,’ he said. ‘If you tried to play “The Tennessee Waltz”, the yobbo would get up in the middle of the song and get hold of Roger by the scruff of the neck and say, “It’s Lucy’s birthday, play Cliff’s latest or I’ll chin ya!” At which point Roger would chin him and a fight would break out. After that John and I would go over to Jim Marshall’s store and say, “We need a really big set of amplifiers, so we don’t get heckled.”’

Jim Marshall came from the jazz and big band era. His son Terry worked in the family business, was the same age as The Who and played saxophone in a group called The Flintstones. He understood what the band needed. ‘We opened a factory in Hayes in 1964,’ says Terry now, ‘which is when Pete and I discussed the first eight-by-twelve cabinet. Pete was frustrated with what was around. No one had considered a cab that big before. But Pete’s enthusiasm was what sparked me. We sketched out what was wanted, and I took the sketch down to my dad. Two eight-by-twelves either side of a stage looked and sounded fantastic. It also gave the audience something to look at that wasn’t the pub wallpaper.’

From the mid-1960s onwards, few serious rock groups would go onstage without a backline of Marshall cabs. But it was the fledgling Who that pioneered the concept of the Marshall stack. They led where Marshall’s other customers, the Stones and Eric Clapton, would soon follow.

One morning, Townshend and Barney opened the door of their flat to a woman they’d never seen before holding a letter from Tom Wright. Their American friend was now living in Ibiza and wanted his record collection back. Soon after, the landlords at 35 Sunnyside Road asked the pair to vacate the premises. ‘I think they kicked us out,’ says Barnes. ‘There was a family living beneath us and, looking back, I don’t know how they put up with it.’

For a short time, they rented what Barney calls ‘a glorified bedsit’ in nearby Disraeli Road, but hated it there. On a whim, the pair bought a Morris Commercial ambulance from a girlfriend’s father, and decided to live in it. ‘There were beds in the back, and it was quite comfortable,’ says Barnes. ‘It was the sort of vehicle they used to carry old people around. So policemen would stop the traffic and wave us through.’

One night, Barnes drove to the Crawdaddy R&B club in Richmond, parked outside, and returned to find ‘The Yardbirds’ scrawled across the back of the ambulance in lipstick: ‘And because we never cleaned the thing, it stayed there.’ Barnes did all the driving, as Townshend couldn’t master the vehicle’s double de-clutching. ‘We used to say we could give our address as Knightsbridge or Mayfair by parking up and sleeping there for the night. However, I think we spent one night parked on Ealing Common and the rest in Warwick Road outside Sid’s.’ After a couple of weeks, the novelty had worn off: ‘We had no sounds, and Pete complained that it was getting too cold and he couldn’t sleep.’

After three weeks in the ambulance, Barney and Townshend moved into the flat above Cliff and Betty Townshend’s, in Woodgrange Avenue. The rent was £8 a week, and they had more space than they knew what to do with. The ambulance, the mattresses, the dope and the omnipresent red light from Sunnyside Road moved with them. The party carried on.

While The Who were soon too loud to be ignored, their image was still non-existent. They’d dumped The Shadows-style suits, but hadn’t replaced them with a unified look. In February 1964, The Detours had supported a north London group called The Kinks at the Goldhawk Club. The headliners wore foppish frock coats onstage. There might have been something incongruous about men dressed like Regency dandies in a working men’s club where the night rarely passed without a brawl. But the coats had the desired effect: they made The Kinks look like a gang.

The Kinks’ lead singer/songwriter Ray Davies was fresh out of Hornsey College of Art. ‘I wanted to be an artist,’ he said. ‘I just changed my palette, if you like, left the drawing board and went to music.’ Townshend was already measuring The Kinks’ powerful sound against that of The Who’s. The band’s managers, another pair of would-be Epsteins, stockbroker Grenville Collins and society man-about-town Robert Wace, had recently signed up a third partner, Larry Page, a rock ’n’ roll singer-turned-producer and image consultant. It was Page who’d changed the group’s name from The Ravens to The Kinks and styled them as a more sexually ambiguous version of the Rolling Stones.

Believing that The Who needed to look more like a gang, Townshend designed a set of stage clothes. ‘Pete and I didn’t have a TV, so we’d just sit around, getting stoned, writing, drawing and scribbling,’ says Barnes. ‘Pete designed these leather apron things, and got Helmut Gorden to pay for them.’ The sleeveless leather garments reached down almost to the knees, and were reminiscent of something Robin Hood’s merry men might have worn. John Entwistle immediately complained that they made the band look like ‘poof dustmen’. The aprons didn’t last long, but were Townshend’s first serious attempt to give The Who a look.

Any hope that Helmut Gorden might contribute some constructive ideas were quickly dashed. ‘Helmut was spending all this money, but he didn’t have a clue,’ says Barnes. ‘I was sat in the car with him once, when The Who were visiting an agent, and Gorden suddenly said, “What I want to do with the band is shave their heads and dress them in kilts.” It could have worked twenty years later in the era of the new romantics, but not in the 1960s. I thought he was joking, but he wasn’t, he was completely serious.’

In the end it was Gorden’s contacts, rather than Gorden himself, that would facilitate The Who’s transformation. Helmut was a regular customer of Jack Marks, aka ‘Jack The Barber’, a hairdresser in London’s Marble Arch. Marks had several music business clients, among them Chris Parmenter, a big-band leader turned A&R man for Fontana Records. Parmenter had just overseen the comic actress Dora Bryan’s novelty Number 1, ‘All I Want for Christmas is a Beatle’. After Marks told him about The Who, Parmenter was persuaded to go and see them at the Oldfield. Parmenter liked what he saw, but had one reservation: the drummer.

Doug Sandom was due to celebrate another birthday in April. When Helmut Gorden asked Rose how old her brother-in-law was going to be, she let slip that he was about to turn thirty-four. Sandom is convinced that Gorden had wanted to fire him ever since he started managing the band: ‘He knew I was older, and he kept saying it was “bad for ze image” – those were his exact words – “You are bad for ze image.”’ When Gorden found out Doug’s true age, the drummer’s days were numbered.

In reality, ever since Townshend had told Lily Sandom to take off her wedding ring at the Oldfield, Doug had been under pressure to give up the band: ‘My missus hated Pete, and we were having arguments all the time, because I was out playing sometimes seven nights a week.’

Despite Parmenter’s reservations, he agreed to audition The Who for a possible record deal. On 9 April, Gorden hired the Zanzibar restaurant on Edgware Road. By now, the band knew that Parmenter had criticised Sandom’s playing, and had discovered that their drummer was almost fifteen years their senior. Daltrey and Entwistle felt a sense of loyalty towards Doug but Townshend had no intention of letting the drummer stand in the way of a record deal. ‘John and I were close, and he told me they wanted me out,’ claims Sandom now. ‘He told me before we got in the van. He said “Dougie, you’re being set up.”’

In the past, Doug Sandom has described 9 April 1964 as ‘the worst day of my life’. He now insists that after Entwistle’s tip-off he’d already made the decision to leave the band by the time they reached the Zanzibar. As soon as The Who arrived at the restaurant, Chris Parmenter told Sandom that he shouldn’t unpack his gear. He was to use a drum kit already set up onstage. Within minutes of Doug playing the unfamiliar kit, the problems started. ‘It was all very theatrical and dramatic,’ recalls Richard Barnes, who witnessed the audition. ‘Chris Parmenter said, “It’s not sounding right,” and Pete suddenly jumped up, pointed at Dougie and shouted, “You fucking get it together!” I was shocked. Pete got very aggressive and I’d never seen that side to him before.’

When it was over, Parmenter explained that he wanted to make a record with The Who but that the drummer would have to go: ‘It was all very strange,’ adds Barnes, ‘because Chris Parmenter was also the first person to say anything good about Pete. He turned round to him and said, “You’re tall and skinny. You look great onstage.” That didn’t happen very often.’ Feeling empowered, Townshend took the lead and decided to tell Sandom the bad news: ‘At that moment my heart turned to stone, and I went out and said, “He said, he’d give us a record deal, but not if you’re in the group, so you’re out.”’

Years later, Townshend would admit to feeling guilty about Sandom’s dismissal, and would describe the ex-drummer as ‘my friend and mentor’. Sandom’s behaviour in the immediate aftermath of the decision certainly merits Townshend’s contrition. Straight after the incident at the Zanzibar, he joined the rest of The Who for a BBC audition at Broadcasting House. He also agreed to stay until the band found a replacement, allowing them to honour any existing bookings. It was a ridiculously big-hearted gesture, but one that failed to soften the blow of being ousted from the group he’d spent almost two years of his life with.

Four days after the audition, Sandom played his final gig with The Who at the 100 Club in London’s West End. ‘And when it was over,’ he says, ‘I put my stuff in the van and had to go home by train.’ He was standing on Oxford Street when he heard someone sobbing behind him. It was Sue, ‘the big girl’ who used to carry him on to the stage at the Goldhawk: ‘She must have come out to see us because she knew it was my last gig. She threw her arms around me and she was in tears.’ The morning after, Sandom went back to the building site.

Before the month was over, another drummer had entered The Who’s orbit. Doug Sandom had seen his replacement before in the audience at the Oldfield. He was a teenage boy, who looked far too young to be in a pub: ‘He used to say, “Hello Doug, hello Doug” … Really enthusiastic. But he was just this boy hanging around.’ Nobody could have imagined this boy playing in The Who, until they saw what he could do on a drum kit.

One Saturday afternoon in 1961, an unidentified male telephoned the emergency services, claiming Wembley Empire Pool was on fire. Within minutes, several fire engines with their sirens screaming pulled up outside the building. It was a hoax. Nobody can be one hundred per cent certain that it was Keith Moon who made the call. But then again …

Ken Flegg, who would go on to make amplifiers for The Who at Marshall’s, was one of a group of Wembley teenagers that who went ice-skating with Moon at the Empire Pool. He was there on the day of the ‘fire’. ‘What happened is somebody pulled out all the toilet paper in the gents’ and set it alight,’ says Flegg now. The small blaze burnt itself out in a matter of minutes. Nevertheless, that same ‘somebody’ called the fire brigade. ‘Whoever rang up said, “The Empire Pool’s burning! Send everything you’ve got!” Fifteen fire engines turned up outside – all for nothing. Now, Keith always swore blind he didn’t ring them, but everybody there knew it was him.’

Over time, Moon drifted away from the ice-skating crowd. ‘Then one day I got a call from one of my friends, saying “Are you watching Ready Steady Go!? Moonie’s on it.”’ Ken Flegg tuned in to the ITV pop show to see Wembley’s failed arsonist playing drums with The Who.

The Empire Pool prank may or may not be another example of the amusing, strange, sad and sometimes tragic behaviour that characterised the late Keith Moon. But, like so many stories about his life, it’s shrouded in hearsay and rumour. The myth of Keith Moon started to overshadow the reality almost as soon as The Who became famous. As Roger Daltrey later said: ‘Keith lived his entire life as a fantasy.’

Nothing with Moon was ever quite what it seemed, including his date of birth. Although he was the youngest member of The Who, he still felt the need to lose a year from his show-business age. Keith John Moon was born in Central Middlesex Hospital in Park Royal, west London, on 23 August 1946, not 1947 as reported for many years in the press. Keith’s father, Alfred Charles Moon, was the youngest of five children and had grown up on a farm in north Kent. He met Kathleen Winifred Hopley, known by all as Kitty, from Harlesden, north-west London, when she was on holiday on the Kent coast.

The couple married in summer 1941, and moved into 224 Tokyngton Avenue, Wembley, just off the Harrow Road, the long, wide thoroughfare that cuts north from Paddington into Harrow. No sooner were they married than Alfred went off to serve overseas, and Kitty and her family spent the next four years braving the best efforts of the German Luftwaffe. With its railway network and industrial estates, Wembley was a target for German air raids. Almost a thousand bombs wreaked widespread damage and loss of life upon the area.

After being demobbed, Alfred took several jobs, before becoming a motor mechanic. The couple’s first child, Keith, was followed three years later by a sister, Linda. Soon after, the family moved to a council-owned house at 134 Chaplin Road, Wembley, where a second daughter, Lesley, was born in 1958. Aged four, Keith became a pupil at nearby Barham Primary School. A class photograph shows him with his face turned away from the camera and his mouth wide open in an expression of cartoon-like shock. It’s the same look he’d often have when playing drums. Moon is remembered by his peers at primary school as ‘a mischievous child with very little interest in learning’.

Peter ‘Dougal’ Butler, who became Moon’s driver and close friend in the 1960s, is adamant that in the twenty-first century, a young Keith ‘would have been diagnosed with ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder]. They would have spotted that he needed help, that something wasn’t right.’ In the less enlightened 1950s, though, Moon’s poor concentration was chalked up to stupidity. There was nothing malicious or violent about his behaviour. He was just inattentive and prone to showing off. Even his ever-forgiving mother conceded that her son ‘got bored easily’. Nothing seemed to engage him.

In the summer of 1957, Moon failed his Eleven Plus exam, and was packed off to the newly built all-boys wing of Alperton Secondary Modern School. Headmaster Thomas Hostler had lost a leg serving his country in the Second World War, and is now remembered by a former colleague as ‘a gentleman and a scholar [who] brought humour and distinction to the role of headmaster’. Hostler was determined not to let his school become a dumping ground for Eleven Plus ‘failures’. Unfortunately, Moon spent most of the next four years resisting all his good efforts.

Despite scraping through in English language and literature, most of Moon’s autumn 1959 school report, with its proliferation of C and D grades, made for grim reading. His music tutor unwittingly predicted the future: ‘Must guard against a tendency to show off.’ However, Moon’s physical education teacher’s comments were the most revealing: ‘Keen at times, but ‘goonery’ seems to come before everything.’

Like Pete Townshend, Moon had fallen under the spell of The Goon Show. The BBC’s comedy programme exuded a streak of very English eccentricity, which Moon would later share. His eerily accurate impersonations of the Goons’ characters amused his classmates but frustrated his teachers. ‘Keith was a savant,’ said Roger Daltrey. ‘The most amazing mimic. He could vacuum a character off someone in ten minutes and he would then become them. Not just a caricature, he’d get inside.’

Moon joined the local branch of the sea cadets, where, like John Entwistle in the Boys’ Brigade, he learned to play the bugle and the trumpet. However, his first public performance was disastrous. According to author Tony Fletcher’s definitive Keith Moon biography Dear Boy, Moon was asked to play the trumpet at morning assembly. He arrived onstage and started ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’, but, said an eyewitness, ‘murdered the first few bars and left [the stage] to cheers from his contemporaries’. It’s an amusing anecdote, but it invites the question: could Moon really not play or was it another example of that infamous goonery?

According to Kitty Moon, it was in the sea cadets that her son first started playing the drums. Like his future bandmates in The Who, Moon had discovered Elvis and Bill Haley, and had nagged his parents into buying him a copy of the ‘Bermondsey Elvis’ Tommy Steele’s hit ‘Singing the Blues’. In one of the rare moments when he gave an interviewer a straight answer, Moon would name The Shadows’ Tony Meehan and Presley’s drummer DJ Fontana as his early heroes. But most drummers just sat there with their head tilted to one side, tapping the kit. And that, Moon decided, was boring.

For showmanship and flair, he first looked to the American jazz drummer Gene Krupa for inspiration. Krupa was a bandleader, whose offstage life was as tempestuous as his playing. The Gene Krupa Story, starring Sal Mineo in the title role, was sold to cinema audiences in 1959 with the blurb: ‘He hammered out the savage tempo of the jazz era!’ Moon saw the film and was fascinated as Mineo’s Krupa twirled his sticks, mugged to the audience and played as if his drums were a lead instrument. The parallels between Krupa’s playing and Moon’s remain striking, as is the fact that Krupa also liked his whisky and drugs.

Not long afterwards, Moon started telling other pupils at school that he was a drummer and that he had a band. He wasn’t and he didn’t. Not yet. By the spring of 1961, his schoolwork had deteriorated to such an extent that he was allowed to leave Alperton Secondary without taking any O Levels. The only subject in which he’d gained any qualification was science. Moon enjoyed tinkering with transistor radios and crystal sets, signed up for electronics classes at Harrow Technical School and managed to get a first-rung-of-the-ladder job at an electronics company in nearby Park Royal. His electronics expertise later came in useful when he showed his future bandmates how to ‘hotwire’ a public telephone and make calls for free. But in his mind the job was a means to an end: to get him enough money to buy his own drum kit.

It was while trawling the music shops in Soho one Saturday afternoon that Moon met Gerry Evans, a teenage employee of Paramount Music on Shaftesbury Avenue, who also played drums in a north London group called The Escorts. Over the coming months, Moon would watch The Escorts rehearsing in the back room of a Kingsbury pub. When Evans took a break, Moon jumped behind the kit. What he lacked in ability he made up for in enthusiasm. Before the year was over, he’d talked his father into counter-signing a hire purchase agreement for a pearl-blue Premier kit. Moon could barely play, but he was determined to learn.

Like Doug Sandom, other musicians started to notice the impossibly young-looking Moon in the audience. Gabby Connolly remembers seeing Moon in the crowd when he played with his pre-Detours group The Bel-Airs: ‘Keith was this tiny kid and he used to come all the way out to the Boathouse in Kew to watch our drummer Ray Cleary. In the interval, he’d plead with Ray to let him have a go on the kit – “Can I have a go, Ray? Can I? Can I?”’

Among Moon’s early heroes was Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages’ drummer Carlo Little. The Screaming Lord was singer David Sutch, whose stage show pre-dated shock-rocker Alice Cooper and featured him climbing out of a coffin and terrorising his audience with an axe. Carlo Little was a formidable-looking character, who’d spent his national service overseas with the Royal Fusiliers and was not a man to be trifled with. His party piece was a feverish solo during ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’. After the Savages played Wembley Town Hall, Moon marched up to the drummer and asked if he’d give him lessons. Little was so shocked by the teenager’s audacity he couldn’t refuse.

For possibly the first time in his life, Keith Moon began to engage with something. At his weekly thirty-minute lessons, Little taught him the rudiments of drumming but also his own personal style. ‘When I hit something I didn’t just tap it. I walloped it,’ Little said. ‘It was impressive. Especially in those days, because I took it hard as it could go.’ At a time when most rock ’n’ roll drumming was positively polite, this was a revolutionary approach.

When his friend Gerry Evans left for a fortnight’s holiday, Moon sat in with The Escorts. When Evans returned, the band didn’t have the heart to fire him, so they carried on as before, but slipped away to play extra gigs with Moon. His drumming was often sloppy and he hit the cymbals too hard for their repertoire of sedate Shadows covers, but he brought excitement to their act.

Moon, it seems, had turned his fantasy into reality. To celebrate, he bought a gold lamé suit on hire purchase from the fashionable clothes shop Cecil Gee, and wore it most days of the week around Wembley. ‘He looked ridiculous,’ The Savages ex-bass guitarist Tony Dangerfield told the author in 2004. ‘I bumped into him on Wembley High Road and he had the suit on, in the middle of the day. It was the first time I’d seen it. You couldn’t help but love him, but he was chattering away at me, and I couldn’t hear a word he was saying. The suit was too fucking loud.’

Moon’s bandmates were just as baffled as Dangerfield. But as they’d quickly discovered, Moon was a baffling character. Onstage, his extrovert drumming made the group stand out. Offstage, his extrovert behaviour was sometimes less appealing. Wearing the suit was harmless fun; his tendency towards casual vandalism and petty shoplifting less so. On late-night train journeys from the West End back to Wembley, Moon would wreak havoc in the deserted carriages, tearing up the seat covers and pulling down the advertising placards. When Evans caught Moon smuggling a snare drum out of the shop in which he worked, their friendship soured.

None of The Escorts were that surprised then when Moon drifted out of their lives as casually as he’d drifted in. By the summer of 1962, he’d talked his way into a new south London group, Mark Twain and the Strangers. With the help of their lead singer, Moon found a new job in the printing room of the National Council of Social Service in Bedford Square, just a few minutes from the Soho music shops. The job lasted almost as long as his time in the band.

The split came after The Strangers were offered a tour of US army bases in Germany. ‘Keith turned up to go ice-skating and told us he’d been asked to go to Germany with a band, but didn’t know whether to or not,’ recalls Ken Flegg. ‘Until then, we didn’t even know he played in a band. All we knew was that he was a nutcase. After that, though, he seemed to fade away from our group.’ Moon never made the trip. He was only sixteen and his parents refused to give permission. Mark Twain and the Strangers faded away soon afterwards.

Keith Moon joined the band that led him to The Who in April 1963. Clyde Burns and the Beachcombers were a five-piece ensemble whose members lived around Wembley and Harrow. Like The Detours, they were signed to Commercial Entertainments, but the comparisons didn’t stop there. The Beachcombers had developed out of the skiffle craze, and were known for their perfect versions of Shadows hits, and their ability to do the requisite Shadows ‘walk’.

When The Beachcombers’ drummer left, Moon answered their advert for a replacement in the Harrow & Wembley Observer. He arrived with his father for an audition in the Conservative Hall behind Harrow-on-The-Hill station. Keith was one of several drummers to arrive that day, and it was only Alf Moon’s persuasiveness that secured him an audition. ‘Keith was like this little kid,’ says the Beachcombers’ former rhythm guitarist John Schollar. ‘We were all twenty-two, three or four. Our singer, Ron Chenery [aka Clyde Burns], was even older. Keith kept saying, ‘Can I have a go?’ But we had to say to his dad, Alf, “Look, come on, we’re going to be playing pubs. He’s too young.”’ However, as the afternoon wore on, none of the other drummers passed muster. ‘We went through them all, and there wasn’t one we wanted. So Alf came up to us again and said, “Come on, let him have a go, please.”’

Whereas the earlier candidates had all set their kits up facing The Beachcombers, which was common practice at auditions, Moon set his up behind the group, as if he was already in the band and they were playing a gig. ‘We said, “Right, let’s do [Bo Diddley’s] ‘Road Runnner’”,’ says Schollar, ‘and as soon as Keith started we all looked at each other and went, “Bloody Hell!”’ In an effort to catch him out, the band next suggested The Shadows’ ‘Foot Tapper’. ‘It was all off-beat and none of the other drummers could do it. But Keith nailed it straight away. In the end, we said to Alf, “We might have a problem in some of the clubs because he’s underage, but he’s in.”’

That evening, Moon joined Schollar, Chenery, bass guitarist Tony Brind and lead guitarist Norman Mitchener at Mitchener’s family home in Stanmore. As soon as they arrived, recalls Schollar, ‘Keith was picking up Norman’s mum’s ornaments, opening all the cupboards, fiddling with everything he could find … Ron said, “Look at him, he’s like a bloody weasel.”’ The nickname stuck.

The Beachcombers wore suits onstage, but their previous drummer had walked off with his. ‘Our suits were this goldish brown in colour,’ says Schollar, ‘so Keith straight away said, “I’ve got one I can wear already.” So he turned up with the gold suit on, looking like Liberace. By then, I think he only had the jacket left. Later, when we had matching suits made, within four gigs, he’d torn the arse out of his trousers, because of the way he played.’

Not long after joining the band, Schollar took Moon to see the English jazz drummer Eric Delaney in concert. Delaney had played tuned timpani drums on his 1956 hit ‘Oranges and Lemons’. He was a highly animated drummer and a flamboyant showman. Moon had never heard of Delaney before. But Schollar quickly spotted his ability to, as Roger Daltrey said, ‘vacuum up a character’. ‘Keith was blown away, and picked up some stuff from Delaney. The same thing happened when we went to see Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders. He said, ‘See the drummer John, he’s playing that double beat. I’m gonna do that.’ And the next gig we played, he was doing it as well.’

Schollar now sums up Moon’s style as one of ‘power and noise’. Ex-Beachcomber Tony Brind recalls that, ‘Keith had twice as many cymbals as any other drummer on the circuit.’ Later, he’d drill holes into his cymbals into which he’d insert rivets, making them noisier still. He also played with such force that it became necessary to drive nails into the stage floor to which he’d then tie his drums. ‘What you have to remember is that drummers with The Shadows or The Crickets were dance-band drummers trying to play rock … except it wasn’t even called “rock” back then,’ says Schollar. ‘So what Keith did was so much more powerful than what we’d been used to.’

Even offstage, Moon’s drumming style could be problematic. Chris Sherwin was managing Jim Marshall’s drum shop, where Keith had become a regular customer. ‘If there was a kit set up, he’d get his hands on it and I’d have to change all the drum heads after,’ says Sherwin. ‘He was an awful drummer. His innovation and his free-flowing technique were wonderful, but instead of lifting off when you hit the drum, which is what you’re supposed to do, he dug the sticks in.’ When Moon ‘beat the shit’ out of an expensive Leedy kit just imported from America, Marshall banned him from playing on any of the shop’s kits again.

Moon’s musical tastes were as baffling to his bandmates as some of his behaviour. Despite his boisterous playing, Moon had little interest in the kind of R&B The Detours were playing, and was ambivalent about The Beatles and The Stones. Instead, he was fanatical about surf music, especially the Beach Boys and Californian duo Jan and Dean. This was music that evoked a picture-postcard image of America, where it was summer all year round and everyone had perfect hair and teeth. To Moon, in drab, post-war London, a world of bomb sites, bad weather, outside lavatories and stand-up strip washes, it made America seem like the promised land.

‘He loved that surfing stuff,’ says John Schollar. ‘So he wanted us to play it as well. We did Jan and Dean’s “Surf City” and we might have played the Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ USA”. But the trouble was the voices were so high. Keith wanted to sing, but he was an awful singer. The trick was never to turn his mic on.’ It was a trick The Who would later learn. Yet Moon’s love of the music never diminished. ‘Keith only seemed to like surf music,’ said Townshend. ‘Which is why those early Who records, like ‘[I] Can’t Explain’, have those silly high vocals on them.’

The Beachcombers resisted Moon’s attempts to shoehorn more Beach Boys numbers into their set, but he was making his presence felt in other ways. When The Beachcombers played The Coasters’ ‘Little Egypt’, Moon started introducing the song wearing comedy robes and a fez. Even when he was behind his drum kit, he performed as if he was the band’s frontman. ‘He improved us immensely, and he also improved the appeal of the band,’ says Tony Brind. ‘And after a while, people were turning up to see Keith. If you walked into a room, Keith was the one you’d notice. It may sound corny now, but I think even then he was destined to be a star.’

In February 1964, the American boxer Cassius Clay won the World Heavyweight title. Celebrating his victory, the outspoken Clay, who soon joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name to Muhammad Ali, coined his famous catchphrase: ‘I am the greatest’. Shortly after, Moon turned up at The Beachcombers rehearsals with the same words spelt out in transfer letters on his bass drum case. ‘And I think he genuinely believed it,’ says Brind. ‘He’d walk through a hall full of people with that case on show, and not feel embarrassed if anybody saw it.’

There were times, though, when Moon’s over-confidence became an issue. The sheer force of his drumming made it impossible for the Beachcombers to perform the Shadows’ ‘walk’ anymore. Schollar: ‘Although by 1963 or 1964, the “walk” was getting corny anyway.’ But for some in the group, sticking to a formula of The Shadows, Johnny Kidd and the Pirates and Billy Fury was keeping The Beachcombers in work. So why change? This attitude was evident in the Elvis and Marty Wilde ballads that singer Ron Chenery loved to perform, but which Moon disliked. ‘There was friction between Keith and Ron,’ says Schollar. ‘Because Ron would make a point of telling Keith to play quietly and then halfway through the ballad, Keith would hit that bass drum and it was as if someone had fired a shot.’

One night, Moon took the prank further. After Chenery had reprimanded him for playing too loud again, Moon produced a pistol and pointed it at him. The band and the audience watched in disbelief as he pulled the trigger. It was only a starting pistol. But no one, other than Moon, knew that. After a few moments of stunned silence, the audience saw that Chenery was still standing and realised it was a prank. The gig carried on as before.

Offstage, Moon’s ability to inhabit a character came into full effect when John Schollar obtained a pantomime horse costume that had been liberated from the Empire Wembley Pool after an ice-skating show. For months, the ‘horse’, with Moon inside it, went everywhere.

‘The first time, Keith got in the front end and Tony got in the back, and they tried to get on a bus,’ says Schollar. ‘The conductor actually said, “You can’t come on here with a horse”, and Keith said, “What if we go upstairs?” When he was in the horse, Keith became the horse.’ Military personnel at the Air Force bases The Beachcombers played would be amused to see a pantomime nag cantering around the hall during the interval. Elsewhere, Moon would put on the horse’s head and walk into shops, pubs and public lavatories, ‘where he’d stand next to some poor bloke who was trying to have a pee’.

Inevitably, the pranks extended, just as they’d done before, to vandalism and petty theft. A reel-to-reel tape recorder, an amplifier and cushions ripped from the seats in a seaside theatre were some of the items that ended up in Moon’s possession during The Beachcombers’ travels. By now, Moon had also bought himself a moped, which he rode as erratically as he played the drums, once attempting to ride it up a flight of steps and into the bowling alley at Wembley.

For a time at least, though, he stuck to the promise he gave club managers not to drink on their premises. When Moon did drink, the practical jokes became more elaborate. ‘My girlfriend at the time had a birthday party,’ says Schollar. ‘Her father had this beautiful garden with tulips and daffodils, so she warned Keith, “Don’t you touch my dad’s flowers, I know what you’re like.”’ The following morning, her father discovered that his prized flowers were still closed from the night before. A presumably drunken Moon had sprayed them with hair lacquer, which had effectively glued the petals shut.

In some accounts, Moon was already taking pills by this point, procuring his purple hearts from a coffee shop on Ealing Road. But it wasn’t a habit his bandmates shared. Despite John Schollar’s memories of Moon’s drunken prank, Tony Brind insists Keith barely touched alcohol when he was with the band: ‘We used to rehearse at my parents’ house. One day, we were all talking about a party we’d been to. My mum told me years later that Keith had told her, “I make out I’m drinking, but when they’re not looking I tip it into one of the flower vases.” He was a youngster then, and people change. But later on, I sometimes think he played up to the image. It’s as if it was almost expected of him.’

Despite the age difference between him and his bandmates, Moon felt part of their gang. But unlike the rest of The Beachcombers, he struggled to apply himself in his day job. Ron Chenery was a service engineer. Schollar, Brind and Mitchener were draughtsmen. Moon, meanwhile, was now working in the sales office of British Gypsum; a building supplies company, where his poor timekeeping and inattentiveness were quickly noted. ‘He was supposed to be taking orders on the telephone,’ says John Schollar, ‘but I think he spent more time fixing up gigs.’

‘He kept sending the wrong concrete to the wrong building sites,’ claimed Townshend years later, mischievously adding to Moon mythology, ‘so that in a few years’ time the buildings would fall down.’ Nevertheless, despite claiming to have been fired from every job he ever had, Moon stayed at British Gypsum until joining The Who.

By early 1964, The Beachcombers’ resistance to change was coming to a head. Moon, Schollar and Brind could see that pop music was evolving, and thought the Beachcombers should evolve with it. Mitchener and, especially, Chenery, wanted to stick to what they knew. The Beachcombers faced the same dilemma as many bands on the circuit: play safe but risk becoming obsolete, or try something different and risk alienating your existing audience?

On rare nights off, Moon and Schollar would sometimes visit the Oldfield, which had become an unofficial drinking club for off-duty Commercial Entertainments bands. It was here that Moon first saw The Detours. ‘They were outrageous,’ he later told Melody Maker. ‘All the groups at that time were smart, but onstage The Detours had stage things made of leather. Pete looked very sullen. They were a bit frightening …’

The Detours/Who, with their hard R&B covers and sullen guitarist, were doing something different. Moon and Schollar’s group weren’t. When The Beachcombers were offered a residency in Hamburg, where The Beatles had served their apprenticeship in a haze of booze, pills and sexual misadventure, they turned it down. ‘I’m sure if we’d said, “Let’s pack in the jobs and go”, Keith would have gone,’ says Tony Brind. ‘If we had, maybe things would have been a lot different. But I don’t think we ever seriously considered going professional. Looking back, I dare say Keith was looking for other bands to join for a lot longer than we thought he was.’

When word spread that Doug Sandom had left The Who, The Beachcombers knew what was coming. The exact circumstances of how Keith Moon joined the other band are inevitably blurred by conflicting memories. In Moon’s account, he turned up at the Oldfield, downed a few drinks, and told The Who that he was better than the stand-in drummer they were using. When The Who asked him to prove it, he climbed behind the kit, launched into ‘Road Runner’, and played with such ferocity that he wrecked the bass drum pedal and split two skins.

Moon thought he’d blown his chances, but said that Roger Daltrey took him aside afterwards and told him they’d pick him up in the van next week: ‘Nobody ever said, “You’re in.” They just said, “What’re you doing next Monday?”’ Given The Who’s reputation for poor communication, this non-job offer doesn’t seem far-fetched. Both Entwistle and Townshend have told variations on the same story, with Entwistle describing Moon as ‘a little gingerbread man’ on account of his newly dyed ginger hair and the brown suit he was wearing that first night at the pub.

John Schollar says he accompanied Moon to the Oldfield that evening, and that the ginger hair was an accident: ‘Keith had put some highlights in to try and look like [the Beach Boys’ blonde drummer] Dennis Wilson. But it had gone a funny colour. It was in the interval when Keith asked if he could have a go. He did two or three numbers and broke the guy’s drums.’

Reg Bowen says he was on roadie duties that night, and also adds to the story: ‘Keith Moon’s mum bought him down, and I remember that he was very self-conscious.’ Meanwhile, Lou Hunt, the Oldfield’s compére, told Moon biographer Tony Fletcher that the story is complete fiction. Hunt said that Moon came into the Oldfield looking for The Who, on a night when they were rehearsing in Acton. Hunt had been watching Moon’s progress with interest and urged him to offer his services to the band. But he insisted that the public audition at the Oldfield never happened.

‘It did happen and I can remember it exactly,’ says Dave Golding, who was drumming with The Who that night. With Doug Sandom gone, The Who were in a state of flux. The band placed an ad in Marshall’s music shop looking for a drummer. The temporary post went to twenty-seven-year-old session musician Dave Golding, one of Jim Marshall’s ex-pupils, and a protégé of the pioneering producer Joe Meek. If Golding could survive working with the disturbed Meek, who later murdered his landlady before turning a shotgun on himself, he could cope with the fledgling Who.

Golding was newly married and on the verge of giving up playing when Marshall urged him to get in touch with The Who. Golding had once deputised for Cliff Townshend’s drummer: ‘Jim said, “Cliff’s son needs someone. Get yourself over there.” But it was only ever a temporary thing.’

According to Golding, that night at the Oldfield had seen Townshend unveil his biggest amp yet: ‘Pete didn’t give us any warning and this thing was so loud. I liked playing with them, but by the time we got to the interval I just wanted to have a drink. Next thing, a guy comes up to Pete and asks if his mate can play. His mate was Keith Moon.’

That said, Moon’s account of damaging Golding’s kit is exaggerated: ‘While I was having a drink in the long bar at the back of the pub, I heard a voice come over the Tannoy – “Can Dave Golding please come to the ballroom.” When I got there, Moonie was playing away, and he’d broken the bass pedal. I clambered underneath and fixed it for him. It could have happened to anyone.’ Golding watched the teenager play a couple of numbers with The Who, but remembers being unimpressed: ‘He was erratic and mad and it was all very new … but, to be honest, it wasn’t very good.’

Fifty years on, such conflicting memories only enhance the Keith Moon mythology. And as Pete Townshend would soon discover, blurring fact and fiction was a key ingredient to selling The Who. Having a possibly inebriated seventeen-year-old Moon jumping onstage, and trashing another drummer’s kit made for a great story. ‘Out of nothing legends have been built,’ says Golding. ‘At the end of that night, Pete came up to me and said, “We’ve got a recording session next week. Could you do it?” I said, “If you’re looking for someone, what’s wrong with the guy you’ve just got?” And Pete went, “Hmmm … Well … Mmmm …” I said, “Let him do it.”’

This recording, for which there is no documentary evidence, took place, presumably with Moon. Dave Golding, meanwhile, returned to playing sessions and took a job at Drum City on Shaftesbury Avenue, where the schoolboy Keith had spent his Saturday afternoons. Golding is now in his mid-seventies and still playing the drums. ‘I’m a working musician,’ he says. ‘I was never looking to become a pop star.’

Despite the band’s initial misgivings, Moon soon made his mark on The Who. ‘The most amazing thing is that we could actually hear him,’ said John Entwistle, ‘because most of the drummers we’d worked with weren’t very loud.’ Doug Sandom was a solid player. But the teenage Moon, zigzagging around the kit, playing multiple drum rolls and hitting everything twice as hard, was more exciting.

‘Doug Sandom was like those drummers you see in a wedding band, tapping away with a fag in his mouth,’ says Richard Barnes. ‘I never thought there was anything wrong with that. But straight away, even I could see and hear that Keith was exceptional.’

Over time, Moon challenged his bandmates to work harder. He played the drums as a lead instrument. Entwistle adapted his style to mimic what Moon was doing, and turned his bass into another lead instrument. This, in turn, gave Townshend the space to strike those huge chords and not have to fill in the sound the way a conventional lead guitarist would do. The Who played upside down and back to front. It didn’t make sense. But it worked.

Keith Moon supposedly made his Who live debut at a birthday party or wedding reception in early May 1964, in a pub on the North Circular, the name of which nobody can now remember. Unable to nail his drums to the stage, Moon secured his kit with a length of rope to a pillar. When he took a drum solo, the force of his playing caused the kit to lurch from side to side, like a ship listing in a storm. The rope was there to stop everything collapsing. ‘Roger used to say, when Moon starts up behind you, it’s like standing in front of a jet engine,’ says Barnes. ‘And that’s exactly how it looked.’

On 29 July 1978, The Who’s former publicist, Pete Meaden, died of a barbiturate overdose. Even before his death, Meaden had become one of those almost mythical characters that could only have been produced by the music business; a 1960s tastemaker, revered by those in the know, but denied the money and recognition heaped on his most famous discovery.

Roger Daltrey once described Meaden as ‘The man who told us, “You can’t be one of the flock, you have to the black sheep, or, better still, the blue or the red one.”’ Meaden entered The Who’s lives around the same time as Keith Moon. His time with The Who lasted less than a year, passing in what seems to have been a Drinamyl-fuelled blur, but his impact on the band was longer lasting.

Born in Edmonton, north London, Meaden had gravitated towards the Soho jazz clubs as a teenager in the late 1950s. After working as a graphic designer for the fashion mogul John Michael Ingram, he formed a short-lived PR company with the future Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham and was soon searching for a Rolling Stones of his own.

In the spring of 1964, Meaden heard about The Who from Jack the Barber. Helmut Gorden and Bob Druce knew they needed some fresh input if they were to take The Who any further. A meeting with Meaden was arranged. He then proceeded to dazzle the pair with stories about sharing a flat with Mick Jagger and how he’d handled publicity for Chuck Berry. Meaden was now looking after the English jazz/R&B singer Georgie Fame, who’d have a hit before the year was over with ‘Yeh Yeh’. To enable his twenty-four-hour-a-day lifestyle and impress potential clients, he rented a bolthole in Monmouth Street, London W1. That it was just a single room containing a sleeping bag, a filing cabinet, a record player and an ironing board didn’t matter. London W1 was one of the capital’s smartest postcodes.

Crucially, Meaden was twenty-two years old and on first-name terms with every club manager, DJ, pop critic and, it transpired, drug dealer in London. Meaden later recalled in New Musical Express that Druce asked him if he could ‘make a supergroup out of The Who?’ and promised him ‘£50 to start with’.

Neither man knew about Meaden’s drug problems, or that these had contributed to a split with Andrew Loog Oldham. Meaden had been Oldham’s mentor on the Soho club scene, but by 1963 he was losing his way. Meaden’s doctor had prescribed him Drinamyl for anxiety the previous year. He started by taking thirty legally prescribed pills a month, but had soon increased his consumption, procuring the drugs by any means necessary. ‘Pete was pill-drunk,’ wrote the Stones’ ex-manager in his autobiography Stoned, ‘getting soft and emotional around the edges.’

‘Pete Meaden was a proper Soho boy,’ recalls DJ and promoter Jeff Dexter. ‘He had a mad energy, but he was a bit fly, and he made most of his dough from flogging pills. And that’s the thing – if you’re a good dealer you don’t take your own dope.’

The photographer Philip Townsend, who took some of the earliest pictures of the Rolling Stones, worked with Meaden directly after his split from Oldham in 1963. ‘I didn’t realise at the time that Andrew wanted rid of him,’ he says. ‘Meaden started hanging around my studio in Brompton Road, and telling everyone he was my assistant. He wasn’t, but he’d do anything for me. I’d bang him a meal now and again because I felt sorry for him. I don’t even think he was that ambitious. He just wanted to hang around. He was awful, but he was also great … if that makes any sense at all.’ Meaden worked his charm, and the pair set up the Townsend-Meaden Agency, hiring out groups to play debutante balls. ‘The trouble is, I did all the work. Pete also ended up nicking the money on two or three occasions, telling me he’d left it at home or it was lost. But it was so hard to get annoyed with him.’

The ability to talk his way out of trouble was part of Meaden’s appeal. But Philip Townsend was perturbed by his drug use and noted how wounded he seemed to be by Oldham’s rejection. Out of spite, Meaden had Oldham’s number printed on cards for a fictitious prostitute named Madame Loogy, which he then distributed through phone boxes in Soho.

When Townsend-Meaden took on a male and female vocal duo called the Easy Riders (not to be confused with the American group of the same name), Meaden told Townsend ‘he was not going to let Andrew beat him, and he was going to make this group big’. One afternoon, Meaden showed up at the Brompton Road studio where the Easy Riders rehearsed, and found the couple having sex. ‘He got very shocked when he saw they were having it away,’ explains Townsend. ‘He started stuttering – he was often stuttering – about how they couldn’t do that if they were … w … w … working together on the road, and he actually threw them out. He was funny about sex. I don’t think he liked it.’

The stuttering and the reduced libido were both side effects of taking too many amphetamines. Meaden’s partnership with Philip Townsend dissolved: ‘And the next time I saw him he was in a restaurant with this group that I suppose was The Who, and he was babbling away about how they were going to be the biggest thing in the world.’

What appealed to Pete Meaden about The Who was that they were young and malleable enough to be moulded. Meaden wanted to turn them into mods, just like him. In 2014, ‘mod’ has become a catch-all phrase haphazardly applied to any music and fashion with a British 1960s influence. ‘Mod’ began as ‘modernist’, a description used by Melody Maker in 1959 to describe a group of sharply dressed modern jazz fans in Soho’s Flamingo Club. Richard Barnes, in his 1979 pop-culture study Mods!, broadened the term to include ‘various committed teenage free spirits … Kids who were passionately into fashion and style, and an appreciation for Italian styling’ – kids exactly like Pete Meaden.

In contrast to the garish Teddy Boys of the mid-1950s and the unkempt trad jazz fans of the late 1950s, the modernist look was about sophistication. The inspiration came from wildly different sources. Andrew Oldham wrote about ‘bonding with Pete Meaden over the look of American jazz style from the back of album covers’. Others quoted influences as diverse as American actor John Cassavetes in the American TV drama Johnny Staccato; French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, and the Italian cinema star Marcello Mastroianni, zipping around Rome on a Vespa scooter in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. As Richard Barnes points out: ‘Mod was the British wanting to be all things not British.’ But what these men all had in common was style.

Barnes believes the mod look found its way to Soho in the late 1950s via visiting Italian and French students. Pete Townshend believes that a direct line can be drawn from Soho to Paris. ‘It could have been the summer of 1959 or 1960, when a whole bunch of boys came to Paris from Milan for a concert, maybe Miles Davis,’ he said. ‘They wore soft shirts, no tie, a well-made suit, and these scooters that they had ridden all the way from Milan. This was the image that made its way to Soho in the early 1960s.’ Over time, the scooter would become the mods’ preferred mode of transport. These gleaming Vespas and Lambrettas, often decorated with extraneous wing mirrors and headlamps, suggested a stylish new world, and were as lovingly cared for as the clothes worn by their riders.

Mod fashion drew from a melting pot of European, American and English influences. But God was always in the details. ‘It was a fanatical and dress-obsessed scene, where things would be considered “out” within a few weeks,’ says Jeff Dexter, one of the self-confessed ‘flash little fuckers’ that gravitated towards the early mod scene. Italian short box jackets, winkle-picker shoes, narrow trousers varying over time between fourteen- and seventeen-inch bottoms, and button-down collar shirts became must-have items. But only a small number of shops stocked the ‘in’ clothes, among them Austin’s in Piccadilly, John Michael Ingram’s Sportique near Old Compton Street and John Stephen in Carnaby Street, all of which added to the mods’ sense of exclusivity.

It was a cult in a way that the Teddy Boys had never been. Unlike Teddy Boys, mods could pass unnoticed in regular society. The finicky dress code meant that they could hold down regular office jobs. More often that not, the same smart young desk clerk earmarked by his boss for promotion was necking purple hearts and dancing all night in a Soho basement before returning to work, dazed, on a Monday morning.

Jeff Dexter’s friend, Mark Feld, who later became the 1970s pop star Marc Bolan, was one of three north London mods interviewed in Town magazine in October 1962. His comments summarised that sense of exclusivity: ‘You’ve got to be different from the other kids. You’ve got to be two steps ahead. The stuff that half the haddocks you see around are wearing, I was wearing years ago.’

In the article, Feld and his friends discussed the abuse they’d received from Teddy Boys for their individualist style. But the two tribes had more in common than they realised. Both adhered to a fastidious dress code, and both were embraced by working-class youths now enjoying a spell of relative affluence, without clothing rations or eighteen months’ national service to spoil the party. Also, with the growing popularity of hire purchase payment schemes, they could put that Italian ‘bum-freezer’ jacket or those Prince of Wales check trousers on ‘the never-never’ and pay them off in instalments.

Naturally, articles such as the one in Town magazine attracted more so-called ‘haddocks’ to the scene, and Fred Perry shirts, razor-cut hairstyles, Harrington jackets and Levi’s jeans, gradually moved into the mainstream. Jeff Dexter recalls Mark Feld walking into the Lyceum Ballroom in 1962 and declaring, ‘Too many mods here, man, it’s all over.’ Of course it wasn’t.

But the mods, like the Teddy Boys, and every other youth cult that followed, faced the same dilemma: how to remain unique while belonging to what was now a defined sub-culture. Moreover, as mod style went overground tribalism crept in, and the press picked up on and amplified the animosity between the snappily dressed mods and their less sartorially elegant counterparts. These ‘rockers’ were a rival youth cult and the early-1960s successors to the Teddy Boys. They favoured Gene Vincent, long hair, leather and motorcycles over Muddy Waters, French razor-cuts, Italian tailoring and polished Vespas.

The Who first became aware of the mods through Roger Daltrey’s sister Gillian in 1963: ‘Her first boyfriend had a scooter,’ recalled the singer. ‘He and his mates came from Lewisham and they were the first mods I’d ever seen. They wore herringbone bell-bottom tweed trousers and Dutch peaked caps.’ Townshend was very impressed by the same boyfriend’s PVC coat, and Gillian’s newly acquired mod style: ‘Gillian wore very tight pencil skirts below the knee, flat black shoes, and she was doing these dances that I believe evolved from ‘The Twist’ – tiny moves with her knees together. It was incredibly sexy, incredibly elegant.’

However frequently the fashions changed, they had to remain, as Pete Meaden put it ‘neat, sharp and cool’. That same requirement applied to the music. By 1964, the mod soundtrack embraced R&B, soul, Jamaican ska and bluebeat and what Jeff Dexter calls ‘good pop’. In London, the music could be heard booming out of a different venue on any given night of the week. The Locarno, Streatham, on Mondays; The Lyceum on the Strand on Tuesdays …

As the night wore on, the more nocturnal members of the tribe headed to the West End, and to Wardour Street’s La Discotheque, or the Flamingo, where Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames were the resident band and Christine Keeler’s lover, ‘Lucky’ Gordon had his face slashed by a rival a year before. At weekends, the Flamingo stayed open until 6 a.m., with many of its patrons fuelled by the purple hearts dealt in the doorway of the nearby Ravel shoe shop.

A two-minute march from the Flamingo was one of Pete Meaden’s favourite haunts, the Scene, in Ham Yard, a cul-de-sac off of Great Windmill Street. The basement space, which was used as a dance academy during the day, had previously hosted Cy Laurie’s Jazz Club. On Scene club nights, the concrete walls reverberated to Motown and R&B records played by the house DJ Guy Stevens, a soul music obsessive who kept his precious records in a trunk that he sat on while DJ-ing.

The Scene was also the place to purchase and take drugs. A 1964 World Health Organisation survey on drug dependency in the UK discovered that the source of most drugs in London came from thirteen doctors, one of whom had legally prescribed over 500,000 tablets in a single year. These surplus drugs found their way into Soho. Alarmed by the illicit trade in Drinamyl, the then home secretary, Henry Brooke, introduced heavy fines and prison sentences to anyone caught dealing.

When the supply of purple hearts slowed down, the market was flooded with new and more potent amphetamines, including ‘French blues’, ‘dexies’ and the especially lethal ‘black bombers’. The music journalist and early Who advocate Penny Valentine visited the Scene in 1964 and described seeing ‘kids standing spaced-out, glazed … on handfuls of uppers – red pills, bombers.’ The Who’s über-fan ‘Irish’ Jack Lyons would later describe these late-night drug binges as ‘chewing-gum weekends’, after the gum mods chewed while high on pills, and which left them with aching jaws come Monday morning.

By 1964, the British R&B boom was attracting a mod audience, even if Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf were considered superior to the English white boys. The mods didn’t have a band they could call their own. The Beatles wore suits but their music was considered too poppy for hardcore mods. Drummer Ringo Starr would later poke fun at the mod-vs-rocker rivalry by describing The Beatles as ‘mockers’. The Rolling Stones borrowed elements of mod style, but were too unkempt to be wholly convincing, and although The Yardbirds’ guitarist Eric Clapton’s two-button Italian suit and chi-chi loafers passed muster, the rest of the group’s clothes didn’t.

Shortly before Pete Meaden’s arrival, The Who had played Brighton’s Florida Ballroom. ‘We partnered an older band, like a Georgie Fame clone [the Mark Leeman Five], and it was an entirely mod audience,’ Townshend told Mojo magazine’s Jon Savage. From the stage, Townshend peered down at gangs of impeccably dressed boys and what he called ‘boyish mod girls’. The two groups danced separately with the girls moving the way he’d seen Gillian Daltrey dance a year earlier. For Townshend, it was the audience, not The Who, that were the stars of the show: ‘We felt we were entering into their world, that we were being tolerated and given permission to stand on the stage.’

After the gig, Townshend turned down a lift home with the band. Instead, he stayed behind with a girlfriend from the art school: ‘We missed the last train, so we decided to walk along the pier, and what we discovered were all these boys jabbering away at each other on purple hearts.’ The couple stayed underneath the pier until 5 a.m., fascinated by these mod boys, their clothes, their hairstyles and their jabbering, before catching the milk train back to London. Townshend was infatuated.

At later Brighton gigs, he started to notice a clique of male mods offering sex in exchange for money or pills. Among them was one especially handsome youth, always dressed in a perfect Fred Perry shirt and a seersucker jacket, who would become one of the inspirations for Townshend’s later songwriting. What Townshend glimpsed that night, he said, ‘were the people I was supposed to be writing songs for’.

However, changes were needed before Townshend could become a fully realised songwriter and The Who a mod band. Pete Meaden first saw his future charges supporting 1950s rock ’n’ roller Wee Willie Harris at the Goldhawk. It was the day after the Zanzibar audition, and Doug Sandom was still working his notice. Meaden approved of The Who’s R&B set-list and Daltrey’s wailing harmonica, but not Townshend’s noisy guitar playing, and definitely not their image. ‘They were all wearing Pierre Cardin leather jackets,’ he told New Musical Express. ‘They had cropped hair at the back and Beatle cuts at the front.’ As ever, God was in the details.

‘Pete Meaden came with a henchman of his, a very cool, dangerous-looking mod called Phil the Greek,’ said Townshend. Andrew Oldham had hired a driver and bodyguard, Reg ‘the Butcher’ King, from London’s East End. Meaden, therefore, had acquired a minder of his own. It was all part of the image. For Pete Meaden, image was everything.

That night at the Goldhawk, Sandom heard Meaden gabbling away about all things mod and was immediately suspicious: ‘John Entwistle whispered to me, “I’m a rocker, not a mod.”’ And so was I.’ But with Sandom soon gone, there was one less dissenting voice in the band. Like Larry Page with The Kinks, Meaden wanted to give The Who an identifiable image: ‘I wanted to make them a group that would be a focus for the mods, a group that would actually be the same people onstage as the guys in the audience.’

Meaden’s ideas complemented the art school theories whizzing around Pete Townshend’s head. ‘Pete and I used to sit around at Sunnyside Road dreaming up ways to sell a pop group as if it were a product,’ says Richard Barnes. ‘What Meaden did with The Who was put what we’d learned into practice.’

Townshend and Barnes were soon smitten by The Who’s new publicist. Meaden educated them in mod culture, including the jargon, a mix of hipster speak and esoteric slang. It struck a chord with Townshend who was already fascinated by semiotics and language. ‘Meaden called everyone “baby”,’ says Barnes. ‘It was all, “Yeah, Barney, baby” walking around Soho clicking his fingers like something out of West Side Story. But he was also chattering about Smokey Robinson and Tamla Motown, which is the music we were interested in. It might seem ridiculous now, but at the time it was very persuasive. Meaden was always on pills, but there was this strange dark glamour about him.’

According to Meaden, the best-dressed mods were called ‘faces’, their underlings ‘tickets’ or ‘numbers’, the latter after the mod trend for T-shirts with numerals printed on them. ‘“Tickets” would wear whatever they could afford, maybe one cool item like a pair of Levi’s,’ said Townshend. But as Barnes points out: ‘No one ever defined the terms. I think they were made up on the spot, in the streets, by no one in particular and spread by word of mouth.’

Meaden’s ability to sell himself as an ‘ace face’ worked on Barney and The Who, but not everyone was convinced. ‘Pete Meaden and I would often go out together looking for clothes,’ says Jeff Dexter. ‘But despite what everyone says about Pete being the “face”, it’s a bit of bollocks, to tell you the truth. He could buy a tab collar shirt or two when he’d sold enough pills, but he would never have been pulled out by the majority of folk around at that time as a tasty geezer.’

Pete Meaden’s first step towards transforming The Who was to take them shopping and spend Helmut Gorden’s £50 clothes budget. At a time when most groups wanted to look like the Rolling Stones, The Who did the opposite. ‘Every band in those days were Stones looka-likes, especially on the London scene,’ Daltrey told the author. ‘Pete Meaden said no to that, and turned The Who around. He understood marketing, branding and the hype of rock ’n’ roll.’ Daltrey was soon dressed in a white seersucker jacket from Austin’s, a button-down collared shirt and tie, and a pair of black-and-white two-tone shoes, which Meaden later revealed were Daltrey’s Hush Puppies hand-painted navy and white.

In fact, most of the £50 budget went on Daltrey’s jacket, meaning that Meaden and Townshend had to pay for the rest of the band’s uniform. Townshend, Entwistle and Moon become ‘tickets’ to Daltrey’s ‘face’ by wearing cycling jackets, boxing boots and Levi’s jeans, the latter carefully turned up one inch to reveal the red stitching on the inside seam. In Townshend and Entwistle’s case, it was a return to the playground hierarchy of Acton County.

Once The Who had acquired their new wardrobe, Meaden took them to Jack the Barber. Again, every other wannabe pop star was growing their hair to resemble Mick Jagger’s carefully dishevelled mane. But, sticking with his ‘red sheep in the flock’ theory, Meaden demanded The Who cut theirs. They emerged from Jack’s, newly shorn, and in Entwistle’s case distraught. ‘I’d spent about a year growing my Beatle fringe,’ he protested. Disgusted, he messed up his new boxing boots by wading through a puddle, went home and smashed his bedroom mirror.

Although Daltrey was now the ‘ace face’, he was similarly unconvinced by their transformation. ‘If they had told me I had to stick my head up a donkey’s arse and I would have been a successful pop star, I would have done it,’ he later told The Who fanzine Naked Eye. ‘So being a mod was far less painful, and it was nice being a wolf in sheep’s clothing.’ But the clothes best suited effeminate, elfin youths such as Mark Feld, the future Marc Bolan, who was a regular at the Scene, and whom Townshend originally mistook for a rent boy.

Daltrey, with his scarred steelworker’s hands and barrel chest, was anything but effeminate and his curly hair didn’t lend itself to those precise mod cuts. ‘For a mod, having curly hair was worse than the clap. It was a scourge. You could not be cool with curly hair.’ Of all Daltrey’s mod accessories, the most important was soon Dippity-Do, an American brand of hair gel that he discovered was powerful enough to keep his curls straight for long enough to make it through a gig. Before the year was over, he’d gained a new nickname: ‘Dip’.

In his role as The Who’s newest ‘ticket’, Keith Moon wore the clothes he was told to wear, and played the songs he was told to play. But his first few weeks in the band weren’t easy. He faced some animosity from fans at the Goldhawk who remained loyal to local lad Doug Sandom, and he was also worried about letting The Beachcombers down. Indeed, he continued to play with both groups, until John Schollar forced him to choose: ‘I was disappointed when he chose The Who, but not surprised.’

In May, Moon joined his new band for a second Fontana Records audition, only to discover that Helmut Gorden had booked another drummer, Brian Redman of the Merseybeat group The Fourmost. But as Pete Meaden and the rest of The Who pointed out, Redman looked far too much like a rocker.

The Who passed the audition and were offered a tentative record deal by Fontana. Moon was now officially their drummer, but it took him a while to work out his place in the group. Although he was wary of Townshend’s acid wit and sullen moods, Moon’s biggest problem was with Daltrey. ‘Roger tried to befriend Keith, but Keith kept his distance,’ was Townshend’s tactful explanation of the relationship in Who I Am. ‘Those two hated each other,’ says another band confidante.

Part of the problem was that Daltrey, understandably, considered himself to be The Who’s frontman, but Moon was used to being the focus of attention in The Beachcombers. ‘Moon always thought the drums should be at the front of the stage,’ Daltrey told Mojo magazine. ‘I was the poor sod that had to stand in front of him.’ Unlike Townshend and Entwistle, Moon hadn’t grown up with Daltrey the feared, older boy at Acton County. Keith was two years younger than the singer but refused to defer to him, especially onstage. ‘He’d always be doing things behind my back,’ said Daltrey, ‘and I never knew what was going on. I was blissfully ignorant of the fact that he was taking the piss out of me all night.’

Daltrey often drove himself to gigs, as he hated being a passenger and preferred to make his own getaway after the show. Townshend also often travelled alone. This left Moon and Entwistle to travel together. They soon found they shared a sense of humour and a love of the absurd, and quickly became inseparable. ‘When Keith and John got together they could be very funny,’ says Richard Barnes. ‘Now, when Pete and Roger started arguing, John had someone else in his corner. So it was now him and Keith standing at the back with their arms folded saying, “Oh God, here they go again.”’

Whatever their doubts and internal struggles, The Who agreed to follow Pete Meaden’s game plan. Having dressed them and cut their hair, he now suggested they change their name to the High Numbers. Most promoters had only just become used to The Who. Changing the group’s name for the second time in a year was potentially disastrous, but Meaden was adamant. ‘He said The Who was a tacky, gimmicky name and it sounded uncool,’ said Townshend. ‘The [High Numbers] name was perfect,’ explained Meaden. ‘I dreamt of it one night. High – being a little high – and numbers was the name for the general crowd.’ Reluctantly, the band agreed, and The Who transformed themselves again.

As a sign of his commitment, Helmut Gorden offered the group a weekly wage of £20 each. Moon had left British Gypsum as soon as The Who offered him a job and had been scraping by on gig money and his parents’ generosity. Daltrey and Entwistle were in secure jobs, but were bored and exhausted by the never-ending cycle of late nights and early mornings. Meanwhile, Townshend had been neglecting his college work, and the combination of nightly gigs and endless dope smoking was taking its toll. When the head of his graphics course heard he was being offered £20 a week – ‘a police sergeant’s salary at the time’, says Richard Barnes – he urged him to leave. Townshend walked out of Ealing, but believed that the band would be but a temporary diversion on his way to becoming an artist. ‘I always thought that The Who would be very brief,’ he said, ‘and that I would shut it down after a while, and sit in my apartment making kinetic sculptures.’

Gorden prepared contracts for the band, but with four members still under twenty-one their parents had to act as co-signatories. Moon’s, Daltrey’s and Entwistle’s agreed, but Cliff and Betty Townshend refused. Cliff, who’d signed his share of music business contracts, read every clause and decided the deal wasn’t good enough. Their refusal was no obstacle for their son, but Gorden would later pay a high price for the missing signatures.

Now a professional musician, Townshend threw himself into the mod lifestyle as if it were another art project. ‘The others didn’t really care about it, but for Pete, it was like a new religion,’ says Barnes. The guitarist felt like part of the world’s most exclusive gang – ‘A powerful, aggressive little army’ – with its mysterious dress code, music, dances and semiotics. He learnt how to walk like a mod: ‘Shoulders swaying, small steps,’ according to Barnes, and mastered the spare, economic dance moves he saw at the Scene (where the High Numbers would soon have a residency); a significant development for someone who preferred the security of the stage to the sexually charged environment of the dance floor.

‘There were never more than thirty or forty people at the Scene,’ said Townshend. ‘So the people that were there were very important. You would hear Charlie and Inez Foxx alongside a Memphis song by Snooks Eaglin, and it would all be about dancing. You have to remember that Elvis had turned into a complete prat by then, while other people simply, conveniently, died before they made idiots of themselves. Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, all gone. This felt new.’

The High Numbers had become the mod group Pete Meaden wanted. But, as Townshend admits, they were following their fans, not leading by example: ‘We became “faces” by default. I felt that I had been given this incredible gift to be able to look down from the stage at these people and see exactly what was going on. You could see who was going to be next week’s fashion.’ Townshend would identify the top ‘face’ in the audience, and note what he was wearing, then go out and buy the same shirt or tie, wear it onstage and watch as the rest of the audience bought the same item a week later. ‘And it looks like it’s my idea, but I stole it from the poor bugger down the front.’

Townshend also followed his fanbase’s drug habits, and added amphetamines to his menu of stimulants. Marijuana was a slow drug. Whereas the energy and heady buzz of purple hearts was perfect for late nights flitting between La Discotheque, the Scene and the Flamingo. Taking amphetamines bonded him with Moon and, before long, Entwistle. When Daltrey tried pills, though, he decided he didn’t like them. His abstinence would soon create yet another division within the band.

No sooner had the High Numbers gained their new haircuts, clothes and name, than mod violence became front-page news. On the Easter bank holiday weekend, a group of mods travelled to the Essex seaside town of Clacton. It was a typically cold, wet English spring day. When the pubs closed after lunch, a few bored youths began misbehaving on the pier. The misbehaviour escalated, the police were called, and ninety-seven people were eventually arrested for offences ranging from vandalism and disorderly conduct to stealing an ice cream. The Daily Mirror’s subsequent headline ‘WILD ONES INVADE SEASIDE’ posited the mods as violent juvenile delinquents.

Three weeks later, during the Whitsun bank holiday, the High Numbers played Brighton’s Florida Ballroom, and had a ringside seat for the next bout. ‘I saw about two thousand mod kids, and there were three rockers up against a wall,’ said an imaginative Townshend. ‘The people who were kicking rockers out in front would then come and listen to our music.’ There were similar clashes in Margate that same weekend resulting in broken deckchairs, smashed shop windows and more mod-on-rocker violence. Forty-five youths were arrested and sent before magistrate Dr George Simpson, who condemned each tribe alike as ‘long-haired, mentally unstable, petty little hoodlums … Sawdust Caesars who can only find courage, like rats, in hunting packs.’

Simpson handed out fines totalling almost £2,000. But it didn’t stop further skirmishes later that summer in Hastings. Even allowing for the media’s exaggeration, it was as if Townshend’s ‘aggressive little army’ had gone to war. However, the original mod ethics of style and individuality had been replaced by a simple gang mentality. As Mark Feld might have said ‘the haddocks’ had taken over. These mods weren’t the elegant jazz fans Townshend had imagined gliding around Paris on their Vespas, and had admired for what he called their ‘poetry of lifestyle’. These mods wanted something else: ‘We need someone to take notice of us,’ one thrill-seeker told the Daily Mirror, ‘and fighting is a way of attracting attention.’

Nevertheless, all those ‘sawdust Caesars’ and all those broken deck-chairs meant that when the High Numbers recorded their first single in June in Fontana’s own Marble Arch studio, every teenager in the country – and their parents – knew what a mod was.

Despite Pete Townshend’s earlier songwriting efforts, it was Pete Meaden who came up with both sides of the band’s one and only single. The A-side ‘I’m the Face’ featured Meaden’s mod-conscious lyrics about ‘faces’ and ‘tickets’ laid over what was essentially the rhythm track from Louisiana bluesman Slim Harpo’s ‘Got Love if You Want It’. The B-side, ‘Zoot Suit’, was another Meaden-composed mod anthem, based on the song ‘Country Fool’ by the New Orleans doo-wop group The Showmen. A surviving acetate from the session, or possibly an earlier attempt, was later discovered with the words ‘Andrew Oldham is a bum’ scrawled across the label, presumably by Meaden. But the High Numbers had some way to go before they could challenge the Rolling Stones.

The trouble was, The Who’s speciality was bellicose R&B songs ‘about sex and women and feeling down and frustration’, said Daltrey. At the same session, they’d cut a version of Bo Diddley’s ‘Here ’Tis’ with Daltrey doing his best whisky-sozzled bluesman impersonation. Neither ‘I’m the Face’ nor ‘Zoot Suit’ could measure up to that. Moon’s brisk drumming lifted both songs, but the rest of the group sounded tame. On ‘Zoot Suit’, Daltrey bragged about his two-tone brogues and his ‘zoot suit jacket with side vents five inches long’. But this was a look the mod on the street already knew, and how long before Daltrey’s clothes were out of date?

Fontana pressed just 1,000 copies, released the single in July, but did little to promote it. Instead, Meaden’s pill-driven enthusiasm took over. He had flyers printed lauding the High Numbers as ‘Four Hip Men From London’, raced around Soho with boxes of records under his arm, trying to get them into the shops, and pestered the pop magazines Record Mirror and Fabulous into writing about what he called ‘the first authentic mod record’. The press obliged. Pete Meaden’s wild ideas and the band’s tense dynamic were interesting even if the record wasn’t. Fabulous writer June Southworth turned up to watch the High Numbers in Tottenham, north London. After seeing the club’s doorman attempting to strangle Roger Daltrey, she figured they must be worth writing about.

By now, mod fashions had infiltrated the group’s west London fanbase. Dedicated Who watcher ‘Irish’ Jack had spotted his first mod in Hammersmith in the summer of 1963, and had soon adopted the clothes, the haircut, the purple hearts – everything, in fact, but the scooter. When Meaden asked him to take a dozen copies of ‘I’m the Face’ to sell in Shepherd’s Bush market, Jack readily agreed. Unfortunately, he managed to shift just four copies. Meaden, despite trawling every record shop in London, was equally unsuccessful. In a later interview, he claimed to have bought 250 copies himself in an effort to get the single into the charts. But it wasn’t enough. ‘I’m the Face’ sank without a trace. The image was in place, but it seemed the music was lagging behind.

‘I remember them being stunned when it failed,’ says Richard Barnes. ‘We didn’t think it would get to Number 1, but we thought it would get noticed. We didn’t expect the High Numbers to be such a spectacular flop.’