Peter ‘Dougal’ Butler grew up at the same time and in the same London milieu as the founding members (Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, John Entwistle, Keith Moon) of the band that became The Who. Leaving school aged fifteen, Butler was first employed by HM Customs and Excise, but after finding his way into The Who’s inner circle he became personal assistant, chauffeur, bodyguard, minder and all-round majordomo to the band’s mercurial drummer, Keith Moon.
Butler carried out these functions for a tumultuous ten years, leaving in the year prior to Moon’s untimely death by overdose in September 1978. In the years immediately thereafter Butler worked with film and TV writers (and long-time collaborators) Peter Lawrence and Chris Trengove to produce a memoir of his experiences with Moon.
Full Moon was first published as a Star paperback in 1981, and was received rapturously by fans of Moon and The Who, also becoming an ‘instant classic’ account of rock ’n’ roll excess, avidly consumed on tour buses everywhere. This Faber Finds reissue of Full Moon restores the book to print for the first time in thirty years, and also marks its debut as an ebook.
The following interview about Full Moon with Peter Butler and Chris Trengove was conducted by Faber Finds editor Richard T. Kelly in March 2012.
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Q. Peter, Full Moon first appeared in 1981, three years after Keith’s death. What had prompted you to want to put your memories of him down on paper?
PETER BUTLER: I thought to myself, ‘When is the right or wrong time? Should I leave it ten years?’ But what I decided was I should do it while it was all still fresh in my memory. It wasn’t for money, because there wasn’t any money in it. It was to keep his name going: Keith Moon, one of the best drummers in the world, who played in the world’s best rock ’n’ roll band and who – by the way – was also a nutcase, but a great nutcase, a great guy to be with.
I mean, I’m just like any Englishman, I like to go out on a Friday night and meet my mates after work – I always have done, always will, it’s always nice to see the boys and have the banter. And when there’s a pack of you in the pub, there’s always one character who you adhere to – one guy who’s Peter Pan and has got all the jokes and is just more fun than the rest. And Keith Moon was one of those guys. He had the sense of humour and the devil-may-care attitude, he was someone you’d absolutely want in your gang on a Friday night.
So I started working on the book idea with Chris and Peter, and as we went along I felt absolutely at ease with these two. And it turned out exactly as I’d wanted, if not better.
Q. Chris, how did you and Peter Lawrence tackle the job of working with Dougal to get the book into shape?
CHRIS TRENGOVE: We taped a series of interviews with Dougal, after hours, in the boardroom of the advertising agency where Peter Lawrence and I both worked at the time, sitting up until late at night. Quite quickly we realised there wasn’t any point in telling the story chronologically. Naturally, Dougal’s memory was slightly hazy on precise dates. But it also seemed to make better dramatic sense to order the book around certain themes, so that it’s ‘episodic’, if you like. So all the car incidents have their own chapter, likewise all the drug incidents, all the hooker incidents …
The authorial voice of the book really evolved out of the way that Dougal himself talks – the narrator is a slightly heightened version of Dougal. But it seemed to sit well alongside the way that Keith himself talked – the ‘Dear boy’ thing – which was common knowledge. One thing we did on purpose, though, was the present tense of the telling – ‘So he comes in here and he does that, and I think “Blimey!” ’ and so on – which seemed to give it a kind of storytelling immediacy. The main thing was just to present Peter as a lively narrator of what was a very lively time, and of a larger-than-life subject, which seemed to call for a matching sort of voice.
Q. Peter, to return to the start of the story, when you first encountered Moon and The Who you were a Customs and Excise clerk at Heathrow, but also a proper mod?
PB: Yes, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I had the short haircut, the Fred Perry shirt, Levis 501s, Hush Puppies, full-length mustard coat from Petticoat Lane … I thought I looked the bee’s knees. And my dad used to say, ‘Have you seen the state of you, son?’
But I used to go to see The Who all over the place – the Ricky-Tick in Windsor, the Blue Moon in Hayes, Middlesex. I saw them at Southall Community Centre, Dunstable Civic, the Marquee, the Goldhawk and the A Train in London. I was down at the Brighton Aquarium when all the riots were happening [in 1965].
Q. Did you get to Brighton by scooter?
PB: No, I was sixteen, I couldn’t afford a scooter, but me and my mates saved up and clubbed together, bought an old Rover for £17 18s. 6d – lovely car, running boards, big headlights. Seven of us drove to Brighton, all under age, no tax or insurance. We actually slept in that car at night. And we ended up having to abandon it on a roundabout, after two of my mates got arrested. So we came home by train. Good times …
Q. When you started working for The Who in 1967 they’d already had hit records, but clearly they weren’t yet as huge as they would become. And the way you describe their operations at the time makes it sound like a bit of a hand-to-mouth business?
PB: When I started, me and Bobby Pridden were roadies and then I moved on to look after John Entwistle and then Keith. And technically Keith was my employer, but really we were mates – I was always round his flat, socially. Originally I was driving a customised transit van, getting £15 a week – if I was lucky – which was good money in late 1967. But there were times I’d have to go to the office on Old Compton Street and say, ‘I ain’t been paid for two weeks, where’s me wages?’ I remember Kit Lambert and Pete Townshend asking me to drive them in my little Morris 11 to Jim Marshall’s shop in Ealing. We’d get there and it’d be ‘Keep the car running!’ Pete would run in, grab a guitar off the wall, run out. ‘Drive on!’ Without paying …
Q. But then Tommy was released in 1969, and quite suddenly The Who became one of the biggest bands in the world. You got to see that happen in close-up?
PB: Before Tommy The Who were about eighty grand in debt. Then you get to 1970–71, and suddenly instead of going up and down the M1 in a transit you’re in your own private jet. It’s gone from playing the local Odeon to 50,000-seater stadiums. So to witness the transition was amazing. We were all young then, but when you think now about the pressure that was on Pete at the time, and the work he produced between Tommy and Quadrophenia … the creativity was just phenomenal.
Q. Did you remain a fan of The Who’s music as it progressed from its mod beginnings to that harder rock sound of the 1970s?
PB: Oh yeah, always. To watch them on stage was awesome, a privilege to be there. Just to watch them rehearse, even. The hairs on your neck still stood up even if you were seeing them every night. It was just the power they gave off – and I’m not talking about the volume of the PA, I mean the force of their playing, and those songs. The same with watching them in the studio – their musicianship, and the transition from Pete’s demos to the final songs – it was magical, the way it came together, with the producer’s input and Pete’s input, and John Entwistle’s too, even though he was called ‘The Silent One’. And then Keith just had a natural knack for what that song wanted, his fill-ins were always brilliant.
Q. In that moment of the early seventies Keith’s drum kit seemed to get very noticeably bigger and flashier.
PB: It did. His Pictures of Lily-era kit was just a standard double-bass drum kit. But then around late 1970, 1971, when I was more involved with him socially and work-wise, I remember saying, ‘Why don’t you get another row of toms at the top? It’d look fantastic to the audience.’ So Premier put them on for him, all in chrome, and the stage lights picked them out and flashed off them in different colours. It was good for his playing, but it was showmanship, too.
Q. In terms of the special dynamics of The Who sound it’s often said that Pete’s playing was very attuned to Keith’s. Did you notice that phenomenon yourself?
PB: Oh it was incredible how they used to get off on each other – all based on eye contact between them. Pete would go into what I called ‘freeform’, and Keith would be watching him, taking his lead from Pete. You didn’t have to keep an eye on John – the bassline would always be pumping away. But then Pete would turn to Keith, there’d be eye contact, and boom! Pete would change, John might go up an octave, and Keith would just go mad around the kit. I mean, I’m not a musician, but I always say Keith played the drums like an orchestra.
Q. Given that The Who generated so much energy onstage, do you think it was the need to do something with all that adrenalin that led Keith into his infamous hotel-wrecking antics?
PB: Well, say you’ve played a great gig – could be to 2,500 people or in a 50,000-seater stadium – and you come off that stage on a high. You go backstage, get changed, greet the VIPs or whoever’s there … you’re not back to your hotel until midnight. And it could be a five-star place but still you’re told, ‘Sorry, kitchen shut at eleven.’ You want to relax, have a beer, sandwiches, some friends round … nothing, no room service, or else incredibly slow room service. And you’re paying top dollar. So Keith, if he couldn’t get an answer from reception, would go, ‘Right, fuck it,’ and the TV would go straight out the window. Boom! ‘Now answer the phone. Where’s me sandwiches?’ That was his way …
Of course with Keith there was the added thing that after a show he’d have a few brandy-and-gingers, then there’d be drugs – pep pills or a snort of coke, or someone giving him a pill you didn’t see – and then all of a sudden he’d be flying. He’d go into ‘acting’ mode, whoever he was with. It might be a rock star or a movie star, or just a nice-looking bird. But all of a sudden he’s ‘Hello, I’m Keith Moon, I’m here to impress.’ What he never registered in his mind is ‘Where do I stop?’ So he wouldn’t stop until he passed out at three or four in the morning. And as time went on it just got worse and worse…
Q. And one imagines that all this only went to make your job more demanding?
PB: With Keith, being one step ahead of what he was thinking wouldn’t do the job – you had to have three or four steps on him, you had to try to be thinking what he was thinking. ‘So, if we go in here, what’s he gonna do next?’ Say if we were going to Apple to see Ringo [Starr]. You’d think, ‘Right, it’s only two o’clock, so it’ll be the office, then it’ll be the pub, game of darts maybe, or it might be Tramps. Then Tramps closes, but Kingly Street opens up at three thirty in the morning … so I’m gonna be going for the next ten hours here. And at some point I want to try to get him home …’
Q. It does seem that Moon had the advantage of a lot of hard-living people, which is that he had an incredibly strong constitution.
PB: I remember a time in Trancas, we were all at a beach house that Ronnie Wood was renting and we went out to a club across the way from Alice’s Restaurant. I’m with Bob Dylan’s roadie Sandy, he’s driving a Cadillac hearse, and me and Moonie go to him, ‘Take us back to the house, it’s boring here.’ So Sandy drops us off, we sit out on the veranda and there’s this glass vial sitting on the table. And Keith gets that look in his eye: ‘Ah, Dougal, dear boy! Look what’s someone’s gone and left, silly boy! There you go …’ It’s only a little vial, and Keith does most of it, but all of a sudden I’m seeing different coloured lights. I said, ‘This ain’t cocaine, mate, I’m feeling really strange.’ By the time the others came back I was hallucinating, I had to be walked up and down the beach. But Keith just carried on, totally unaffected. And as long as he was alright …
Q. Pete Townshend wrote a fine Who song, ‘How Many Friends?’, about the particular isolation of a rock star. Do you think that was a problem for Keith? How many friends did he really have?
Other than me it would be Pete, then maybe John. But if there was a problem I know Keith could at any time ring Pete, or talk to him privately, at rehearsals or recording, about anything that was concerning him – business or personal – and as a friend, a close friend. Even in Trancas, out of his skull, Keith would be ringing Pete. ‘I got this problem …’ And Pete would listen. Though I know sometimes he had to put the phone down and go to bed …
In the later years there was Ringo and Harry Nilsson, and they were great friends, but not close like Townshend, where there was that element of trust. In Malibu Larry Hagman became a friend, he and his wife Maj, and he was good for Keith. He used to come round to Keith’s in a post office van, with his dope, and take us up to the hills overlooking the Pacific for a smoke, trying to calm Keith down.
But with Ringo and Harry – they and Keith drifted apart, people move on. Keith was very selfish in that if he got something in his head then he wanted to do it now, he’d say ‘Get hold of Ringo and Harry, we’re doing this tonight and they’ve gotta be there.’ Sure enough they would. But put it in reverse – if somebody wanted Keith somewhere? He’d usually say he couldn’t be bothered, wouldn’t turn up, or even get out of bed, even though he would expect everyone to turn up for him. My partner Sue, who teaches special needs children up to age eighteen, she reckons Keith had ADHD [Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder]. Because he was hyper all the time, he couldn’t concentrate or organise.
Q. Do you think he reached a stage where he felt he had to be ‘Keith Moon’ at all hours, just because everyone else in the room expected it of him?
PB: In his own mind, that’s absolutely right, because in the last three or four years he’d got into believing his own PR, and that was what so sad about it. He probably did say to himself, ‘I’ve gotta keep this up’ even though it was destroying him.
Q. It’s often said of people who are infamous ‘hell-raisers’ that a big downside can be the toll taken on family life and on loved ones. One doesn’t get the sense that Keith spent much time with his daughter Mandy. How did he relate to her as a father?
PB: In a nutshell, Keith didn’t think of Mandy in that way – which is very, very sad. I wouldn’t say he didn’t know her, don’t get me wrong. But he didn’t give her a lot of time, because he was more caught up in himself and what was going on now – not tomorrow, now. ‘Who’s doing what? What’s Ringo doing, what’s Harry doing?’ Not ‘What’s Mandy doing?’
Say it was her birthday, at Tara house, a little garden party. Her friends would come round, the trestle table would be out, all the bunting and cakes and a hired entertainer. I’d be there, with friends of Kim, married couples, and Mandy’s friends from infant school. And Keith would be in bed, because he’s been up all night. Now, Kim’s point of view, which I can understand, would be ‘I don’t want to wake him up, don’t want him to take this over, act the joker in front of these kids he hasn’t met.’ Because Keith never went to the school gates. So Kim used to leave him there, and I don’t blame her for it – I know what Keith would have done, he’d have had a couple of brandies and within two hours all hell would break loose.
But that was a ploy of mine and Kim’s at the time: ‘Don’t disturb him, keep him out of the way, better for all concerned on that sort of occasion.’ Kim might say to him, ‘It’s your daughter’s open day at school tomorrow.’ But she’d only mention it once. And she’d love to take him – but she doesn’t want to, if you understand. Because Keith might do something and then not know when to stop. And when you’ve got children involved that’s a no-no.
So Mandy didn’t have the greatest upbringing. But Kim was definitely a fantastic mum.
Q. One senses a tipping point in this story around 1976–77 where you went from being Keith’s employee/mate to increasingly having to be his minder, and there seemed to be a growing sense that he might do himself serious harm.
PB: Absolutely. And it was particularly so after 1976 when he bought the house on the beach in Trancas, next door to Steve McQueen. Multi-millionaires everywhere. Neil Young lived down the road on the next beach … paradise. I know that’s how Steve McQueen thought of it – or he did, until he had Moonie living next door.
For Keith, though, he attracted all the wrong element from the LA rock ’n’ roll life. I wouldn’t say ‘lowest of the low’, but definitely hangers-on, who kept him fed with drugs and whatever else he wanted. So my job was to have eyes in the back of my head – and not with Keith but with those other people. I used to throw people out the house – not physical, I’m not a violent person, never used my fists – I just asked them to leave. I’d find some guy had come round with a load of cocaine: ‘Get out.’ ‘But Keith’s invited me …’ The minute their backs were turned I knew what to do, I’d get hold of it and tip it down the toilet, five hundred dollars’ worth in those days. Keith would say, ‘Where is it?’ I’d say, ‘You don’t need it, mate.’
But he used to get illegal drugs from other people, he could make those phone calls. And I just could see him going down and down. His weight ballooned.
Q. Why did he put on so much weight after 1975?
PB: It was booze, and eating, and no exercise. Plus, The Who weren’t playing. Somebody told me in the early days of The Who someone did a study and figured out that in two hours on stage Keith, energy-wise, did the same amount of work as a lumberjack does in a week. In them days he used to wear Chelsea boots, and when he took them off after a show he had to pour the water out. Used to have to wring his T-shirt out too, so there’d be a proper puddle on the floor.
But then from late 1974 The Who stop touring – they go out in 1975 but only for a couple of months. Keith doesn’t practise, he hasn’t got a fitness regime, no gym in the house, he doesn’t go running. He’s just there boozing. And he did like his food. He was totally unfit. His drumming had gone down a bit, too, and he knew it. Roger even said to me, ‘Dougal, you tell him, if he don’t pull his socks up …’ I said, ‘I’ve got to tell him, Rog? I think that comes from you and Bill [Curbishley, The Who’s manager].’
Q. And in this period he was undergoing stints in rehab clinics?
PB: We put him in a place in Weybridge, put him into Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles – with no health insurance, so that bill was $44,000. But he was in there two or three weeks, I used to go see him in this secure unit – they called it the Thespians Unit – and it was terrible, really. Here’s a guy who’s an icon to millions, saying to me, ‘Look what I’ve done, Dougal!’ And he’s built this wooden tray, cut a load of pictures of topless women out of a magazine, stuck them down on the tray and polyurethaned it. It’s a drinks tray. And this was his pride and joy. I thought, ‘Fuck me, this is sad.’ But I had to laugh at the same time – you didn’t know what else to do. Two days later I get a phone call, ‘Sorry, Keith won’t be coming out just yet, we found him and he’d drunk some aftershave.’ It’s like, what do you do …?
I remember he finally came out of there and we wanted to fly him back to London, he and Annette and me, British Airways first class. But there was a cock-up at the London office, I get to the desk at LAX and they tell me, ‘Sorry, we’re overbooked.’ I don’t want Moonie to know, so I get him escorted to the VIP Lounge, I ask for the manager and we get in a corner, I say to him, ‘Look, this is not my cock-up, but we’ve got some important issues here, and we’re not going back home, I’ve got to get him on that plane. Now, today.’ In the end I had to give the guy a $200 back-hander just to take someone off the flight. So I head to the VIP Lounge, only Keith’s got out of there. And then who’s walking toward us but Richie Blackmore? Dressed all in black, wheeling a stuffed alligator on casters. And I look at him, and at Keith, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh fuck, I hope they ain’t on the same flight!’ Thank God they weren’t.
But when we were back to Trancas again, things got desperate between us – we had a few rows at that stage, which we’d never had before, which were just awful. We had one big fight, came to blows, in the kitchen, and I just rang Bill Curbishley and said, ‘Bill, get him home. If he stays here, he’s not gonna last another six months.’ And they did get him home. I left just before that.
I loved him to death, but we had to part ways. It killed me because I’d known this guy since 1967, we were mates, and for the last six months I was employed I wasn’t even getting my wages – I’d stayed because I thought the world of him, and I knew I’d get my money eventually. But it felt like he was either going to kick the bucket or make me seriously ill. And I thought, ‘He’s got to sort himself out. He’s got to want to do it for himself.’
Then I remember seeing him on TV being interviewed with Pete for an American chat-show, a morning show, and I thought, ‘This isn’t the guy I know.’ He was trying to be funny. And I thought, ‘Mate, you ain’t funny.’ And I didn’t feel then that he was going to be with us for long.
Q. Can you imagine any way he could have been ‘saved’ from that early death?
PB: We all tried. Maybe he could have lasted another ten years. But he wouldn’t have made it to fifty, I don’t think. He was going to die young. I think we all knew that. Tragic as it was, in our hearts we knew.
CT: It’s an interesting thought: if he hadn’t died, how would he have coped with getting older? There’s that phrase ‘the oblivion express’, and you think some people are just on it and they’re not going to be able to get off in time. But he lived a hell of a lot in thirty-two years.
PB: He did in a week what the rest of us wouldn’t do in a year.
Q. Right at the end of the book in discussing Moon’s funeral you refer to some ‘mystery’ in respect of whether Annette or someone else close to Moon was putting out noises that you shouldn’t attend that day. Can you clear up that mystery for the reader now?
PB: A guy called Richard Dorse was working with Keith when he died. Dorse himself is now dead. But he didn’t like me, because I got on with Keith. He got quite stroppy and threatening. I called Bill Curbishley, he said, ‘Don’t you worry, there ain’t a problem, you come with me and Roger.’
Q. What happened to Mandy after Keith died?
PB: Kim got married again, to Ian McLagan, the keyboard player in The Faces. From the divorce settlement they bought a house in Wandsworth. Mandy went to school. Kim got a job in Harrods. But Ian was struggling because The Faces were falling apart. After Keith died his house in Trancas was empty – Keith spent his money before he got it but the house was the majority of what he left. So Kim and Ian decided to move out there with Mandy, and they stayed for a couple of years. This was a place Keith had bought for $325,000, and I know that in 2010 it was put on the market for $10 million. So the equity in the house was rising all the time, and when Keith’s estate sold it a large chunk of that money went to Mandy and also to settle his debts. And since Keith’s death she gets his publishing, which is quite substantial. Mandy became a drummer, actually, and I think she had a slight drink problem, but she came through. She’s married and remarried, has two children. But she’s absolutely gorgeous and fine, lives in Pasadena, and is very happy as far as I know.
Q. So here we are in 2012 and arguably interest in The Who has never been higher, even though only two of the founding members survive. What have you made of how Pete and Roger have kept the band alive, in spite of all their well-documented disagreements?
PB: They’ve always had barneys, they will continue to do so, I’m sure … but it’s part of what made The Who, and kept them together. A lot of bands have had those tensions and called it a day. Not The Who, they stuck together. And when you look back, it doesn’t matter who didn’t like who – I mean, they all got on, and they all disliked each other too at certain times. I saw them fight in the studio over musical things, trivial things, but they came back two days later and it was done … it was a creative friction.
Of course there could never be another Keith. I remember speaking to Kenney Jones when he joined The Who [after Moon’s death, in 1979], and Kenney said, ‘Phew, I dunno how Moonie done this.’ The only one who’s come near is Ringo’s son, Zak [Starkey, who has played with The Who since 1996]. Zak is amazing.
Q. For both of you, are you surprised by what a huge adoring audience The Who still command?
CT: It does seem to me that these are people we’ll never see the like of again. The whole thing of virtuoso musicianship in rock, it’s sort of gone, really. If you ask young musicians now who are their heroes they’re always harking back to people from thirty or forty years ago, before they were born. ‘Oh, Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix …’ There are no equivalents now.
PB: There are still exciting young bands out there. But it’s harder to get recognition, harder for smaller bands even to get gigs now. And you’ve got to work at it, tour, play the back-rooms of pubs, learn by your mistakes. It’s not the same putting your video up on YouTube. To me rock ’n’ roll has gone back to like it was in the pre-Beatles era – to Bobby Vee and Helen Shapiro – because of the Simon Cowells of this world and The X Factor, which makes me want to throw a brick at the TV.
But for the last twenty years I’ve been going to see The Who, at Earl’s Court or Olympia or Wembley, and I can’t believe the number of sixteen-year-olds I see there. Dads with their sons who are Who-mad. I saw them play the Albert Hall for the Teenage Cancer Trust and, boy, the hairs stood up on my neck again. I thought, ‘They’re still the greatest.’ Still to this day, I think, the best rock and roll band in the world – the best that ever came out of England, that’s for sure. There’s something about The Who, they speak for every generation, ours and every one since … and long may it continue.
Q. And when you look back on Full Moon now, and on the life you led at the time, is there any bit of it you think you’d rather have done differently?
PB: I don’t regret anything. My dad always wanted me to be a plumbing and heating engineer, and I’d probably have made more money if I’d stuck my apprenticeship out. But it doesn’t matter. I look back and I’ve had a great time. I wasn’t in a factory, I wasn’t a painter and decorator – I was coming home at five o’clock in the morning, driving a pink Rolls Royce!