Who’s better, who’s best.
I can’t quite believe that after being slightly obsessed with the Who for about 25 years, I’ve only just got round to watching The Kids Are Alright. (Amazon). God knows how many time’s I’ve watched Tommy and Quadrophenia - but somehow, this one escaped me.
A few things strike you - first, that Pete Townshend’s on-stage dancing is possibly the worst that you’ve ever seen (he jumps around like a posh dad at a wedding during a version of Baba O’Reilly…admittedly not an easy tune to dance to…) . Also you realise just how heavily styled they were until that point in their career (just how many tassled capes did Roger Daltry have?). But the biggest thing you notice is just how big a deal Keith Moon was: the way he looked, they way he played, and yes, the way he drove Rolls Royce’s into swimming pools.
I know that’s stating the obvious - but I suppose that given that he died when I was 12 (he was 31, which now seems impossibly young), I think I’d always tried to kid myself that they’d just ‘lost their drummer’, so that when I finally got to see them live (Birmingham NEC, 1984) it was as near as damn it to the real thing. I now realise it was nothing like it.
Yes, I’d seen clips and read all about him - but you only really notice it when you see this much footage all at once. You simply can’t take your eyes off him whenever he’s in the picture. And dead at 31?. There’s scenes he’s there with his beard, playing around with Ringo Starr - and you look at them and think: christ they’re nearly 10 years younger than I am now.
Anyway - there was one clip of him, picture above, (playing Pictures of Lilly) that I saw and thought - oh my god: that’s where Austin Powers got the look from. I then did a quick google check to find out exactly when he died - only to find out co-incidentally (I think I knew this already) that Mike Myers is going to be playing Moon in a ‘forthcoming bio-pic’. Which we now await with some eagerness.