He’s the rock legend whose band, the Who, was one of the biggest in the world. But over the past 20 years Roger Daltrey has also raised £32 million for the Teenage Cancer Trust. He tells Michael Odell about fame, marriage and turning 80

Thursday January 11 2024, 12.01am GMT, The Times

Is it OK to ask a pensioner, one moreover who is sitting in a hospital ward, “Didn’t you think you’d be dead by now?” Usually no, but this is the Who’s Roger Daltrey we are talking about and since “I hope I die before I get old” is so integral to his brand, questions on mortality are OK.

“Actually, being around these young people today I do ask myself, ‘What the f*** am I still doing here?’ ” he says. “I’m in the way. All us old farts, we really are just in the way of the young now, aren’t we?”

Daltrey is clearly moved by his surroundings. We are meeting on a cancer ward at Southampton General Hospital. Over the past 23 years, the 79-year-old rocker has raised more than £32 million for the Teenage Cancer Trust, which built this specialist unit and funds an array of psychologists, social workers and palliative care nurses. There are 27 other units just like this one around the country, thanks in part to his work.

“Twenty-odd years ago, my GP told me young people with cancer were being treated on wards alongside the elderly,” he says. “That’s not right, is it? When you’re sick, you want to be taken care of somewhere that makes you feel at home. The mental fight is as important as the physical one.”

Daltrey leads us into the recreation room where he admires a mural depicting Bob Marley, Mick Jagger, David Bowie and others. I do not see Daltrey.

“That’s me with the curls, when I had decent hair,” he says, pointing at a face between John Lennon and Jay-Z. I’m pretty sure that’s Madonna, although Daltrey does retain lush silver tufts.

He is here to announce the latest Teenage Cancer Trust shows at the Royal Albert Hall in March, but this is no casual rock star photo op. Daltrey is passionate about this cause and puts himself about the ward. When we meet 20-year-old Elina Dodds, who is having chemo, he is all roguish charm.

“All right, what’s wrong with you then?” he asks.

Eleven months ago, Dodds was a second-year undergraduate studying at Liverpool University. She was academic and sporty and planning a career in the Royal Navy. In February she broke her shoulder playing rugby and when the injury continued to hurt and she couldn’t get a scan, her parents paid for an MRI privately. In September, she was diagnosed with stage 4 Ewing sarcoma, a rare bone or soft tissue cancer.

“It’s incurable but treatable, so I’ll have 14 rounds of chemo, hopefully go into remission and if it comes back, we’ll hit it again,” says Dodds, who is level-headed, articulate and charming. “Make the most of every day, that’s my outlook.”

Daltrey is gentle and tender with her, but when we get back to the recreation room he sighs with dismay. He is no longer a rock star. With fists balled into the pockets of his quilted jacket, he is more like an angry cab driver and cancer could be someone who has offended him.

“For f***’s sake,” he says. “That poor young woman couldn’t get a scan? F***ing hell. That’s our wonderful NHS for you. And like I said, it’s partly because all these old farts like me are in the way, isn’t it? Let’s just die! Get me and my lot out the way. It’s crazy.”

Daltrey sounds genuinely pained. His sister, Carol, died of breast cancer aged 32.

“I’ll never forget the day she was diagnosed,” he says. “I ran around the house screaming, ‘Why her? Give it to me.’ She had babies — two and three years old.”

The Teenage Cancer Trust shows this March will feature the Who, Noel Gallagher and the Chemical Brothers, among others, but this will be Daltrey’s last time curating the concerts.

“It’s got to the point where artists see me and they say, ‘F***ing run for it! It’s Daltrey and he’s going to make us play.’ It needs younger blood because I’m 80 in March. I don’t even know if I’ll be here in another five years and that’s not fair on the charity. You’ve got to be realistic.”

Daltrey has done his bit, but his frustration with cancer care is obvious. Why does teenage cancer care rely on charity, he wonders. Why didn’t the government support his work during the pandemic when the trust’s finances took a hit? Sometimes he teeters into conspiracy.

“I don’t think they’ll ever find a cure for cancer,” he says. “I don’t think they want to find a cure. I’m being cynical here, but scientists look after the science but they also look after themselves. You do imagine if they did find a cure tomorrow it would be fabulous for the country, but there’d be an awful lot of scientists out of work. You might think I’m being cynical, but I do think that.”

Daltrey is an old-school, working-class Londoner, a “diamond geezer” who has always been a bit suspicious of authority. As a boy, he took against the teachers who said he would never amount to anything (he sarcastically acknowledged his old headmaster in the title of his 2018 autobiography Thanks a Lot, Mr Kibblewhite). He was suspicious of the Who’s managers, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp (he was right to be — Lambert was funding a heroin habit, not to mention a Knightsbridge apartment and a 15th-century mansion on Venice’s Grand Canal from the band’s funds). And he was suspicious enough of the EU to support Brexit.

Does he really believe Big Pharma is holding back on us?

“It’s just human nature, isn’t it? You’re not going to invent something that’s going to put you out of work.”

Daltrey was born in 1944. The NHS did not exist then. And neither, for that matter, did teenagers. He, the Who and a host of first-wave British rock bands can claim to have birthed the whole idea of youth culture. In 1959 he formed the Detours. The bass player John Entwistle and guitarist Pete Townshend joined two years later (drummer Keith Moon arrived in 1964) and evolving through various incarnations into the Who, they became one of the biggest and most influential bands in the world.

While all the other members had addiction problems at one time or another, Daltrey was the grounded, sensible one. It kind of explains why he is here now.

“I looked after my body because, as a singer, it’s my instrument. You can’t sing if you’re off your head on drugs. And I am always aware that rock’n’roll gave me a life of privilege. Aged 12 years old, my arse was hanging out me trousers. I made my own guitar [out of plywood] and all my dreams came true. How many people can say that? So in the second half of my life, this work has grounded me. It’s better than hanging around in the pub or on the golf course all day. It’s real. I need a purpose. I’ve always needed a purpose.”

Daltrey did not stay sober just to preserve his voice. He desperately needed the Who to succeed. After being expelled from school by Mr Kibblewhite aged 15, he was a tea boy in a west London sheet metal factory and could easily have been drawn into London’s underworld (Daltrey was “connected” and once borrowed money from notorious London gangsters the Kray twins). By contrast, Townshend was the son of musicians and Entwistle had a job as a tax inspector.

Daltrey’s focus caused tension. He was annoyed when Townshend started smashing up his guitars and Moon began trashing drum kits as part of the band’s performances and he was furious when drugs further jeopardised their chances. In 1965, after a lacklustre show in Aalborg, Denmark, it was Daltrey who angrily flushed Moon’s stash of amphetamines down a toilet. Moon attacked Daltrey with a tambourine, a brawl ensued and next day Daltrey was fired from the band (he was reinstated shortly afterwards on pain of controlling the “red mist”).

It is slightly curious, then, that it is Daltrey who is about to valorise this hedonism. He has co-written a script for a Keith Moon biopic (Moon died of a drug overdose in 1978, aged 32) with the children’s author Nigel Hinton. They are now looking for a director and a plausible Keith Moon.

“That’s not going to be easy, is it?” says Daltrey. “It’s a dream part for any actor, but who can portray such an incredible personality?”

Daltrey acknowledges there is a certain irony here. We are on a ward full of young people desperate to live discussing a rock star who threw everything away.

“Some people get to live their dream and they just can’t handle it,” he says.

Moon was an extraordinary musician, but what are we to make of his antics today? When, in 1967, he drove a Lincoln Continental into the swimming pool of the Holiday Inn in Flint, Michigan, it immediately became a benchmark of rock hedonism. Filling a bathtub full of piranhas and blowing up various hotel toilets with fireworks only added to his mythology. And sure, moving in next door to the actor Steve McQueen in Malibu, California, getting into a fight with his guard dog and biting it is funny. And perhaps turning up at a subsequent court hearing dressed as Field Marshal Rommel is vaguely amusing (in the Seventies, Nazism was often lampooned rather than decried as outright evil). But in 1970 Moon also ran over and killed his chauffeur and broke his wife’s nose and smashed up their house with his four-year-old daughter present in a jealous rage.

What does Daltrey hope to do with this material? “It will be a psychological film about the guy who I thought was one of the funniest people I ever met,” he says. “But yes, he was also an addict and addiction is a waste of a life.”

I met Townshend in 2010. He said he thought Moon had an undiagnosed mental disorder. Is it possible that Moon would now be diagnosed with something such as ADHD?

“Oh f***, yeah,” says Daltrey. “I think we all had that. I don’t think there’s any doubt — we would all be diagnosed with it. I was uncontrollable as a kid. I was terrible and quite probably slightly autistic too. I think we all were.”

As a teenager I played the drums in a band called Mental Elf. We tried to perform the Who’s anti-war classic Won’t Get Fooled Again and, on a good day, we could just about stumble through the song’s first verse and chorus. But about six minutes and ten seconds in, the song descends into roiling, transcendent chaos. Quaking bass, snarling, twirling guitars, a mad, bleeping synth and what sounds like Moon throwing his drum kit down a flight of stairs.

“That is hyperactive boys who could hear rhythms within rhythms,” says Daltrey.

If he could travel back in time, receive medication for ADHD but lose the ability to create such music, would he?

“Nah, you wouldn’t have got a doctor near us,” he says. “We were all damaged psychologically — me and Pete from terrible bullying at school — but we worked our bollocks off to create magic from it. Now, everyone’s got to have something fixed, haven’t they? We were the ‘we’ generation. Now it’s me, me, me, me.”

Daltrey has paid a price. The Who were once listed in the Guinness World Records book for playing the loudest rock concert (at Charlton Athletic football ground in 1976) and these days he wears little silver hearing aids. You have to avoid talking into his “John Entwistle ear” (on his right side, the one exposed to the bass). And while Townshend smashed guitars and executed scissor kicks, Daltrey pioneered twirling a microphone round his head on a lead. Those old mics weighed a ton. Sometimes it went wrong.

“I hit myself in the bollocks a few times — an absolute killer,” he says, wincing.

After the Teenage Cancer Trust shows will there be more from the Who?

“I can’t answer that. I don’t write the songs. I never did. We [he and Townshend] need to sit down and have a meeting, but at the moment I’m happy saying that part of my life is over.”

Daltrey is happy at Holmshurst Manor, his Jacobean pile in East Sussex, where he lives with his wife, Heather. Extraordinarily, they have now been married for 52 years. Extraordinary because, though he never succumbed to booze or drugs, sex was his thing.

“That’s what rock’n’roll is all about,” he wrote in his autobiography. “For a man it [sex] is just a shag, unless you fall in love,” he added for good measure.

For Daltrey, the blue-eyed, golden-maned rock god, his sex life spanned repressive postwar social mores and the dawn of Sixties “free love”.

Aged 20, he was married to 16-year-old Jackie Rickman and living in a one-room flat in London with their newborn, Simon. The Who were making waves and his manager advised him to leave. Daltrey’s father, Harry, wounded during the D-Day landings, was so outraged he took a swing at his son.

Even when Daltrey saw off competition to marry the American model Heather Taylor in 1971 (Jimi Hendrix wrote Foxy Lady about her), it was on the understanding he could sleep around on tour.

The repercussions of that emerged on his 50th birthday in 1994 when Daltrey opened a letter from a 27-year-old Jewish girl called Kim who, having seen Daltrey in the film Tommy, thought he must be her father. He was, and two more daughters subsequently made themselves known. Heather has welcomed them into the family.

“Every marriage has its bumps. Mine have been quite huge,” he says. “How has my wife put up with me? She understands me. From day one, looking into those eyes, I was hooked on her. She gave me a solidity I never had in my life. I got lucky. And that’s where the ADHD and autism worked. She likes a bit of danger too.”

Where do you find danger at 80?

“Every time I get out the f***ing bed each morning.”

Daltrey wants no fuss for his big birthday, he says. A gathering of the whole family at Holmshurst — eight children and fifteen grandchildren — would be nice.

“I don’t like birthdays, to be honest,” he says “They’re great when you’re five and you can’t wait to be six, but 80? Who the f*** wants to be 80?”

Daltrey’s life has spanned extraordinary times. He grew up when there was still National Service and rationing. He remembers eating sugar sandwiches and the family being allowed one powdered egg a week. And yet in 2012 the Who sold their back catalogue for a reported £100 million. Doesn’t that sort of money seem mind-blowing?

“I found it hard to do,” he says. “It was like selling the family silver, but then they made such a good offer. I’m a wealthy man, but I’m no good to society because I don’t want anything. Still to this day I have that wartime mentality. I find it hard to throw anything away. My Merc is 20 years old and my jeans have holes in them.”

Even as a rock god, it was make do and mend. At the legendary 1967 Monterey pop festival, Daltrey went on stage wearing a bedspread he had bought at a Chelsea antiques market. And he used to parade about in a barely there leather waistcoat styled like a Native American brave, a garment he stitched together from chamois leathers bought at his local Sussex garage.

“I grew up mending my own shoes,” he says. “And finishing every scrap on my plate because people were starving.”

How the music business has changed too. In 1965 the Who played 265 shows and yet Daltrey still came home struggling to afford a mortgage on his first house. Does he envy Jay-Z or Taylor Swift, music’s modern moguls who have managed to become billionaires?

“Money doesn’t make you happy,” he says. “But I do think the industry has been stolen from young artists. There’s no money in streaming, even if you write a great song. You can write a hit for Taylor Swift and, even if it gets a billion streams, you’ll receive a cheque for about £3,000.”

Daltrey does not have to worry about that. He is happy at home tending his beef cows, the trout in his lake or playing with his giant train set. So many of his enthusiasms seem to recall a forgotten age. Get him talking about his train set and he can summon more native pride than a whole squadron of mods in Union Jack parkas threading to Clacton for a spring bank holiday ruckus.

“This country invented trains and they changed the world, probably more than the internet,” he says. “And where I live in Sussex, it’s like a medieval world. We’ve got beautiful views and no electricity pylons. Life hasn’t changed much there for 400 years.”

It all sounds lovely, but Daltrey has something on his mind.

“Do you enjoy looking at the English countryside?” he asks, making it sound vaguely like a threat.

Yes, I do.

“Well, make the most of it because when they rewild it they will turn it into Connecticut. Ever been to Connecticut? It used to be all dairy farms and now it’s a forest, a dark and dingy forest.”


Rewilding is a hotly debated issue, but Daltrey’s suspicion of change belies some highly unconventional views.

“Oil and coal are organic,” he says. “People don’t see that. Upgrading the grid so that everyone can have an electric car — and this is according to an engineering professor at Cambridge, so what would he know, eh? — will require the equivalent of building three HS2s every year between now and 2050.”

In the Seventies, when other rock stars fled Britain, Daltrey stayed and paid 98 per cent tax under Harold Wilson’s Labour government. There will be an election this year. Is he resigned to “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”, or can things only get better?

“I wouldn’t be prime minister for two minutes,” he says, “but the NHS is always top of the public’s wish list and so I think Wes Streeting [the shadow minister for health and social care] is on the right page. But has he got the balls to say, ‘This system we created has to be broken down’? You can’t just keep throwing money at it.”


Daltrey leans forward conspiratorially. There are young patients relaxing near the pool table. “More than 50 per cent of the NHS budget isn’t spent here on wards,” he says. “I’ll tell you how to pay the nurses more — cut down on executive pay. Why do NHS executives need £400,000 or £500,000 a year of public money? That’s my opinion. I’ll get slaughtered for saying it, but you’ve got to be tough. They [the political parties] make the NHS this political football in elections. They’re using us and it needs to stop.”

Daltrey cares passionately that the young people on this ward get well again. He seems far less bothered about his own wellbeing. We are talking the day after the TV presenter Esther Rantzen was in the news discussing assisted dying. Rantzen, 83, has stage 4 lung cancer and has joined the assisted dying organisation Dignitas.

“I think she is incredibly brave to raise the subject and I’m kind of there too, so I have thought about it,” says Daltrey.

Is he ill?

“No, but if I became a burden on everyone I’d consider it. A good friend of mine, a lovely woodsman called Tom, he had stage 4 pancreatic cancer. If I had stage 4 pancreatic cancer I wouldn’t have chemo. I’d take the morphine and go down.”

In 2015 Daltrey contracted viral meningitis while on tour in America. He was seriously ill. He says he saw the “exit sign”. “I didn’t think I was coming back and I thought about my life,” he says. “My dreams came true so, listen, I’m ready to go at any time. My family are all great and all taken care of. You’ve got to be realistic. You can’t live your life for ever. Like I said, people my age, we’re in the way. There are no guitar strings to be changed on this old instrument.”
Teenage Cancer Trust at the Royal Albert Hall has announced the Who, Noel Gallagher, the Chemical Brothers, Young Fathers, “Ovation” celebrating Roger Daltrey and a Night of Comedy from March 18-24. Tickets from teenagecancertrust.org/gigs


Comments(30)Link

I had no idea. Never really knew much about the individual members. Daltrey is certainly an interesting guy. Thanks

Indeed, an interesting article!

Like many here, I'm a huge fan of The Who; 60s Brit rock, consisting of The Beatles, The Stones, The Who and The Kinks, is my absolute favorite rock music (along with Dylan). And if one thinks about it, Daltrey is the only Who member that did not have any publicity or scandals connected with drugs or alcoholism (booze and heroin for Townshend, cocaine for Entwistle, and Moon just being Moon). He was also the guy who would always defend Moon's drum playing after his death, something Townshend did not do.

One interesting about Daltrey, along with Rod Stewart,, is that he is a die hard model railway nerd, both saying it is their greatest passion. Last year, he had The Who play a one-off gig for a steam train festival because he wanted to drive a steam locomotive https://bravewords.com/news/mo...ut-a-dream-come-true.

The 60s rockers are now mostly in their late 70s and early 80s, they know it is about to end. Even Jagger last year was speaking about The Stones in a post-Jagger world. I have always loved Daltrey, always thought he was a class act, and the above article proves it. Thanks for posting.

Very cool. Thanks for sharing the train link.
Roger's autobiography is not particularly long, and is a worthy read.

98% income tax in the 70s? Holy crap.

Excellent read, thank you for posting that.