Thanks A Lot Mr Kibblewhite
Reviewed By Janet Mawdesley December 12, 2018
Author Roger Daltrey
Distributor: Allen and Unwin
ISBN: 9781760528348
Publisher: Allen and Unwin
Release Date: November 2018
Website: https://www.allenandunwin.com
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As Roger Daltrey of The Who, a famous rock group formed in the 1960’s, has obviously written this book, it asks the question, who then was Mr Kibblewhite, and why is he so significant as to have his name on the cover of what is obviously an autobiography!
Well, he was the Headmaster who expelled from Acton County Grammar, Roger Daltrey on his fifteenth birthday with the parting statement “You’ll never make anything of your life, Daltrey.” How many times over the years, as Daltrey rose, and rose again to fame on the world stage, did this man wonder at the fickle nature of fate.
Daltrey takes a walk back through time to growing up in post war Britain at a time when rationing was the norm, kids played on bomb sites and three meals on the table every day was considered high living.
This young boy, who built his first guitar from factory offcuts paid for by odd jobbing, never dreamed, that he would one day go on to live a life in the public eye as the front man for a group famous for pushing the barriers, trashing their instruments on stage and commencing the new world of Rock music, raising the standard year after year.
The WHO, a band made up of complete musical geniuses, went on to redefine music in the early ‘60’s becoming more and more outrageous on stage, dependant on the amount and type of drug being consumed at the time. Daltrey talks of the road trips, the rip offs, the many people who helped them rise to the top only to help them crash to the bottom due to poor management, drug abuse and conflict.
Pete Townsend the other surviving member of the original group was way ahead of his time with his music, often so much so it failed to find an audience to begin with, as in the case of Quadrophenia but previous to this, his work Tommy, captured the audience from the first.
My Generation is just one of the many famous pieces still played and enjoyed more than forty years after it was first performed in a rage on stage, and is one that rapidly became the anthem for a generation of teenagers redefining what it was to be young, angry and alive!
Entertaining, enjoyable, humorous and most of all very readable, Roger Daltrey has captured the essence of being young in the years of Post War Britain, when the world was reforming, redefining and ripe for change. He takes a look at what it was like to be broke most of the time, even when the band was earning big sums of money, the deaths drummer Keith Moon and bass player John Entwistle and the separation between Daltrey and Townsend that took years to resolve.
He also shares his life as a soloist, an actor and family man and through his eyes, he offers a firsthand perspective of what it was really like to live the life, to pay the price and the eventual good times and peace that was achieved later in his life.
Still performing with Pete Townsend, the band lives on more than 50 years after they played their first note, became a worldwide phenomenon, created a new, loud, wild style of music to join in the revolution that was the 1960’s and 1970’s.
A definite must read and must have for all fans of THE WHO.