Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon by Tony Fletcher Page A

in music. They’d sit in the La Gioconda coffee bar for hours, where they’d heard the movers and shakers went and where some musicians had even been discovered. “It was a place to come and hang out and pretend you were a part of that scene, though we were too young to be really,” says Haines. They never even saw anyone famous, though they saw some who looked important. The others would point someone out in a particularly dandy suit, and Keith would immediately send them up, regardless of whether they might be influential in the music world. Life didn’t seem particularly complicated for Moon at this point, as far as his friends could tell. “He was just a continuous hyper laugh,” recalls Haines. “Anything that was going to be extraordinary and get a laugh. He wouldn’t stop at anything. He was a very embarrassing person to be with at times.”
    Gerry Evans had had enough embarrassing encounters to begin becoming weary of his friend. As had always been the case, most of these would occur on the tube train, where Keith had a ready-made audience and the bonus of anonymity. But now even the coffee-bean incident at Baker Street was beginning to look innocent compared to his new ideas of entertainment. They would be taking the Metropolitan line train home, for example, and Keith would get out at Finchley Road, where he had noticed that the announcement booth often went unattended. He would sneak in, get on the microphone and there, in the heart of London’s Jewish area, put on a Gestapo voice learned from the war movies that were still spewed out by the older generation.
    “All Jews line up here, ready to be gassed,” he would command, and he thought it the funniest thing on earth. Everyone else in the station, particularly the considerable number of Jews whose suffering during the war was all too fresh a memory, thought otherwise, and would start hunting down the London Transport staff to see which employee had lost his mind – because there could hardly be any other explanation – and Keith would be back on a train, a flabbergasted Gerry Evans in tow, before anyone knew it was him.
    These Gestapo impersonations were to continue throughout Keith’s life, perpetually testing the limits of what his friends and family found amusing. “He was not anti-Semitic,” insists Gerry Evans, as would everyone else who found themselves apologising for Keith’s unusual sense of humour. “He was not. He had nothing against Jews. It was just that for some reason he thought that was funny.”
    Another prank he found amusing was taking the slow train home from Baker Street, waiting until after it passed through Neasden – the last stop before it picked up express passengers at Wembley Park, and so therefore usually deserted at this point – and then to start smashing it up.
    “He’d run through the whole carriage, tear down all the advertising placards, including the wooden dividers, which were plywood, and he’d pull out all the seats,” said Gerry. “And at Wembley Park he’d say ‘See ya’ and be off home. And I’d be going on to the next station. So as he got off the train, the people coming on to go to Kingsbury, Queensbury, Canons Park and Stanmore, well there was nothing for them to sit on because he’d taken all the seats out, and all the placards were destroyed from the train and in a heap on the floor.” These passengers would look intently at Evans, their indignation suggesting he knew something about it, their stiff upper lip forbidding them to get involved, and Gerry would shrink into his seat, wishing himself invisible.
    The hidden speaker in the garden at Chaplin Road, the explosive experiments in his bedroom, the Nazi impersonations, the wilful destruction, these were the original form of antics for which Keith would become infamous over the years, and the fact that they were so prevalent in his life during his early teens puts paid to any suggestion that he only got into them once the Who became