Keith Moon

Dark side of the Moon

John Robinson hears how Dougal Butler got over the Moon

Saturday July 1, 2006
The Guardian

On a different planet ... Keith Moon (far right) and the Who in 1976

Any lingering doubts that Dougal Butler may have had about terminating his employment with Keith Moon were swiftly quashed by a meeting with the legendary drummer's Malibu neighbour. "Steve McQueen came out and shook my hand," says Butler. "He said, 'I love Keith. But you've got to move on - you can't live like that.'"

For Butler this meant his decade-long stint as personal assistant to one of the most dynamically talented, but utterly unpredictable figures in rock'n'roll. A prolific drinker, and destroyer of fine automobiles, Moon had always been a handful. By 1977, however, he had become impossible to deal with. Soon, he would be dead.

Today, Butler is nominally on the phone to help plug the rerelease of Moon's solo album, Two Sides Of The Moon. However, a chat with this genial man is also an audience with a co-conspirator of one of rock'n'roll's greatest vandals. Butler's ribald book, Moon The Loon - rights bought by Robert De Niro - helped quantify the Moon legend. Butler himself, meanwhile, remains guardian of a rich archive of Moon misbehaviour.

"We were on tour with the Who, in Detroit," says Dougal. "We were in this five-star hotel and we met the guy who played John Steed in the Avengers. So we go round to his room and we're happily having a few drinks with the bloke out of the Avengers, and the drummer from Three Dog Night.

"But then Keith took a dislike to this guy out of Three Dog Night. The previous day we'd bought these gas guns, so we went and got them, got down on the floor outside the room, and let them off, bang, under the door. Then we hear all these dogs yapping. Keith goes, 'I don't remember any dogs.' We'd got the wrong room. Turned out there was this woman in town for some dog show. We gassed her dogs."

Memorable as these larks were, however, as the 1970s gathered speed, so did Moon's self-destructive tendencies. When the Who weren't working, there was a real fear that if he wasn't given something to do, he might simply destroy himself. The solution? A solo album.

"So the idea was, advance him some money and hopefully you'll get some of it back," Dougal explains. "But we've got to keep him busy."

The virtue in the resulting effort, needless to say, is maybe more in its expediency than its music. "It's the most expensive karaoke album ever made," says Dougal, "but it's a good insight into what he was going through. It's a laugh."

As Moon's alcoholism, cocaine use and susceptibility to the flattery of hangers-on thrived under the Californian sun, these laughs, however, steadily declined. Ultimately, after "a big barney" and a subsequent "big punch-up", Dougal took his final leave of Moon.

After 10 years trying to right the drummer's vehicular wrongs, it shouldn't be a surprise that some of Dougal's businesses since have been on four wheels.

"It's all going very well," he says, signing off. "We provide all the trailers for Midsomer Murders..."

· Two Sides Of The Moon (Deluxe Edition) is released by Sanctuary on Monday. Premier Percussion has launched the limited-edition run of Keith Moon's Pictures Of Lily tribute drum kits. Proceeds from the first kit go to the Who's Teenage Cancer Trust charity.

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