Credit: Far Out / Flickr
Wed 2 September 2026 12:13, UK
When we say people are born to go into a particular profession, it’s rarely ever meant in a literal sense. However, when you watch a performer with the sheer restless energy of Keith Moon, it’s hard to imagine him being able to hold down any profession other than being the drummer in a band.
Watch a live performance of him with The Who and then imagine those hands doing any form of manual labour – it would be nothing other than carnage. The late ‘Loon’ was born to play. As Alice Cooper put it, “Nobody could compete with Keith Moon.“
The shock rock pioneer continued, “Think of it this way: about 40% of what you’ve heard about me or Iggy or Ozzy is probably true. Everything you’ve ever heard about Keith Moon is true and you’ve only heard a tenth of it.” While that might pertain to his antics, Cooper claimed the same applied to his drumming. He was in another world.
Of course, the role of a drummer for the most part is to hold a steady rhythm for the rest of the band to follow, but when a drummer is bursting with personality and an urge to steal the limelight from the rest of the band, then you’ve got to allow them the occasional opportunity to show off everything they can do. Moon was given ample space to do just this during The Who’s live performances. He was even granted permission to quite literally place explosives in his kit.
He was the final piece of the jigsaw when assembling the gritty group, since Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend, and John Entwistle had all known each other since early childhood, but given the overblown and theatrical style that the band developed for themselves, he appeared to be the perfect fit for the mod pioneers.
Credit: Far Out / Alamy
They were a forward, thundering band, and as John Entwistle explained, that all came from Moon. “He didn’t play from left to right or right to left,“ he explained, “he’d play forwards. I’ve never seen anyone play like that before or since.” However, there were apparently times when his style was so out of control that Daltrey had to take drastic action in order to salvage a song from being scrapped.
In 1977, the band began work on their eighth studio album, Who Are You, and while much of the album saw the band move increasingly towards the progressive rock stylings that their concept albums from earlier in the decade had flirted with, this caused problems for the erratic Moon, who was seemingly only ever able to follow his own methods of drumming.
The song ‘Music Must Change’, which appears at the end of the first side of the record, had a slightly more complex rhythm that Moon wasn’t used to being demanded of him, and in a 2015 appearance on the Howard Stern Show, Daltrey revealed that he had to bring in a session musician to step in for the incapable drummer.
“Keith couldn’t play the drums to it,” Daltrey claimed. “It was in a three-four. Keith couldn’t play normal drums. Keith could play great Moon drums, and that was it.” But the song dictated something different. Moreover, Moon wasn’t on his finest form with his condition worsening. To some degree, this was a paradigm for the band in the period. They seemed to be pulling in different directions.
While the waltz pattern isn’t that hard to wrap your head around, even if you’re not an accomplished drummer, Moon was unable to perform on the song, signposting his downfall. As a consequence, there isn’t much drumming on the final recording, save for some percussion, but the replacement drummer who was brought in to perform on the track remains uncredited on the album to this day.
However, while they chose to stick with Moon for the remainder of the album, it would end up being the final release that he appeared on for the band before he tragically passed away in 1978 at the age of 32, only three weeks after the release of the record.
Perhaps more so than a limitation of his skills, however, the tricky ‘Music Must Change’ could be more aptly remembered as a fork in the road for The Who. One that sadly left Moon behind.
ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE 
The Far Out Classic Rock Newsletter
All the latest Classic Rock content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.