Dear Boy: The Life Of Keith Moon, by Tony Fletcher (Omnibus,1998)

P.30-32...In future years, Keith Moon would often be asked how he came to be a drummer...He almost always declared that he had never taken lessons. But he had. Carlo Little was a big bear of a young man fresh out of National Service when he first formed his band the Savages in Wembley in 1960 - and again, a year later, when he and another lad from Harrow called Dave Sutch finally committed working together. During his two years in the army, Carlo had been doing for real what Moon had been merely playing at with the Sea Cadets; as leading drummer on parade for his battalion, his beat had to be loud enough for 1,000 men to hear it and keep in step. He ensured it always was.

The last of a generation to endure conscription before it was scrapped in 1960, Carlo was 'choked' to have been forced into the army in 1958, just when rock'n'roll was at its peak. Stationed abroad for much of his time in uniform, he emerged with his musical enthusiasm and tastes unaffected, but shocked by the absence of decent live music. "The only groups around were big bands, and they weren't groups, they were all old men," he says now, no longer a drummer or involved in the business, but no less imposing than ever. "There was Cliff Richard and the Shadows, but they were just playing at rock'n'roll." Indeed, as the new decade dawned it was obvious that rock's flame was burning perilously low...come 1961 and things had got so bad that trad jazz was considered hip once again. Carlo Little had left the army - and Keith Moon school - just in time for the most fallow years of rock music's history.

But the flame had been passed on to a new generation before the original fire could be extinguished. Too many teenagers of the late fifties - like Carlo Little - had been too burned by the excitement to give up now, and standing in the shadows of the new decade they formed a handful of groups who set out to perform the rock'n'roll classics the way they knew they were meant to be. It involved a lot of one-night stands, a lot of cheap bed and breakfasts, a lot of travelling back from the middle and north of England overnight in run-down old vans never designed for such wear and tear, but it sure beat working in an office, and the rewards were, emotionally at least, if not financially, tangible. "There were a handful of acts, maybe half a dozen," says Little. "Nobody had big hit records, but you knew that if you went to see them you'd be entertained. It would be a good night out. There was nobody to follow or copy. You had all your records that you got your act from - Little Richard, Elvis, Chuck Berry - and you worked your act round that."

Topping this circuit were Johnny Kidd and the Pirates who, unable to follow up commercially on 'Shakin' All Over', instead hardened themselves musically and intensified their live show, complete with pirate outfits and strobe lights; in this form they would go on to have a dramatic effect on a then unknown young west London band called The Detours who opened for them one night. On a separate tier beneath the Pirates were Joe Brown and the Bruvvers, Shane Fenton and the Fentones (both who went on to considerable commercial success), Nero and the Gladiators, Neil Christian and the Crusaders and Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, all of whose merits are still argued over in late night pub sessions by veterans of the era but none of whom, almost all agree, could hold a candle to the voluminous show that was Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages.

And much of the Savages' excitement emanated from the back of the stage where, as if by divine intervention, there now sat a British drummer who understood what it took to play rock'n'roll. Over the years the line-up of the Savages would include some of the key musicians of the Sixties and Seventies, and their galvanising effect on others can only truly be garnered by talking to those who saw them. Among these hard-core fans were Keith Moon and his new-found friends in the Escorts. While the Mill Hill group was building a set based around Cliff Richard and the Shadows tunes their real passion was for this local band who played rock'n'roll in a way they had never heard it before. "They were the equivalent of a hard rock band today," says the Escorts' bass player Colin Haines. "They would grab you by the scruff of the neck and thrash it out. They were very dynamic and loud."

Rob Lemon, who like Tony Marsh would eventually realise a personal dream by playing with in the Savages, had no doubt where that on-stage energy was derived from. "Carlo Little played drums in the UK like no one else. He was original like you can't believe. And it was all to do with the bass drum." "He was a fantastic heavyweight rock'n'roll drummer," says Gerry Evans, "and we were in awe of him. He used to hit the bass drum like you'd never seen. It was like a cannon, like a bomb going off when he hit it."

Carlo himself would hardly be the one to disagree. "When I hit something I didn't just tap it. I walloped it. 'Take that!' It hit you. It was impressive. Especially in them days, because I took it hard as it could go. We were the loudest band ever." Quite apart from their energy, disregarding their exhibitionism, ignoring for a moment their choice of material and even discounting the drummer who hit his kit with such a violent passion, Keith Moon had added reason to be inspired by - and jealous of - the Savages.

By the winter of 1961 the Savages line-up featured not one, but two local teenage prodigies. Nicky Hopkins was a 17-year-old classically trained pianist from the neighbourhood, and who had evidently traded Beethoven for Chuck Berry, and good for him for doing so, but Bernie Watson...Well, Bernie had been just two years above Keith at school. Being a quiet kid, like Hopkins, he never particularly attracted Keith's attention because Keith had never marked him down as a potential rock'n'roller. Seeing him on stage with the best band in London - hell, there couldn't be one better in the country - was just one more factor on convincing Keith Moon to realise his potential...

P.34-38...On June 25, 1962, Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages headlined at Wembley Town Hall. Keith and Gerry and at least a couple of the other Escorts were among several hundred who attended the show. In fact, it was so crowded that many of the girls stood on the bench seats around the hall perimeters to see the band properly and promptly punctured the leather with their stiletto heels, causing a mile furore that made the local papers. Everyone applauded the opening act, Paul Dean (who later became actor Paul Nicholas) and the Dreamers, another bunch of local boys. And they went ape at the Savages.

Back in 1957, out of all the first wave of rock'n'roll, it was Little Richard's records that had featured the drums most prominently. If you turned them up loud enough - which meant risking your parents' wrath for daring to play the devil's music in the first place - you could actually hear the kick drum thudding away, and of all those singles, none has so prominent a bass drum as 'Lucille'. So of course the Savages, rock'n'roll historians despite their youth, opened their set with 'Lucille'. And the audience just stood there with their mouths agape. It wasn't the ludicrously loud orange shirts and the white boots that set the Savages apart so much as the sheer noise, particularly that made by Carlo Little on the drums - every component of which was noticeably bigger than those on the average kit - flailing away like he was trying to beat them up.

It was also the visual impact of the singer. Sutch was the consummate performer. No matter what the song, he had a corny prop to go with it. So for Bobby Darin's 'Bull Moose', he put on a helmet with two foot long horns; for 'Blue Suede Shoes', he pranced around in boots several sizes too big painted lurid blue; during the group's self-penned single 'Till The Following Night', he found his way into a coffin; and on 'Great Balls Of Fire'...well, you had to laugh really: he jumped round the stage holding a biscuit tin alight.

Keith was a little disappointed that night at Wembley to find that Nicky Hopkins and Bernie Watson, as rumoured, had left the Savages to take up a residency with Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers in Hamburg, although Keith couldn't blame them: he would have jumped at the chance himself to get out of London and play in a foreign country. No, what really got his back up was that the new guitarist was even younger that Watson, a Middlesex boy by the name of Richie Blackmore whose devastating runs up and down the guitar were leaving people gasping for breath. Keith thought he could hear his life ticking away above the noise.

He turned back to checking Carlo. All the budding musicians were down the front at a show like this, monitoring the movements, studying for tips. If you wanted to be a guitarist, Richie was your man (or boy); if you were learning the bass, you turned to Ricky Brown; if you were striving to be a singer, you didn't look to Sutch for vocal excellence but you could certainly learn a lot about working the crowd. And if you were planning on becoming a drummer, well there was really no one to compare. During 'Good Golly Miss Molly' Carlo would stand on his motorbike crash helmet to take a solo. And somewhere towards the end of the set, his playing would get louder and louder, like an express train, until the other members would stop what they were doing to look at him quizzically, at which Carlo would go off on this solo for five or ten minutes that sounded like he's just escaped from the funny farm. The applause at the end of it convinced Keith he'd been right not to go after the guitar or bass like everyone else: you could make it as great an impression on the drums.

After the show, the Savages were to be found holding court in the changing room, trying to get their breath back. There wasn't much chance. As always seemed to be the case, they were surrounded by potential apostles, those budding musicians who had been down the front and were desperate for pearls of wisdom to fall from their spiritual leaders' lips that they could take back to their own cover bands (these included from time to time various members of bands who later became The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, Led Zeppelin, etc.) Most of these hopefuls, however, would never successfully emulate their heroes because they didn't have the guts, as the Savages did, to turn their backs on the Shadows' instrumentals, the neatly tailored suits and carefully choreographed stage moves of the day and let rip into real rock'n'roll, with all the blood, sweat and tears demanded of it.

But that night Keith Moon walked backstage with Gerry Evans, waited for the right moment, and then approached Carlo Little, eight years his senior, twice his size, and the best drummer he had ever seen in the flesh. He introduced himself. And then he asked Carlo Little for drum lessons. Carlo looked down on this kid with the 'bum freezer' brown jacket and greasy hair that sat incongruously atop such a cherubic face. The kid didn't look strong enough to hold a pair of drum sticks. "I'm not a teacher, mate," he said eventually. "I'm self-taught. I could probably do with some lessons meself." "No," said the boy, "You're fantastic. You really are. Me and my friend come and see you all the time. The way you hit the bass drum..." Carlo thought about it for a minute. "Where do you live?" he asked the boy. "Chaplin Road." That wasn't far from his own place at Sudbury at the end of the Harrow Road. Carlo thought about it some more. He wouldn't have minded having someone teach him when he was the boy's age. Every penny came in handy when you were devoting yourself to something as unstable as rock'n'roll. "I can only teach you what I know," he said by way of agreeing. "Ten bob for thirty minutes. Wednesday at seven. Here's the address."

Gerry Evans never ceased to be amazed at his friends audacity. He could never have dared ask the great Carlo Little for lessons, even though he dealt with so many famous drummers at Paramount on a daily basis. And that's why, as Wednesday approached and Keith suggested that Evans come along with him, Gerry balked. Carlo was a frightening bloke. He looked like a gypsy. Who knew what he was going to do once he got him in his lair? And besides, Gerry could already play the drums. It was Keith who needed the lessons.

Keith, who had such a terrible problem holding on to the £4 wages he was earning at Ultra Electronics every week that the 10 shillings for the lesson had started to look expensive, then had another idea. "He said, 'Tell you what,' " recalled Gerry. " 'I'll go in and have the lesson, then I'll come out and tell you all about it and you give me half a crown.' That way I was getting the lesson, second hand, for half a crown, and Keith actually got the lesson for seven and six." Carlo Little never knew there was another potential student hanging round outside his house on the Harrow Road. He just set up his kit in the front room - "I didn't care about the neighbours, they just got used to it" - and when the doorbell rang, he opened it to find one diminutive, somewhat shy boy at his doorstep.

"Here's your money," Keith said before he was half way in. Carlo mumbled something again about not being a teacher. He felt guilty about taking ten shillings from a 15-year-old but then again, he didn't play for free. He sat the boy down at the kit and struggled to contain a laugh. The lad would have been small for any kit, but framed by Carlo's drums - a 24" bass instead of the standard 20", a 14" snare rather than a 12", and two equally over-sized tom-toms - he was almost invisible. Carlo asked Keith to show him what he could do. It wasn't very impressive. "He was just a lad fumbling, trying to play. I said, 'Right, this is what you should be doing. I can only show you, mind, I can't do it for you. You go home, remember what you've been shown, practise and practise and come back next week and I'll show you some more.' "

While Carlo tried to explain, in layman's terms, which were all he knew, what a paradiddle was, how it enabled a marching drummer to lift alternate arms at the top of the beat despite maintaining a continuous roll, Gerry Evans paced up and down the Sudbury section of the Harrow Road. He should have come on the scooter he'd bought when he'd turned 16 earlier in the year, then he could have gone home for a while, he thought...At least it was summer, and warm outside. The lesson was taking a while, though. It had been almost an hour. What was Carlo doing to his friend?

Eventually Keith emerged from Carlo's house ecstatic. "I've got it!" he exclaimed, as if he'd been given the holy grail itself, and the pair of them ran back to Chaplin Road so Keith could show Gerry everything he'd learned before he might forget it. Up in his room, Keith sat himself at his blue Premier kit - which looked awful small all of a sudden - and started to play for Gerry. You didn't just tap the bass gingerly on the beat like they'd been previously been doing, he explained. You hit it double time - and double hard - on the beat, and then off the beat again, and then here again, and there again...It was the rudiments of syncopation married with the energy of hard rock, and as he tried to emulate their hero, Keith fell off the beat completely. He hit the snare extra loud in frustration and almost tore the skin. He didn't have it yet. But the roots had been sown. "That was what put Keith on the right road," said Gerry almost 35 years later. "He realised that if he could put the bass drum together, it would be the whole foundation of any band he would be in, because all the other drummers were hardly tapping the bass drum. That was the turning point, and that was for ten shillings." Or six or seven, counting Gerry's contribution.

Keith went back to Carlo for lessons several more times. "He was keen and eager," recalls Carlo. "I remember he came back one week and he'd got off what I'd shown him. So he was obviously listening to what I was telling him." The usually irrepressible Keith was unusually intimidated by his teacher, who remembers him being polite and ordinary - and focused. "When we talked it wasn't for more than a few minutes, and it was always about the drums." Carlo was glad to see his one and only student coming along, but compared to the standards that Carlo had set himself, he remained unimpressed by the boy's skills. "I thought nothing more of it, just a young lad called Keith."

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