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www.totallyjewish.com 22 April 2010 The Jewish News 15

PORTMAN’S TROPICAL
xx Month 2006 The Jewish News 15
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PAGE 16 PAGE 28

Who’s the rock legend

raising £5m for charity?
British music icon Roger Daltrey on singing in Richard Desmond’s band
BY KATHERINE communal. It’s not quite the same
now. Right from that moment on, I was
LEVY a singer.”
Daltrey was expelled from school

A
short man with loose yellow
curls and blue-tinted glasses
bounds into the room and
gives a small shrug of antici-
pation beneath a striped vel-
vet suit. He is not instantly recognis-
able, but has the air of someone who
might have entertained millions in his
lifetime. Of this you can be certain, for
the chap in question is none other
than rock legend Roger Daltrey, lead
singer of The Who.
Daltrey is standing in a new charity
centre in Stanmore set up by
Norwood, which aims to get adults
with learning disabilities into the
world of work. He is here as guest of
honour, as he has helped to raise
£1million for the Jewish charity.
Daltrey and his band the RD
Crusaders (RD for his initials and that
of lead drummer and Norwood presi-
dent Richard Desmond) held a concert
in 2008 – what Daltrey calls a “really
big, big night” – with the sole purpose
of raising money for The Teenage
Cancer Trust (Daltrey is a patron). The
band invited fellow stars Lulu and DJ
Mark Ronson to perform. The event
was indeed big – raising more than
£5million. A quite staggering sum.
“We had so much fun,” Daltrey
exclaims, bobbing up and down in
front of me. “We try to keep it loose on
stage. If we’re doing that, we tend to
raise more money.” The rocker says
that when he was told how much
money the concert made the he decid-
ed to spread the donations among
many charities. Desmond naturally
suggested Norwood.
“Richard suddenly realised that this
kind of thing was such a great vehicle
to raise funds,” Daltrey says.
I ask him whether he feels rock stars
and celebrities like himself have a
responsibility towards helping chari-
ties. “Yeah, absolutely,” he says. “I’ve
had a life of privilege. You owe it to
where you’ve come from, if you
remember, and I do. It’s easy to put
things back.”
Nestled above a Norwood charity
shop on Stanmore Broadway, the RD
Crusaders Workhub offers a rare
opportunity for people with learning
The RD Crusaders: Roger Daltrey (singing) and Richard Desmond (drums) performing at a charity
concert at Old Billingsgate Fish Market and (inset) Daltrey performing with The Who
disabilities to learn essential work-
place skills, such as how to use email
or how to act socially at work. “We
teach them, for example, that they
can’t just go up and hug people in the
work place,” Norwood’s Linda Looney
explains: “Of the 65 percent of people
with learning disabilities in the UK
who would like to work just 10 per-
cent do, something Norwood hopes
this centre will help to change.”
Daltrey, who in 2005 was awarded a
CBE for services to music and charity,
says he is “very very impressed” with
what Norwood does. “It’s so inspiring
to see the work here. The Workhub is
helping so many people with learning
disabilities to feel included in society”.
Daltrey says the idea of forming a
band to raise money for charity at its
gigs first came to him eight years ago.
“I approached Richard and said,
‘Listen, if you ever want to get in a
singer with yourself playing the drums
then I’m there – and we could raise
money for charity.” Desmond jumped
at the chance.
Being a passionate philanthropist
clearly suits Daltrey – the rocker looks
good for his long innings. Perhaps it is
the Los Angeles sun that has given him
a healthy complexion.
He says: “I play mostly in the US
‘A band is a great
charity vehicle’
these days. I’ve spent 50 years of my
life on the road. I love performing and
love the singing, but I’m getting a bit
weary with the travelling. We’re getting
on – two members of The Who are
already dead.”
Daltrey is referring to drummer
Keith Moon, who tragically died of a
prescription-drug overdose in 1978,
and guitarist John Entwistle who died
of a heart attack on the eve of The
Who’s 2002 US tour,
after spending the night
with a stripper.
Despite this, Daltrey
and Pete Townsend still
reprise the band every so
often, most recently for The
Teenage Cancer Trust’s 10th
anniversary concert at The Royal
Albert Hall.
So what inspired the now veteran
star to become a rock singer in the first
place? “I saw Elvis Presley on the box
when I was 11-years-old. That’s what
made me want to be a rock star. He
was an antidote to all the greyness and
the stiffness of my strict grammar
school at that time. I saw Elvis and I
saw freedom. I didn’t want to be any-
thing else after that.
“That day I went out and bought
some wood and made a homemade
guitar – we couldn’t afford to buy the
real thing. In those days every street
had its own skiffle band. Music was
for smoking when he was 15 and
worked as a sheet metal worker in a
factory in Acton, north London, for
four years while moonlighting with his
first band The Detours at men’s clubs
in the evenings.
By 1964 the band had absorbed the
key players who would end up form-
ing The Who, and in 1965 their first hit
single I Can’t Explain was released.
Hot on the heels of its success, they
soon composed what is undeniably
their most worshipped single and one
of the defining songs of the swinging
sixties, My Generation.
The song unintentionally captured
the conflicted emotions of a genera-
tion of young hippies caught between
post-1950s liberation and the Vietnam
war. The song was also performed at
Woodstock, New York’s Madison
Square Garden, the Superbowl during
the half-time show and Live 8 at
Wembley Stadium.
“When I sing that song,” Daltrey
whispers, “to me it’s my life. Every
time I sing these songs I have sung all
these years, I sing them as if it’s for the
very first time.”
And as one of rock’s greatest stars
grabs his sausage-shaped bag and
leaps from the room, I am
convinced that he is talk-
ing from the bottom of
his charitable heart.