Review: 'Roger Daltrey: The Biography'

Poor Rog. There are several fairly thick biographies of both Pete Townshend and Keith Moon. John Entwistle was the subject of a feature-length documentary. What does Roger Daltrey get? A leaflet-sized biography that fails to mention his songwriting efforts, reduces his entire solo career to a couple of paragraphs, and zips through everything that happened to him after the sixties in fewer than 100 pages. Writers Tim Ewbank and Stafford Hildred’s reliance on old interviews with Who manager Kit Lambert makes for some entertaining reading but the raconteur rarely instills confidence that his stories are accurate. Neither does the writers’ tendency to make sloppy mistakes, as when they refer to the “three” albums of original material The Who released in the eighties. The only chapter that is sufficiently thorough and unique is the one covering Roger’s acting career. Otherwise, Roger Daltrey: The Biography offers little information about the singer that can’t be gleaned from most Who biographies.