During his interview with Shawn Keaveny on the ‘Daily Grind’ podcast Roger Daltrey compared smashing his guitar to “killing his wife.” stating:
“The trouble is the guitar was worth 50 gigs. I’ve only ever smashed one guitar and I’m really sorry I did it.” “I don’t know why, just this thing came over me. I’ve always regretted it – I thought ‘I shouldn’t have done that, that was like killing the wife.’ ” “[Fans] never came to hear the music, they came to see the guitar being broken.”
Insisting that he only broke one of his instruments and still regrets it, the now 80-year old iconic musician even likened the instrument destruction to the idea of murdering his wife Heather Taylor.
Unlike Daltry, The Who frontman’s bandmate Pete Townshend has a true passion for smashing guitars. Roger added that he hated seeing his friend destroy such expensive instruments, but later admitted that his bandmate would carefully break the neck of his guitar so that he could glue the body back together after the shows.
In his memoir, Daltrey wrote ‘Thanks A Lot Mr. Kibblewhite’: “It was heartbreaking. When I remembered how much I’d struggled to get my first guitars, it was like watching an animal being slaughtered.” “An expensive animal that we’d have to replace with another expensive animal before the next gig.” “And we had to pay for the hole in the ceiling … from then on, the audience expected us to break our instruments. It was our thing.”
Speaking to the ‘How to Wow’ podcast in 2020, the legendary rock band’s lead singer said:
“It was costly in glue because as fast as we were smashing it — we had four sets of gear — it then got glued and by the time we got to smash it again the glue had set.” “They weren’t prop guitars, they were real guitars, but we worked out very cleverly, very rarely did the neck break, as long as the neck didn’t break you could glue the body back.” “Even with holes in it, it didn’t matter, as long as the distance between the bridge and the nut of the guitar [where the strings are supported] was the same you could make it work.”
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Author: Saul Goode
Photo: Annie Mole