From the Keith Moon archives: David Puttnam
"My life, he touched it," says the film producer.
Two weeks from the day of posting this interview transcript, I will be going to see The Who in concert at the Royal Albert Hall. This feels rather like déjà vu all over again, given that I did exactly the same thing this time last year. But here I am, in the UK still until at least the end of the month, and what with Palace in the FA Cup Quarter Final in London the same weekend, I could not resist – though I did make sure I got a seat further away than the third row I had for The Who last year, which turned out to be far less than the perfect placement I’d envisioned at the time. Tickets aren’t cheap, but they’re not that expensive either, considering it’s for the Teenage Cancer Trust, a charity I wholeheartedly endorse and support, and that on any day of the week, for any performance, the Royal Albert Hall is a hell of a venue.
Every time I go to see The Who I am convinced it will be the last time, and yet it turns out not to be. But this much I do know to be true: I will never see Keith Moon behind the drums again. Something I else I know to be true, although almost thirty years on from starting out on the project, I do occasionally have to pinch myself to believe I pulled it all off: I wrote the biography on Keith Moon and along the way I got to talk a number of wonderful people, many of whom I’d admired, perhaps even worshipped in younger years, some of whom I knew merely to be famous and good “coups” for the book, some of whom were famous in The Who camp only, and plenty of whom had never been famous and never would be but were integral parts of Keith’s life story.
And then there were some who I knew to operate on another level entirely. Such was the case with (Lord) David Puttnam, the esteemed film producer behind such epic silver screen classics as Chariots of Fire, The Killing Fields, Local Hero, Bugsy Malone and Midnight Express (to name just a few). Before all of those, however, before he was placed in the House of Lords, before his vast television work and his philanthropy and dedication to education, Puttnam produced That’ll Be The Day and Stardust, two cult classics that relived the early days of rock’n’roll and beyond, helped make a pop star out of David Essex, and featured the likes of Ringo Starr, Adam Faith, Billy Fury, David Edmunds, Paul Nicholas and others, in varying degrees of acting skills versus cameo performances, as well as introducing the American actor Larry Hagman in the role that would soon be known as Dallas’ JR. (I posted my interviews with Hagman and Edmunds per links below.) These films also featured Keith Moon as the drummer of the fictional group the Stray Cats, and particularly with That’ll Be The Day, I would say they featured Moon’s finest acting cameo too.
As Puttnam explained to me one day back in 1996 when he kindly sat for an interview with me in his production office, those films would possibly never have been made without Keith Moon. This, in turn, rendered it a difficult interview for Puttnam, because the Moon that had been so helpful to That’ll Be The Day became a “pest” on Stardust.
“I had to say, 'We've got 100 people here in Manchester, we can't all afford to get slung out the Post House. I can't afford a personal vendetta between you and the manager.’”
David Puttnam is alive and well at 84 years old. Per his web site, he remains “a British film producer, educator and environmentalist. He is Chair of Atticus Education, an online education company founded in 2012 that delivers audio-visual seminars to students around the world. Until his retirement in October 2021, he was a member of the House of Lords for 24 years. Most recently, he sat on the Select Committee for the Environment and Climate Change, tasked with exploring cross-Government action on COP15 and progress on COP26.” In the interview that follows, Puttnam not only talks about his experiences with Keith across the two movies, but about the day he was kidnapped in LA by Moon and Oliver Reed - who told his own version of that event in my memorable two-parter with him here.
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