The Who's Roger Daltrey on the one time he smashed a guitar: "That was like killing the wife"

The Who‘s Roger Daltrey has opened up about the one time he smashed a guitar and compared it to “killing his wife”.

• READ MORE: Roger Daltrey on Teenage Cancer Trust and the chances of new music from The Who

The rock icon has shared that he has only broken one of his instruments in his life which he regrets and likened the moment to the idea of murdering his wife. While appearing as a guest on Shawn Keaveny’s Daily Grind podcast, the 80-year-old musician said: “[Fans] never came to hear the music, they came to see the guitar being broken.”

He continued: “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.’ ”

In his 2018 memoir, Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite: My Story, Daltrey spoke about his bandmate and The Who frontman Pete Townshend‘s passion for destroying guitars and admitted that he hates seeing Towshend smash such expensive instruments.

“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,” he wrote in his book.

He continued: “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.”

Daltrey also revealed that Townshend would actually carefully break the neck of his guitars so that he would be able to glue the instrument back together after their gigs.

“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,” he told the How to Wow podcast in 2020 (per Music News).

He continued: “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.”

In other news, Daltrey recently opened up about the future of The Who, saying that he is “happy” that “that part of my life is over”.