70s rock icon thinks smashing guitar up is like 'killing his wife'

The Who legend Roger Daltrey has compared smashing his guitar to ‘killing his wife’.

The 80-year-old rock icon – who insisted he only ever broke one of his instruments, which he still regrets even now -hates the idea of damaging a guitar, and likened it to the idea of murdering his wife Heather Taylor.

His bandmate Pete Townshend is much more open to breaking guitars to entertain a crowd, and it led to the Pinball Wizard group getting a bit of a reputation.

‘[Fans] never came to hear the music, they came to see the guitar being broken,’ Roger told the Daily Grind podcast. ‘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.” ‘

That’s one way to look at it!

The frontman’s bandmate Pete’s own real passion for smashing guitars on stage made Roger uncomfortable, as he previously admitted he hated seeing his friend destroy such expensive instruments.

He wrote in his memoir 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.

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‘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.’

However, Roger – who thinks AI will destroy the music industry – has since revealed a behind the scenes secret, admitting Pete would carefully break the neck of his guitar so that he could glue the body back together after the shows.

Speaking to the How to Wow podcast in 2020, he explained: ‘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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