CLASS DISMISSED Roger Daltrey

REBECCA WALKER TALKS TO THE WHO SINGER AND TEENAGE CANCER TRUST PATRON ABOUT HIS NEW CRAFT ALE, THE MUSIC INDUSTRY AND HIS NEW SOLO TOUR

So tell us about your new beer?

It was something that I started with my son-in-laws and my son during lockdown because we were all sitting on our hands and unlike the civil service we got off our butts and did something. Beer is the new wine. There’s so much wine in the world you could bathe in it. Everybody’s doing vineyards but the craft beers they are fantastic and we’ve managed to find a really great brewer. We’re wiping our nose every week. We haven’t made any profit yet but you know, it’s exciting to do it. I never realised how good beer could be when you’re drinking he mass produced stuff it’s not like a craft beer at all. It’s totally different it’s like a really good claret.

You’ve been quite vocal about the state of the music industry. Do you have sympathy for young musicians. Musicians were very poorly treated in lockdown, most of them are selfemployed. They couldn’t be furloughed: They were being crucified. I planned to put it together last year and I could smell the way the wind was blowing with a new wave of Covid and our so called scientists and their models which are so inaccurate. If you bought a car with that many faults you would take it back immediately and never buy another car of that model but there you go.

It seems as though streaming services preclude musicians from earning a proper living?

They do. It’s a huge problem. The whole record business has been stolen by overseas huge conglomerate record companies and the streaming companies and of course they’re all working on the model that was made when they were taking sensibly or reasonably 75 per cent of the income because they had to produce it they had to distribute it, they