Roger Daltrey says Keith Moon attacked him with tambourine after flushing The Who drummer's pills down toilet

The frontman claims he was thought of as 'the enemy' due to his clean-living behaviour

Roger Daltrey (left) and Pete Townsend of The Who at Glastonbury festival in 2015 (AFP/Getty Images)

Roger Daltrey claims his late bandmate Keith Moon once attacked him with a tambourine after he flushed The Who drummer's pills down the toilet.

The singer, who has released his new memoir Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite, revealed he was thought of as "the enemy" due to his clean-living behaviour in comparison to other members of the notoriously hedonistic rock band.

Daltrey says he constantly fought with his bandmates Moon, Pete Townshend and John Entwistle, most typically over their drug use, including one fight which got him kicked out of the band in 1966.

After flushing Moon's "great big bag full of pills" down the lavatory, Moon apparently "came slashing at me with the bells of a tambourine". The following day, Daltrey was fired from the band. However, he was reinstated after the remaining members were booed off stage" when they performed without him.

"Rock'n'roll had become all about taking as many drugs as possible until you died," he writes, via The Times. "And I was spoiling that. From their point of view it was an intrusion on how they wanted to live their lives. They wanted to be free and I was spoiling that."

He previously spoke about the incident with Moon in an interview with The Mirror, where he said he had to be clean living "to keep the others in line".

"I was the one that didn't take the acid," he said. "All I ever did was pot. I was f***ing boring."

Daltrey's only indulgence beyond alcohol was smoking "a bit of pot in the gaps between tours", he claims. Moon died from an overdose of prescription pills, aged 32 in 1978, while Entwistle died in 2002 from a heart condition brought on by taking cocaine.

"It's so intense, the temptation to take something to maintain the balance is huge," Daltrey says in the memoir. "You take the downers to bring you out of the clouds after a show. Then you need the uppers to put you right back up there in time for the next one. That's why there are so many casualties in our business."