Roger Daltrey has compared smashing his guitar to “killing his wife”.
The Who legend, 80, insisted he only ever broke one of his instruments and he still regrets it, even likening it to the idea of murdering his wife Heather Taylor.
He told Shawn Keaveny on the ‘Daily Grind’ podcast: “[Fans] never came to hear the music, they came to see the guitar being broken.
“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.’ “
The frontman’s bandmate Pete Townshend has a real passion for smashing guitars, and Roger 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.
“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 later admitted 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 said: “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.”