22 Feb 2016
Q&A and Sunday lunch with Dougal Butler
On Sunday 21 February 2016 Peter ‘Dougal’ Butler and I met up for an informal chat in the lounge bar of the Crown & Cushion hotel in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire. The Crown & Cushion is well-known in Who circles for having once been owned by the dear boy himself, Keith Moon. Now the idea of Keith Moon owning a pub-cum-hotel seems like madness in itself but he did indeed run this place fairly successfully for nearly three years in the early 1970s. I had hoped to tape the interview the week before at Wembley but ran out of time so we decided to meet halfway between our respective homes. The Crown & Cushion seemed the obvious choice.
Apart from a few obvious refurbishments, the hotel, and certainly the bar didn’t look that much different from the days when Keith held court. Fans still come from far and wide and ask if Room 3 (Keith’s room) is available.
Dougal and Keith back in the seventies.
Here’s the bar of the Crown & Cushion with Keith pouring the drinks for Ronnie Lane, Vivian Stanshall and NME journalist Chris Welch. Photo by Barrie Wentzell for the NME.
And here’s that corner today with me and Dougal.
We chatted for a good hour during which I put to him several of your questions. Time forbade me asking all of your questions but I hope you enjoy the conversation we had. Apologies for some of the background noises. Just as we began recording someone in the next building decided to drill holes in the adjacent wall – we swear it was the ghost of Keith come to disrupt proceedings!
Many thanks, as always to Bomber who cleaned the recording up and added the front and back end music. Hope you enjoy it.
Richard Evans