Wealth & Money Quote by Roger Daltrey

Daltrey’s genius here is the casual pivot: he starts with the old British class tightrope - not rich, not poor - then detonates the expected meaning of “rich” by making it social rather than financial. It’s a cheeky reframe that flatters his roots while refusing the usual rock-star poverty myth. Shepherd’s Bush becomes less a backdrop than a credential: community as currency, belonging as the thing you can’t buy.

Then he drops the line that does the real work: “All my friends were into villainy and crime.” He’s not confessing so much as myth-making, painting adolescence as a low-level gangland apprenticeship with a grin. “Villainy” is theatrical, almost pantomime language, which signals he’s keeping it at the level of story and swagger rather than a police report. The subtext is about proximity to danger as a formative education: you learn fast, you develop nerve, you cultivate a persona. For a frontman, that’s origin-story gold.

The cultural context matters. Postwar London produced a lot of kids with little money and heavy social texture; for musicians of Daltrey’s generation, the route out often ran through scenes, mates, and mischief as much as talent. He’s also defending working-class life from the condescension that treats it as deprivation only. The punchline is that his “wealth” was a kind of local chaos - and that chaos helped manufacture the voice that later filled stadiums.