Zak Starkey, who is the son of The Beatles’ Ringo Starr, was The Who’s drummer for 29 years and was fired twice by the band recently. It all started after a feud with Roger Daltrey. Everything started during a show where Roger Daltrey felt he was playing some wrong parts. In an interview with Rolling Stone, the musician revealed that his father told him: “I’ve never liked the way that little man (Daltrey) runs that band.’”
What Ringo Starr said about Roger Daltrey
Starkey also noted that he was playing it right and it was Roger who got the song wrong, probably because he couldn’t hear most of the instruments. “I spoke to Roger last week. He said, ‘Don’t take your drums out of the warehouse, we might be calling you.’ What the fuck? These guys are fuckin’ insane! I’ve been fired more times than Keith Moon in ten days.”
“He came in four bars early. And I just sent him an e-mail going, ‘I watched you on TV last night, you were off.’ It’s 30 years in the group. It’s like a family. But he came in four bars early. And he just asked for the drums to be turned up, and he couldn’t hear the piano.”
“But I love Roger. He never misses a note. His voice is still so pure. It’s like a laser beam. He always nails it. They’ve not changed one key since the start of conceptual art as rock & roll. But he just got lost. He blamed it on the drums being too loud, and then it got made into this huge social media thing.”
“And it freaked him out and he’s going around doing solo shows, and saying it’s ‘fake news.’ But it wasn’t me. I was in the car and gone before they finished the last acoustic song. There was no argument in the dressing room. Nothing. I was halfway home by the time they finished.”
“I dropped two beats. I’ve watched that film three times. I’m looking on the floor, and I can’t see it. If I drop two beats, where the fuck are they?”
Starkey also said he would accept The Who’s offer to return
“Oh, man, of course I would. I said to Pete, ‘Thirty years. In the thirty years, you put the bar so fuckin’ high. What the fuck do I do now?’ And I don’t even just mean musically, but lyrically. Because if you’re in a band, you’ve got to know what the words mean so you can transmit it properly. It’s really fuckin’ important.”
“I said to Pete, ‘What do you suggest?’ I mean, the guy demands 200 percent every night, everything you’ve got. When you get back to the hotel, you’re not physically tired. You’re mentally tired from the whole conversation of it. It’s like them jazz players that are counting to 24 in five seconds,” Zak Starkey said.
He was replaced by Scott Devours, who is Roger Daltrey‘s solo band drummer. Devours is one year younger than Starkey and is American. He was previously part of bands like Oleander and IMA Robot. He is a good friend of the band and works with Daltrey for more than a decade already.
