Sitting in his orange-tinted studio on the outskirts of London, Zak Starkey’s face is half-hidden behind a beautifully painted mug. His hair, however, is fully on display with a couple of deliberate cowlicks perched at the top. He knows he has a good haircut. He mentions it more than a few times, and it becomes a familiar touchstone. We first met more than 20 years ago, when he was drumming in Johnny Marr and the Healers. Hair was a major factor in that band, too.
The Healers were just one of Starkey’s many projects. Over the course of nearly half a century, he’s played with an extraordinary range of musicians from Oasis to Toots and the Maytals—with whom he won a Grammy for best reggae album. He’s perhaps best known for his nearly 30-year run with The Who—a tenure that ended abruptly last year, restarted, and then ended again within the span of a month. Starkey brings up The Who often in conversation, instinctively referring to them as “we.” When I point this out, he says, “I talked to Roger [Daltrey] on Friday, and I texted Pete [Townshend] last night. We never stopped our relationship. Even for all that crazy shit that went down, we were still friends through it.”
Starkey has a way of drawing creativity out of the people around him. He’s up for everything without putting too much pressure on anything. Those qualities attract collaborators and have made him a go-to drummer. His pedigree as Ringo Starr’s son may have opened doors early on, but it’s not what has kept his calendar packed with engagements.
His latest venture is a one-man show titled Zak Starkey…Who?: An Evening of Drums and Conversation, which lands at New York City’s Gramercy Theatre February 20. The multimedia, interactive program functions as something of a This Is Your Life-style presentation, incorporating photographs, personal footage, multiple Q&A segments, and moments where Starkey drums along to video clips featuring a cross-section of artists he has performed with over the years.
He’s spent a long time working on the show but doesn’t plan on doing any warmups because, as he puts it, “The Who don’t do warmups. We don’t even rehearse.” He admits he misses playing with them, and that absence became the impetus for the show.
“I invented the show that I can’t stand to be away from,” he says. “They’re the greatest rock and roll band in the world. They never play anything twice. It’s all improvisation. There’s just no other band like that. Pete raised the bar so high that everybody else is just over-rehearsed wankers. Most bands think a great gig is when they do it as good as they did in rehearsals. The Who is ‘Whatever happens, happens.’ Very much like bebop in a rock and roll idiom.”
How did this one-man show come about?
Because I haven’t got a job. I’m maybe unemployable, but maybe not, not by people that know me anyway. A drummer with a big mouth, someone suggested a drum clinic. I’d been to one 30 years ago and I took my dad and he said, “Never take me to one of those again.” It’s just not me. I can’t sit there and show you how to do things, because I haven’t been trained.
Then I thought, what if I could play to The Who backing tracks that we use when we play live? Then at least I’d be carrying on playing the music that I’ve been playing for 30 years. I spoke with Pete, and he was fine with it. There’s a lot of stuff that underpins The Who when we play live, that is to a click track, and Pete’s sequencer parts from the early ’70s. I bootlegged John [Entwistle] off YouTube, and I dropped John on it, so I’ll be playing a lot of it with John. Then I thought, with AI, I could do this with anyone. So I took a bunch of stuff from my dad’s gigs that I played with him, and took my drums out. I’ll be playing along with Joe Walsh on the screen, or Dave Edmunds, Billy Preston, or my dad. They’ll be playing the same song I’ll be playing live. The same with Oasis and a few other artists.
What will be on the screen while this is happening?
On the screen you’ll see the guys playing the song I’m playing live. Take for instance, “I Hear You Knocking” Dave Edmunds with the All-Star [Rock ‘n’ Roll Revue]. With AI, you take my drums out so you still see the film of that show, but I will be playing live along with it. Same with The Who, same with Oasis.
There’s a film that opens the show, which was supposed to be 20 minutes, but it’s getting so good, it’s about half an hour now. It’s me and Johnny [Marr] doing stand up and stuff. Someone said the show is a bit of an interactive documentary of my life. It starts off with a film that’s sort of an overview. There’s so much in it. I played with Jeff Beck. I played with Kasabian. It goes on forever. There’s little clips of all that interspersed with home movie chats and me and Johnny being very silly, and me and John Entwistle being very silly, Oasis talking about me being a bit of a weirdo. Also little clips of when I had a band called the Silver Machine with Bobby Gillespie and Andrew Innes from Primal Scream. I had another band called the SSHH with my wife and Paul and Glenn from the Sex Pistols. With Mick Jones of the Clash, we had a band called the Wankers. I found some footage of that on YouTube. It’s a bit of everything, really, good fun shit.
Then I’m going to come out and do a little bit of drumming that is very recognizable and start a Q&A while the film’s fresh in everyone’s minds. Hopefully the Q&A will lead to the next piece of music I do. Hopefully the audience will help lead there. And if they don’t, I’ll just do it anyway. But it will end with The Who, because you can’t follow The Who.
That should be a lively Q&A.
It’s near the beginning and then in the middle, Marky Ramone is going to interview me for 10 minutes. And then towards the end, there’s another Q&A. Show’s probably going to run about two hours.
I’ve done a few Q&As recently with my friend Tony McCarroll [original Oasis drummer]. He talks about the first record and I talk about the last two. People do want to know a lot of crazy stuff about that.
Have you put the whole thing together yourself?
I’m working on it at home. I’ve done all the artwork and edited everything myself. I will film it and see if I need to re-edit anything. It’s a really great process. I love doing it. Getting the content together, going through boxes of old Hi8 video tapes, it’s been nuts. One VHS tape was smashed so we had to take the tape out and put it in a different case that wasn’t smashed so we could transfer it. I actually think I love doing this more than playing the drums.
When I was looking for this stuff, I found a block of set lists that are all Roger’s set lists from ’99 or 2000, for every single gig of the tour. I just put one on top of the other on the drum riser, and I found all of them. I found the set list from Sydney on the night I met my wife. I didn’t keep that on purpose. It was just there. Lots of broken tambourines that got thrown in my cases because they’re no good. Crazy stuff I don’t need. But hundreds of Hi8 and Video8. I had to get on eBay and find cameras that work that we could get digital out of.
How come you were doing so much filming?
I don’t know. There’s one bit when John Entwistle looks in the camera and goes, “What are you going to do the second half of your life? Watch the movie?” I took Tatia, my older daughter, on tour in 2000 when she was 14. And I just figured, she’s not here, and she enjoyed it so much, I’d film it. It’s great to have a record of it. Quite honestly, if I hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t have a show.
It’s not people freaking out or anything. It’s all really funny stuff, and a lot of stuff with The Who shot from the side or behind and on the plane. And some crazy meeting about songs. We never have meetings about songs in The Who, but there was one once, and it’s so confusing. I think that’s why we never had another one. I have a bit of that in it. I found home movies that we didn’t know we had, from when I was like 5, on vacation, a tiny bit of that. A lot of photographs I’ve never seen. An interactive documentary about my life and all the amazing people that have been in it, because it has been really amazing.
What else are you discovering in the AI sphere that is helping you be creative?
It’s a bit like in the late ’70s, when drummers tried to ban drum machines. It’s a tool that could be helpful. It really helped me with the show. If they’re going to release AI music, they just got to put a stamp on it and say it’s AI. I’m more worried that the music thing is a smoke screen. What’s going on in politics with AI? It can’t just be in music, can it? We’re only talking about it in music. There could be all kinds of shit happening. If people are going to believe some of the shit they already believe, imagine what you could do with that tool. The possibilities are endless.
What brought you to the drums? I know it wasn’t your dad.
It was Marc Bolan. He showed me the guitar first when I was about 7, and then I heard The Who when I was about 9, and by the time I was 10, I wanted to switch the drums. My dad gave me one lesson, then said, “You’re on your own.” And that’s it. I started in 1975 so I was playing The Who and Alice Cooper and T. Rex, then the Pistols came out and got into that. I had a boom box I would play to. You can’t really hear the drums when you do that, but I could hear the guitars and singing. You just do what you think you’re supposed to do.
You’ve worked with so many legendary musicians. Can you point to key pieces of advice or experiences you had that changed you or stayed with you?
Keith Moon died. That’s what got me here. He was sort of my uncle, my babysitter, my friend. And it was devastating, but it did get me here. He was great with us kids, hanging out, just playing Monopoly, drawing and painting, drinking Heineken. My dad used to say, “He’s playing with you guys, because he’s on your level.” The day Keith died, I called him to invite him to my 13th birthday party the following week. Some strange dude answered and said, “You got to call back later, but Keith is dead.”
He’d moved back to England, so I’d been seeing a lot of him and staying at his apartment in London. When my dad was in L.A., and we’d go to L.A., my dad would send me and my little brother to stay with Keith in Malibu. We spent a lot of time with Keith. I never sat at a drum kit with Keith, but we’d sit at the stereo, listen to the Beach Boys, talk about girls and drink beer. Fucking great.
Johnny’s [Marr] idealism rubbed off for me. It’s always, “We’re going to do this, and it’s going to be great, and then we’re going to do that, and it’ll be great. Then we’ll do this, and that’ll be great too.”
Pete Townshend taught me to be a fearless musician and not afraid of anything because he’s a scary motherfucker.
From Noel and Liam, jokes. We had fantastic chemistry as a group. We were hot live, and in the studio, those albums were made fast. We were good. That’s probably the best five years of my life. The vibe was so good, and it was so funny, and every day was just laughing all day long. Then we’d go out and play fantastic shows. It was an amazing time. Everyone says, “Didn’t they argue all the time?” I never saw them guys ever argue. It was such a great band that no one wanted to fuck it up. When things are going great, that’s when they don’t argue. That’s when you wouldn’t want to fuck it up. When we toured America, we were hot as shit. We stepped up. Every American had to eat his words, because it had not much good shit to say about Oasis up till then.
Speaking of touring, are you going to be taking your show on the road?
Live Nation booked this for me. If it does well, they’ll book me a tour. As I said, I haven’t got a job, so I need a job. And this sounds quite fun to do. I enjoy the Q&A. I don’t mind breaking down drum things if there are drummers there. But really, it’s not exclusively for drummers. It’s for anyone who likes music with good haircuts, and for people who have as many hair dryers and me and Johnny. When we had the crazy Healers’ hairstyles, we had hair dryers for every different country voltage, all over 3200 watts, very specialized subject. We had more hair dryers than guitars. Johnny moved to straighteners. I think that’s why the band broke up.
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