English drummer Zak Starkey of The Who performs on stage at the Paris La Defense Arena in Nanterre, western Paris, on June 23, 2023.ANNA KURTH/AFP/Getty Images
I attended the Who’s concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall on March 30. They are my favourite band, and the famed 154-year-old rotunda was on my bucket list. And while I have no idea how many holes it takes to fill Albert Hall, one drummer is now needed to fill the hole in the Who.
This week they fired their drummer of 29 years, Zak Starkey, apparently because of his performance at the concert, the second of two in benefit of the Teenage Cancer Trust. Starkey is the son of Ringo Starr, who got his gig with the Beatles after the band fired original drummer Pete Best. It happens.
At Royal Albert Hall, singer Roger Daltrey complained early on that he couldn’t hear the drums. Though they were adjusted up in the mix, the My Generation octogenarian monkeyed with his in-ear audio monitors all night.
The final number was The Song is Over, the elegant outro to side one of the classic 1971 album Who’s Next. They had never played it live before. Daltrey repeatedly looked downward (likely at a teleprompter) to sing the opening verses that Pete Townshend had handled in the song’s original recorded version.
Daltrey fell out of time in the chorus, though, and the song’s tricky key change could not have helped. The band staggered to a halt. “To sing that song I do need to hear the key,” he complained. “All I’ve got is drum sound … I can’t sing to that.”
The band regrouped and started again, this time finishing the job. Daltrey walked off the stage, still upset. At one point, after the muck-up, he had said to someone, ”It’s not your fault.”
Starkey, it turns out, took the blame.
On Wednesday, a Who representative said the band made a “collective decision” to part ways with Starkey: “They have nothing but admiration for him and wish him the very best for his future.”
Starkey, 59, responded to the sacking with a written statement that indicated he’d been let go because of Daltrey’s complaints: “After playing those songs with the band for so many decades, I’m surprised and saddened anyone would have an issue with my performance that night, but what can you do?”
He can’t do anything, really. Starkey has drummed with Oasis, Johnny Marr and his father’s All-Starr Band in addition to recording and touring with the Who since 1996. He is no doubt a paid-in-full member of the Musicians’ Union. But he is a session musician. Hired guns, like actual guns, get fired.
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Only Daltrey and Townshend were featured on the concert program cover from Royal Albert Hall. They are the Who. Original bassist John Entwistle died in 2002. Drummer Keith Moon, a close friend of Ringo who gave an eight-year-old Starkey his first drum kit, didn’t make it past 1978.
A hellraiser and an inimitable, frenetic player, Moon was once asked in an interview with Melody Maker magazine if the Who would continue as a group if one of the four original members had to leave. “I don’t think it would carry on,” he said.
Of course, they did carry on, initially replacing him with Kenney Jones, formerly of the Faces. Though Daltrey thought his style was too “simple” for the Who, Jones was in the Who for years. When they reunited in 1989 after a hiatus, he wasn’t asked back. Drummers, a rock band’s engine, are the same as cabinet ministers – they serve at the pleasure of their leaders.
“Roger literally used to dance to Keith’s drums,” Townshend wrote in his 2012 memoir, Who I Am. “But when Kenney joined the band, Roger couldn’t dance to the music anymore.”
Talking to the British music magazine Mojo last year, Townshend said Daltrey was in charge of putting the Who’s backing band together. Who he will pick to replace Starkey is anyone’s guess. (Former Beatles timekeeper Best is not available – he announced his retirement last week.)
It is possible a new drummer won’t be required. Though there are two Who concert dates in Italy in July, nothing else is scheduled. Alas, the band may be on its last legs – literally, in Townshend’s case. During the first of the two Royal Albert Hall shows, the 79-year-old guitarist mentioned a recent knee replacement.
“Maybe I should auction off the old (knee),” he said, according to a Sky News report.
Daltrey, who on the 1969 rock opera Tommy famously sang Townshend’s songs about a “deaf, dumb and blind kid,” told fans that he himself was losing his hearing and sight.
“The joys of getting old mean you go deaf,” Daltrey said at the first Teenage Cancer Trust concert. “I also now have got the joy of going blind.”
If this is the end, it could hardly be more fitting if the last thing ever heard from the Who was the coda to the closing number at Royal Albert Hall: “The song is over, I’m left with only tears / I must remember, even if it takes a million years…”
