“I’m now the most famous drummer on welfare,” jokes Zak Starkey, and few music fans who follow the news at all will have any trouble knowing what he’s talking about. Few musicians have been more visible in recent years as a permanent pickup player, as Starkey seemed to be with the Who. But he’d been popular enough in that role for the last 19 years’ worth of touring with that veteran British band that when it was announced that he’d been sacked from the group — then rehired! then re-sacked! — it wasn’t surprising that a lot of Who fans found themselves sympathizing more with Starkey than with singer Roger Daltrey or writer-guitarist Pete Townshend, to the point that it might’ve had an effect on ticket sales for the fall farewell tour from which the drummer was jettisoned.
Starkey does have other irons in the fire, although perhaps not as many as indicated by the Who when they were giving reasons for letting him go. On this particular day, he is Zooming with Variety to talk up his new Brit-pop supergroup, Mantra of the Cosmos, which includes Shaun Ryder and Bez from the Happy Mondays and Andy Bell of Oasis and Ride. That group’s new single also includes a key guest contribution from Noel Gallagher, who invited Starkey to be the drummer for Oasis in that band’s last stretch before a very long hiatus. Starkey is justifiably proud of doing something more experimental with this assemblage of blokes, and he’s particularly formed a tight bond with Ryder.
But would anything about Mantra of the Cosmos’ agenda have kept Starkey from going out with the Who for the group’s final dates? Hardly, he says, noting that the group was already off-duty for the moment due to Bell being part of the Oasis reunion tour. “I’m not a rock star and they are,” Starkey says, “but I’m not gonna let people… make me look fucking bad and them look good because they want me to lie. I wouldn’t do it,” he says, recalling how he was asked to say he was resigning from the Who due to other commitments — “and then when they did it, I just threw ‘em under the fucking bus because it was bullshit. And then,” he adds, “my dad stepped up for me, and that was the greatest thing in the world” — Dad being no less a co-sign than Ringo Starr, of course.
The first thing to know about Starkey is that he’s a hoot. (Or is it Whoot?) Few questions Variety posed in the following Q&A (which has been edited for length and clarity) were greeted with anything less than five minutes’ worth of exposition and profanity-filled hilarity, amid a somewhat touching devotion to the ideals of rock ‘n’ roll. As much as he’s a great player, Starkey still considers himself a fan who was lucky to get called up by his heroes … and he’s surprisingly grateful that he still has text or phone relationships with Daltrey and Townshend, even amid the turmoil, and hopes those will never come to an end.
How are things going with you right now? You’re doing a little bit of press, obviously, for Mantra of the Cosmos...
If you can get fired by the Who three times in like 10 days, it couldn’t have happened at a better time, when you’ve got a single coming out. On (the Who’s) part, it’s fantastic timing. I’m actually grateful, because I’ve got a great record and everyone (in the music press) has heard it and they want to talk to me about it …
So the situation with the Who has helped you out a little?
Well, I don’t know if it helped me out, but it certainly drew attention to me, because I’m now like the most famous drummer on welfare. And that’s pretty good for my record, because Mantra of the Cosmos is a pretty out-there concept, and so it is sometimes hard to get traction. The weirdest thing about that is I thought of it, and even I didn’t get it. [Laughs.] I thought of it and conceptualized it, and when we did our first show, for the first 10 minutes, I just didn’t get it, it was so far out.
How would you describe Mantra of the Cosmos?
I approached Shaun Ryder by saying, “One of my favorite groups is [the 1970s prog-rock band] Hawkwind, and I want to do, like, a 21st century Hawkwind that’s based on poetry.” They’d be bleeding from orifices and all that kind of shit and bring out a guy to do beat poetry in the middle of a Hawkwind show, which kind of like gives you a break from guitar solos and things like that, which I don’t really agree with anymore. We don’t have very many guitars in our music. But we do have Andy Bell, one of the greatest guitar players in the world, and he is a little bit pissed off with it, but he is dealing with it. [Laughs.]
Mantra of the Cosmos’ new single is “‘Domino Bones (Gets Dangerous),” which features Noel Gallagher. Did the rest of the band do your parts first, and then you sent it to Gallagher to add his?
No, that’s completely wrong, actually. I’ll tell you. Noel recorded the song with Shaun for High Flying Birds, and Shaun’s part was very hip-hop, very rap, and it just didn’t suit Noel’s band. When I started working with Shaun, Noel would text me and go, “Do you know what you’ve fucking got, Zak? You’ve got the king of lyrics. You’ve got Britain’s Bob Dylan.” He’s so in awe of Shaun. So Noel sent me this multitrack and said, “Look, it doesn’t really suit my band, but if you do your Mantras production thing, maybe it’ll work for you.” So I turned (most of the parts) off, sped it up, used half of Noel’s chorus and half of one of Shaun’s verses, wrote all the (rest of the) music on it, and just rebuilt the whole thing into a hip-hop track and sent it back to Noel.
You are a huge fan of the Happy Mondays.
I believe they’re doing some new stuff now; Sean asked me to produce a couple of tunes. But the Mondays had been sort of doing the same set for such a long time. When I called Shaun — I didn’t know him; I called to explain the concept to him — I said, “You know, you are a great singer.” And he went, “Well, am I?” “Yeah, man. And you know, you’re a great poet.” “Am I?” “Yes. You fucking are, for real.” … On the last two legs of the Who tour, I warmed up on an electric drum kit, which is not plugged in, with my phone on the flight case right by my ear, and I would play to Happy Mondays for 35 minutes right before I go on stage.
What were the origins of you wanting to put together a supergroup?
I’d been asked to make this group in 2020 by the head of BMG, Hartwig Masuch; he’s a good friend. He wanted a Brit-pop supergroup. But I thought, how about Kraut-rock supergroups? I love Kraut-rock and Neu and Can and Cluster and all those groups. And he went, “OK, so long as you got a couple of famous people in.” Most of them guys are dead. And I called Karl Bartos from Kraftwerk, but he was like, “If you caught me 10 years ago and there was no COVID, yeah. But right now I’m 75 and I can’t do it.” So I shelved it for two years, and I just couldn’t think of anything good. And a supergroup is like, you know, Cream. What is cream? It’s a load of cum — you know, they’ve been wanking off all night. That’s what I sort of think of supergroups: might have been a good idea back then, but now, oh, it’s not really, is it?
So after I come back from this Who tour, I just went, “Shaun Ryder — beat poet supergroup. Whoa, that’d be really different.” So I called Shaun and told him all that stuff, and he went, “You know, how many times does anyone ask you to join a new band at 60? Yeah, I’m in. I want to do it.” I said, “What about your mate (Bez)? Does he want to do it?” He goes, “He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s doing it.” And then I called Andy, and he said yeah. Then I called Mani, who was one my best friends from the Stone Roses, but Mani’s wife, Imelda, was very sick, and she later passed, so I couldn’t ask him to come to a studio three hours from his house. So we don’t have a bass player. We have bass on track and other shit on track, and it’s got a very EDM sort of stance to it. But it’s a bit more like the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, which is one of my favorite groups as well. There’s not many chord changes, so Sean can just riff and can do whatever he wants. And we played four shows, and the first one took me 10 minutes to realize what the fuck is happening. It took me a minute to go, what’s happening here? And I went, “Oh, wow. I’m in the Doors from Salford” (a city outside Manchester).
The thing is about music today is, you go and watch bands and it’s like they’re serving in the fucking army. You are watching a skeleton clock; you’re not watching anything that’s gonna go wrong. And with the Who, things go wrong all the time. … I’m not upset because I still talk to them guys. They’re still my friends. But things have gone wrong with the Who so many fucking times, you’d think they’d had gotten over it by now. They just don’t care. It’s a fucking train wreck — pick it up, put it on the rails and we start again. And that’s how it is with this band: there’s danger.
So, meeting your heroes is a good thing. Sometimes it works out.
Yeah. No, it does work out, except for once: Mick Jones (from the Clash). The first thing Mick said to me was, “Don’t work with your heroes, Zak. We’ll always let you down.” We formed a band called the Wankers in 2011, and he said, “You’ll fire me, because everyone does.” And I did. Eight months later, I just texted him and said, “I give up, dude, you’re fired.”
But Shaun Ryder was everything you hoped for.
Shaun and I just become like best friends. We’ve done the whole (batch of upcoming music) just the two of us really, because Andy was very busy having a No. 1 album with Ride, so pretty much it’s just me and Shaun in the studio. He’ll do four or five vocal takes and then leave for a bit, and I’ll go, “Well, what the fuck is that about, man? What was that?” And then when you listen through it, you go, “Oh, he’s written a song, it’s just not coming out in the right order.” He just walked in and got on the microphone and sat on the couch and went, “MAGA ain’t gonna make you great again… Mecca’s gonna bomb you… Billionaires shaving heads. That ain’t for the love of Buddha.” Fuck me, dude! — and it’s a pop song. This is genius at work, when someone can just do that. And then, also, Shaun’s a guy with so much empathy, he even worries about Prince Harry sometimes.
That is a lot of empathy.
I know. He’s a really lovely guy. I thought I was going to be working with unmanageable people, and they’re the most manageable people I’ve ever met, and the most easy-going and most honest. Fantastic, to be around and be accepted by people like this. And if Shaun and I are stuck in a dressing room for eight hours, we don’t fucking care because we are just digging on hanging out, you know? That’s rare, because there’s always someone complaining, usually. Everybody’s got so much empathy and love for each other. And it’s quite hard for Northern people to go “I love you” to a man. You can get arrested for doing it, but that’s happening.
Well, of course, we do want to ask about the maybe slightly less loving situation you’re putting behind you with the Who. People really care; every time we published a news story about what was happening, it tended to be the best-read story of the day. Which speaks to you being a beloved figure among a lot of fans.
Really? That’s really lovely. I didn’t really enjoy being treated like that at all, because (Daltrey) is my friend, but he was wrong. And Roger is one of them guys that, once he’s made his mind up, there ain’t going back. And I couldn’t believe the amount of support that happened. And then, how many times do you get fired twice?
It was very confusing when the news came out you’d been let go again within weeks of being officially reinstated.
The last time, it was like, “We want you to say you’ve left and because you’re too busy.” I just ignored it, and I didn’t say a word. Because what that would means: I’ve let down all those people that stood up for me. And I’d never leave the Who. I fucking love the Who! When I got fired (the first time), Pete called me and went, “You know, you’re strong enough to fight for your job back.” “Well,” I said, “I’m not strong enough for you to have to help me. So fuck it.” Then a week later he called me again and said, “How do you feel now?” “I really want my job back, Pete. I really want it back.” So he helped and I got it back, and then it was like, “Hey, Roger’s great (with it), it’s fabulous — Zak back in the Who.” And then 10 days later, I got fired.
And it was fired. It wasn’t anything else. The manager said, “Can you say that you are leaving, but you quit, basically?” And I just thought, “Well, that is fucking propaganda, right? I’d be letting lots of people down.” No. So I just left it, and then Pete did his announcement, which was a load of fucking bullocks he wrote all over his face on Instagram, his sort of abstract-art-school way of saying “Zak’s gonna go and do his own installations” or whatever. And what fucking bullshit. I’m not famous or I’m not a rock star, and they are, but I’m not gonna let people fucking walk all over me and tell me what to do and make me look fucking bad and them look good because basically they want me to lie. I wouldn’t do it, and then when they did it, I just threw ‘em under the fucking bus because it was bullshit. And then my dad (Ringo Starr) stepped up for me, and that was the greatest thing in the world. It’s fucking amazing that he got up and stood up for me.
People keep thinking there must be more to the story, because it can’t really just be that this all came out of one bad song at one gig. [Reports indicated that things went south when the band performed “The Song Is Over” for the first time in many years, and Daltrey lost his place, blaming the loudness of the drumming for the mishap.] People who are fans or supporters of yours are still trying to make sense of it, since there isn’t a really obvious explanation.
Oh, I don’t really understand, either. But I do understand that I’ve had 30 years with the craziest motherfuckers I’ve ever met in my life, man. These guys are so nuts that you’ve just gotta love them. Because if they weren’t this nuts, there wouldn’t be the fucking mini-opera (“Tommy”) and there wouldn’t be anything. They’re crazy and they’re arrogant and they’re aggressive, but they’ve got a fucking abstract genius (Townshend) running it, writing this shit by themself. And then you’ve got Street Fighting Man (Daltrey). They don’t have much in common, apart from the group. But Street Fighting Man nails every note, and they’re all in the original keys. He’s incredible. But when me and Pete — Pete calls it “catching a fire” — when we catch fire, you could see how a lot of people might get lost. But if he looked at me, because he needed a rear-view mirror, I could just help him out straight away. So I don’t really know.
His whole thing, Roger, is, “Well, I thought you were so busy, you didn’t have time to commit properly to the Who.” I said, “It was 17 shows (on the farewell tour). I’ve done thousands with you guys. So what do you mean, commitment? You know, some years, we’ve done three gigs. And this is 17 and it’s the end.” I said, “I’ve just been in Jamaica for seven months in my studio. I finished everything, and I was ready. I was told I was coming on tour with you.”
And then I spoke to him about my drum kit. Because we talk every week, Roger and I. We actually talk — like, proper talking! Me and Pete text. Me and Roger talk. And there’s never been any bad blood between anybody, I mean, fucking at all. Right? I get them. They’re fucking nuts. They get me. Pete went, “You like a bit of chaos, don’t you?” I said, “Not this fucking much! I feel like Dorothy, right? Toto the dog. You know, what the fuck’s happening?”
And basically Roger said, “Well, you know, your drums…” And I said, “Yeah, it’s about the gold bits on them, isn’t it? Because I own those, Roger. You own the electric bits, but I own all the gold shells and I own all the stands.” And he went, “Oh, because I wasn’t sure.” He said, “Well, don’t take it out of the Who lockup yet, because we might need you.” What the fuck? I said, “Well, if you do, you should be fucking letting me know…. Is this all about a gold drum kit, or… what’s it about?” But Roger was just saying, “Leave it there.” That guy’s a dog with a bone, and sometimes you just gotta leave it. He said he thought I was busy, and I’m not busy because I’d put all my time aside because I’d been told I was going on tour with the Who. … That’s why I was retired — not quite fired. Donald Trump would say something like that, wouldn’t he? [Laughs.] You know, “I haven’t fired Elon Musk; I retired him.”
So this is how nuts these guys are. But if they weren’t nuts and the addiction to friction wasn’t there, you’d never have the Who. It’d be boring. It’s also like, if you didn’t have the Kinks, Pete would never had any competition, and that’s why he’s so great, I think. Without Ray Davies as the greatest competition available, Pete would not have stepped up and “Fuck that sod in the arse; fuck that ‘Village Green’ shit. I’m gonna do something about a deaf, dumb and blind kid!” I love all that.
So do you still feel like anything could happen, potentially, or are you completely over it?
I feel like anything could happen, but if it doesn’t, I’m cool with it, man. Look, if Pete does a windmill, and if old Liam Gallagher does his hair in the jumbotron, there’s gonna be 120,000 people there at that gig, and they ain’t gonna be there for me. I understand that. But the Who were my biggest musical influence when I was very young, and then Oasis, well, when that period happened, they were my favorite group. And I was very blessed that they both called me up. It’s a bit like being fucking David Beckham or something, like, whoa, there’s a fucking England triple-team on the phone.
The weirdest thing was, the day before I got sacked the last time, I’d done an interview with the Sunday Times and I said, “It’s a vocation, man, being in the Who — it’s not a job. It’s like being a nun, or a nurse.” And 12 hours later after that, I was fired. It’s so fucked up. But actually, it’s so funny, isn’t it? That’s what’s great about it. It’s funny as well as fucking insane.
And by the way, the whole thing about “The Song Is Over” is: it was fucking my idea to play it. They didn’t want to do it and I fucking made those guys do it. Anything that takes more than 10 minutes rehearsing, they’re not interested. [Laughs.] But like I keep saying… If it doesn’t come back together, then it doesn’t come back together. But wow, what a great 29 years, man. I’d like to make it 30. Whatever it is, it would be great, just because them two guys are in it. It’s like Oasis, too — whatever they do will be great because them two guys are in it.
I really believe in rock ‘n’ roll, you know. But I live for it; I don’t die for it. Bobby Gillespie said that to me, actually, a long time ago. He’s like, “Rock ‘n’ roll, Zak — live for it. Don’t die for it.”
Who was it who said that, again?
Bobby Gillespie, my best buddy [the lead singer of Primal Scream]. I wish I hadn’t told you that, because you would’ve thought I thought of it.
Well, it’s good for all your fans who are puzzled to know that you’re puzzled too, but you’re still going forward with cool things.
And we’re still friends (Daltrey and Townshend), and we still talk. That’s the most important thing to me. I don’t want to not call Roger every week like I always have, and still be able to do that. Or to not text with Pete four times a week and say things that you wouldn’t say to his face. Because you get angry, and he says, “Well, why are you doing that?” And I say, “Because I’m 40 miles away — you can’t do anything.” [Laughs.]
From Variety US.