Zak Starkey is both a witness to rock and roll history and an active participant. While it would be easy for the son of a former Beatle to coast through life as Ringo Starr’s progeny, he’s instead carved out his own legacy as a respected drummer/producer. It’s a story he’ll be telling to the beat of his own drum (literally) as part of his one-man show, “Zak Starkey…Who? An Evening of Drums and Conversation.”
For this multi-media event, Starkey will be digging into his extensive background, having been a decades-long touring member of The Who, an Oasis-hired hand who toured and recorded with them for the band’s last two studio albums and someone who started his own successful reggae label imprint in the late 2010s. But it all kicks off with a wide-ranging exploration of his unconventional childhood.
“There’s a film I’ve made of my life that’s about 15 minutes that has a lot of unseen footage and pictures from when I was a kid that will open the show,” Starkey explained. “There’s a lot of stuff of pictures and video I took of myself on tour. Everyone gets a lot of background.
“The rest of it is a bit more fun. All the content is being made by me, because I don’t have a job. I’m then going to come out and do something on the drums that isn’t too long and then I’m going to talk to the audience while the film is fresh in their minds and do a Q&A. That will lead us to the next part of the show, which is kind of up to them in terms of requests. If they don’t suggest anything, then I’ll do something I pick.”
A big part of what makes this creative roll of the dice so intriguing is how open Starkey is about his life (“There’s nothing I can’t talk about and I don’t have much of a filter.”) And while his time with The Who ended in early 2025 amongst overblown media coverage that had the sexagenarian multi-instrumentalist being hired and fired multiple times, he insists things are copacetic between him and the Who members. It’s a perspective he drives home when he points out how readily Pete Townshend was to grant Starkey permission to use Who songs as part of the latter’s one-man show.
“I speak to Roger [Daltrey] all the time and we’re fine and have always been fine,” he said. “It’s just The Who. I don’t know. We stayed friends all the way through the whole time. I spoke to Pete a month ago, and he said my show is going to be great and to just be myself. We never stopped talking. It’s something that really got blown out of proportion, and I’m not the kind of guy who’s going to let people walk all over him.
“You can’t really operate in The Who unless you’ve got balls. I’m not arrogant in rehearsals, but sometimes when I’m on stage, I feel like it’s my group. Pete will come in the dressing room and say, ‘I’ve told you a million times — I’m leading.’”
And while being introduced to The Who’s singles compilation Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy convinced a then-10-year-old Starkey to become a drummer, his musical journey began with seeing T. Rex when he was only five. The late Marc Bolan was a close friend of the older Starkey, and both Bolan’s on and off-stage personas drove Zak to want to play guitar.
“After seeing T. Rex, I asked my dad for a guitar,” Starkey said. “Marc Bolan was a very good friend of my dad’s and Marc would come over. My parents would still be in bed, so he’d show me a bit of guitar, play kids’ games and hang out with me and my brother. He was a really lovely guy. I love T. Rex. If it wasn’t for Marc, I wouldn’t have gotten into music.”
It would be The Who that provided one of the longer-lasting connections in Starkey’s life. Keith Moon, aka “Uncle Keith” (who was also Starkey’s godfather), was a major influence, starting with that aforementioned compilation.
“When I got that record, what blew my mind was the ferocity of these old pop records and I switched to the drums immediately, although not forever,” Starkey recalled. “I also realized it was that guy on the record who was the same person who would come and hang out with us in our bedroom when my dad threw a party. I made that connection.”
He added, “Keith Moon was my babysitter dude. Me and my little brother would go and stay with him on weekends a lot and he’d take us for days out. Keith was great, man. He related to us because I think what my dad said, which was that he was kind of on our level [emotionally].”
All these anecdotes and more will be on the table for this one-man show. More recent stories will include Starkey’s long-standing friendship with Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, the drummer’s stint in Oasis and a deep love of reggae that eventually led to a tight friendship with the late Toots Hibbert. It’s a relationship that started out with a two-month 2012 vacation in Jamaica that found Starkey and his wife finally meeting the reggae icon in the last week they were there, to the drummer and Hibbert winning the 2020 Best Reggae Album Grammy for Got To Be Tough.
In between, Starkey founded the Trojan Jamaica and Trojan Brasil record labels with partner SSHH in 2016. By 2020, plans to build on this success via a Trojan Jamaica Revue tour with a number of heritage artists, including Hibbert, U-Roy and Bob Andy, were scuttled by the pandemic and the untimely deaths of the aforementioned reggae stars.
“I got into reggae and Jamaican music in the ‘70s, when it was called pop music in England,” Starkey said. My mom gave me Funky Kingston, Catch a Fire and Bob Marley Live, and my dad gave me Man in the Hills by Burning Spear. We eventually became great friends with Toots. We did lots of recording with him and were going to work forever. But after the pandemic and we lost our friends, we had to fold the label.”
Despite these recent obstacles, Starkey remains unbowed and has high hopes for “Zak Starkey…Who?: An Evening of Drums and Conversation.”
“I’m doing this show and if it goes well and people get it and come to it, I’ve been offered a tour,” he said. “I’m quite comfortable doing it because I’ve done quite a few Q&A things. If you believe in something, it’s easy to talk about it. And also, we’ve got some great material in the show.”
Zak Starkey will be appearing on February 20 at the Gramercy Theatre
127 E. 23rd St., NYC. For more information, visit mercuryeastpresents.com/thegramercytheatre or call 212-614-6932.
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