Zak Starkey rejoins The Who | Saga over
Zak Starkey has rehearsed with The Who again, sixteen months after the firing, rehiring and second firing that made 2025 so messy. Here is how it ended.
Zak Starkey has been fired by The Who, reinstated by The Who, and fired by The Who again — all inside about five weeks of 2025.
Now he is back. Properly back, and with a good deal more warmth than anyone expected.
So how did eighteen months of very public whiplash end up here? Let’s go through it.
How we got here
It started at the Royal Albert Hall on 30 March 2025, at the band’s Teenage Cancer Trust shows. Daltrey stopped the closing song — “The Song Is Over”, a live debut — to tell the audience he could not hear the key. “All I’ve got is drums going boom, boom, boom.”
On 16 April, after nearly thirty years in the seat, Starkey was out.
Three days later he was back in, with Pete Townshend posting that “Zak is not being asked to step down from the Who” and admitting he was baffled by the whole thing.
A month later he was out again. Starkey said he was asked to say he had quit, and refused: “This would be a lie. I love the Who and would never had quit.” Daltrey’s version was that he had not been fired, he had been retired.
Scott Devours — Daltrey’s solo drummer since 2009 — took the chair for The Song Is Over farewell tour, seventeen North American dates ending near Palm Springs on 1 October 2025. He did a fine job. He was also, unavoidably, a man sitting in somebody else’s seat.
What actually happened this week
Daltrey let it slip himself. Playing a solo show at the Encore Theater in Las Vegas on 26 August, he told the room the band had rehearsed with Starkey for a possible European leg of the farewell tour.
His review: “It sounded great.”
Starkey confirmed it the next day. “We rehearsed for an afternoon and were absolutely on fire,” he told Rolling Stone. “I’m so happy to be back playing the music I love with people I love. It’s good to be home.”
The Instagram version was funnier. “Nice one Rog,” he wrote, adding that he was “lookin forward to tearin it up with the Who again. The rehearsal was great.. I don’t think we’ve ever rehearsed as tough as that. Usually we drink tea and talk about what time we’re going home!”
Both camps confirmed the statements. No European dates have been announced: a rehearsal for a possible leg is as much as anybody has said.
Why this one mattered more than most
Because of who he is, twice over.
Starkey is Ringo Starr’s son, which is the fact everyone reaches for first. The more relevant one: Keith Moon was his godfather, bought him his first kit at eight, and gave him the only real drum lessons he ever had. He joined The Who in 1996 for the Quadrophenia tour.
That is a closed loop you cannot recast. The Who’s drum stool has never been an ordinary vacancy — Moon, then Kenney Jones, then Simon Phillips, then the kid Moon taught.
Final thoughts
Bands change drummers constantly, and 2026 has been an absurd year for it. Most of those changes are just business.
This one never was. Thirty years, a family tie to the band’s own late drummer, and a fortnight of statements that nobody came out of well.
Good that they patched it up. Better that they did it in a rehearsal room rather than a press release.
Read our full Zak Starkey feature or see his rig, era by era, in the Rig Vault.