At the age of 14 or 15, Zak Starkey disowned The Beatles. “It’s like a wall,” he says in a very mod-like mutter that would have no one guessing he was the son of Ringo Starr. “Can’t get over it. Can’t get through it, can’t get under it.” He used to “f***ing hate” and “totally reject” the idea of the band. Instead, he knuckled down to forge a drumming career of his own, encouraged by “uncle” Keith Moon (who bought Starkey his first drum kit when the boy was eight) and tutored by the Faces’ Kenney Jones. It was 10 more years before he finally returned to his father’s rhythmic oeuvre. “When I was 25, I listened to The Beatles and went, ‘F***ing hell, these guys were amazing. I should have been listening to this years ago.’ And then I got over it.”
Now 59, Starkey settles into the quietest corner of a Soho bar (“This ear isn’t very good,” he says, jabbing the left) as an alumnus of Johnny Marr & The Healers, Oasis and – until his very recent, very public departure – The Who. He’s also the fulcrum of his own all-star band, Mantra of the Cosmos, featuring main players Shaun Ryder, Bez (both Happy Mondays mainstays), and Andy Bell of Ride. “To me, he was a great drummer and that was it,” Ryder says of Starkey over the phone. “I didn’t know he was a f***ing amazing producer. Then when I got in the studio and he stuck a load of beats and tunes on, I f***ing loved it. It’s different from the Mondays, it’s different from what I do in Black Grape, it’s a f***ing buzz.”
Mantra of the Cosmos also feature plentiful high-profile guests. Recent single “Domino Bones (Gets Dangerous)” was crafted from a recording gifted to Ryder and Starkey by Noel Gallagher (“He sent me this song saying ‘It’s probably better for your band than mine,’” Starkey remembers), then reworked into a tropical rap-punk rampage until only a fraction of Gallagher’s high-flying melody remained. “I kept half a chorus of Noel,” Starkey smirks. “He thought it was great. Better than his one.”
Meanwhile, Starkey has also previewed a snippet of another track, “Rip Off”, to much media frothing. It’s a concoction several decades in the making: a song by The Beatles’ children. The prospect of Starkey and fellow Fab offspring Sean Lennon and James McCartney collaborating on a track has been hinted at for almost 20 years, he says, but Starkey would always reject the idea for fear of being judged on it for the rest of his life. “They’re all like, ‘It could be as big as The Beatles,’” he scoffs. “I said, ‘Do you want to be as big as The Beatles? Don’t you want to go to Waitrose? My dad can’t go to f***ing Waitrose, he can’t go and buy a paper or whatever. Do you actually want that? You wanna be as good as The Beatles, but do you want that mania and people bringing babies for you to touch and cure them of cancer and s***?’”
Possibly not. Over time, though, Starkey grew close with his fellow Beatle babies. When the right Mantra of the Cosmos song came up, he sent it to Sean Lennon, who added “an amazing John Carpenter sort of synth and one line, which is really psychedelic and amazing”, and invited James to the studio to provide vocals and guitar on the heady, psych-folk track. “And then Shaun Ryder arrived and proved that the only genius in the building is him,” Starkey says. Ryder’s rap of “Karma’s gonna f*** you up” certainly tempered any Rishikesh-ish peace and love vibes that might have otherwise crept into the endeavour. “What he did in five minutes turned it into a political pop song. Fantastic. Shaun Ryder walked in and went, ‘Maga ain’t gonna make you great again and Mecca’s gonna bomb you, billionaires are shaving heads and it’s not for the love of Buddha.’ Five minutes, done. It’s f***ing great.”
Only Starkey could have orchestrated such a historic coming together with any real integrity. Having played with some of the world’s biggest bands and formed supergroups with musicians from a vast array of legendary acts – the Sex Pistols, Primal Scream, Oasis, Blur, The Stone Roses, Paul Weller and more – he has become something of a backbeat hub for the rock’n’roll world, the connective tissue between scenes and eras and a respected musician in his own right.
“Pete [Townshend] has got a theory on that,” Starkey says. “Obviously, Sean’s dad got killed. [Pete] goes, ‘Your dad was around, so you could tell him to f*** off.’ That’s right... If your dad doesn’t die, you don’t put him on a pedestal, like Jason Bonham, or Sean, Julian [Lennon]; their [dads are] on a pedestal, aren’t they? You don’t get any space to be yourself. Just tell your dad to f*** off, see you later. That’s what I did.”
Starkey has many fond memories of childhood behind The Beatles’ curtain. “Music was everywhere in our house. Jukeboxes in every room. Fantastic music on.” Marc Bolan used to babysit. “We’d play Scalextric. He goes ‘Your dad’s got a studio, right?’ I’d say, ‘Yeah, but I’m not really allowed in.’ He goes, ‘Come on, let’s go up there,’ and he’d show me a few guitar things. He was great.”
Did he learn any life lessons from his godfather, Keith Moon? “Yeah, become an alcoholic! He never taught me how to play the drums, but he taught me how to drink and he taught me about girls and he taught me about surfing. We never went surfing, but we talked about it and listened to The Beach Boys a lot. He’d sometimes take me to nightclubs when I was 11 or 12; he treated me like an adult.” Yet the environment was also one of a kind of secretive normality. “We were taught to shut up, not to tell anyone anything,” Starkey says. “My dad, to me, is this: my dad is chasing me down the garden, going, ‘If I get my hands on you, I’ll bloody kill you.’ That’s my dad. My dad. He changed the world, he was in The Beatles. See him on TV, get a bit misty at that. But he’s my dad and that’s how I remember those years. Like everyone’s dad, he’s a dad, innee.”
He’s dismissive of any Yoko hate (“It wasn’t John Lennon that made her great – she was great, that’s why he was with her, because he’d buzz off her talent”) and of the supposed advantages of nepo-babyism. “It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not any good, [and] it don’t open doors. It might get you in a f***ing nightclub, [although] I’ve never done that in my life, ‘Oh, I’m Ringo’s kid, let me in.’ Nowadays, they’d go ‘Who the f***’s Ringo?’”
The average club doorman of 2025 might be more impressed, perhaps, that Starkey was in Oasis from 2004 to 2008, an idyllic period in his memory. “It was just f***ing great fun and fantastic rock’n’roll, start to finish... We were the greatest live band in the world, I think, at that time. It was like a f***ing comet coming at you.” When Starkey formed Mantra of the Cosmos in 2022, he took the moniker from a mantra that he, Bell and Oasis guitarist Gem Archer had been given during a meditation session in Los Angeles. It was held by the mother of Richard Cooke III, the 1967 Rishikesh attendee who had shot at a tiger attacking him and his mother, the very same Cooke who was immortalised in the “White Album” song “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill”.
“That’s far out, that, innit?” Starkey chuckles. “Bungalow Bill’s mum!... We never told her who I was. She worked at Rishikesh. She was giving it all this about The Beatles. She said, ‘Don’t ever come out of your meditation too quickly or you’ll be in a bad mood, like John Lennon always was.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Not according to my grandma. She said whenever John was coming we knew we were having fun. I think it’s you.’”
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Starkey hadn’t expected the Oasis reunion call-up, though. “It was discussed with Noel, but I was in The Who.” But not for long. Having played with the Sixties legends since 1996, and shortly before their final farewell US tour, Starkey was fired by The Who in April after a disagreement over his performance at the Royal Albert Hall, reinstated two weeks later, and then fired again after a few days. In social media posts designed to wryly cut through the usual band-split PR smokescreen, Starkey claimed there’d been “weeks of mayhem of me going ‘in and out and in and out’ ... like a bleeding squeezebox” and made it clear that the decision to leave wasn’t his. He’s since spoken to Roger Daltrey and been told not to retrieve his drumkit from The Who’s storage just yet.
“I don’t know what the f*** is happening,” he attests. “The thing is, this is The Who, man. The most unpredictable, aggressive, arrogant people, lovely people who are my family, but you never know what’s gonna happen, and that’s why it’s The Who. They have an addiction to friction.” It’s all par for the course for “the oddest, maddest group there is”, he says. “If you look at The Who through the years, all the way back, there’s four completely opposite people. One of them writes all the songs and thinks the other three are an art installation. And they don’t know what that means. They are the craziest, weirdest group there’s ever been. That’s what’s great, isn’t it, that they’re so untraditional with everything that they’ve ever done.”
It’s a bit like David Beckham, I got to play with my favourite teams. Johnny Marr – what? Oasis – what? The Who – what? Graham Coxon – what? Paul Weller – what?
Aiming even odder and madder, Mantra of the Cosmos were originally conceived in 2020 as a krautrock Britpop supergroup featuring both Ryder and Kraftwerk’s Karl Bartos. “I had a couple of conversations with Karl and he said, ‘I’m too old, mate. Ask me 10 years ago, yeah?’” Starkey says. Post-pandemic, the idea was resurrected as – and please crowbar your mind open now – a 21st-century Hawkwind. Leave all your modern-day rock expectations over here by this sonic wormhole linking Sun Studios in 1955, the 100 Club ’76, the Hacienda ’88 and the Buena Vista Social Club in the year 3000. “Long songs of 11-minute pulsating weirdness. Just something different to what you get now, which is very clean, very polished, very perfect, very glow-sticked. People that are in it go to rehearsals like they’re in the army, and then they go on stage like they’re in the f***ing army. It’s a bit generic, it’s a bit clean. First gig, it took me 10 minutes to get my head around ‘F***ing hell, I’m in the Salford Doors’.”
Right now, the Cosmos is in stasis, releasing one-off tracks until “the year of Oasis gets out of the way”, Bell becomes free again and their debut album can have its day. In the meantime, on gardening leave from The Who or not, Starkey is happy contemplating what he calls a blessed musical life. “It’s a bit like David Beckham, I got to play with my favourite teams,” he smiles. “Johnny Marr – what? Oasis – what? The Who – what? Graham Coxon – what? Paul Weller – what? It’s not like I’m the centre of the universe, they’re the centre of my universe. I can’t believe they let me be a f***ing moon orbiting it.” And a galaxy of possibility still awaits, with a little help from his friends.
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