This is turning out to be anything but a quick one. Roger Daltrey isn’t letting Zak Starkey get the last word about his dismissal from the Who, with the front man telling London’s The Times that it didn’t matter if Starkey served with the band for nearly three decades. “Pete Townshend and I retain the right to be the Who. Everyone else is a session player,” he explained. “You can’t replace Keith Moon. We wanted to branch out and that’s all I want to say about it. But his reaction was crippling to me.” Since the “Squeeze Box”–esque saga of being fired, re-hired, and then fired again earlier this year, Starkey claimed the action was spurred by overperforming at recent concerts and Daltrey being vindictive about sound issues that were outside of a drummer’s control. (“What happened was I got it right and Roger got it wrong,” he put it at the time.) Daltrey is now disputing Starkey’s rationale, insisting that the strife came from a technical issue and Starkey erroneously believing he was being blamed. “It was kind of a character assassination and it was incredibly upsetting,” he added of Ringo Starr’s son.
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Since his departure, the Who have hired Scott Devours — Daltrey’s longtime drummer for his solo gigs — to pick up the slack while they embark on their farewell tour. He seemed conflicted about accepting the job when it was made official in May, well before the drummer trade deadline. “It really is a strange contradiction of emotions to have the greatest moment of my professional career also be one framed with some sadness and shadowed by someone else’s loss,” Devours wrote. Additional free agents joining Starkey in Major League Drumming include Matt Cameron and Frank Ferrer.
