Roger Daltrey went to Las Vegas this week to play his own songs, and ended up handing the room a piece of news about somebody else’s job. Partway through his first-ever headline run at the Encore Theater, Daltrey mentioned that The Who have been rehearsing again with Zak Starkey — the drummer the band fired, rehired, and then fired again across three chaotic weeks in the spring of 2025. It sounded great, he told the audience, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Starkey confirmed it himself shortly afterwards. Sharing a clip from the Vegas show on Instagram, he wrote: “Nice one Rog x. 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!”
No dates have been announced. Neither man has said what the rehearsals are actually for. But for a band that wrapped a farewell tour pointedly titled The Song Is Over last October, quietly getting back in a room with the drummer they very publicly dismissed is not a small thing.
How a charity show ended a 29-year partnership
Starkey joined The Who in 1996 and stayed for close to three decades, playing on 2006’s Endless Wire, 2019’s Who, and the 2023 concert album The Who With Orchestra Live at Wembley.
It came apart at the second of the band’s Teenage Cancer Trust benefit shows at London’s Royal Albert Hall in March 2025, during a rare live outing for The Song Is Over. What went wrong there is still disputed, and the two accounts have never been reconciled.
Starkey’s version, given to The Telegraph and reported by Classic Rock, is that the mistake was not his at all. “What happened was I got it right and Roger got it wrong,” he said, claiming Daltrey had come in a bar early. A week later, Starkey said, The Who’s longtime manager Bill Curbishley telephoned to tell him he was being dismissed because “Roger says you dropped some beats.”
“I watched the show and I can’t find any dropped beats,” Starkey said. “Then Pete had to go along with it because Pete’s had 60 years of arguing with Roger.”
Daltrey has characterized it differently, describing the sacking as a misunderstanding and saying the criticism aimed at him over it had been “incredibly upsetting”. Readers should note that the detailed account of the phone call and the Albert Hall performance rests on Starkey’s telling; the band has not confirmed those specifics.
Pete Townshend intervened and Starkey was reinstated within days. It did not hold. Starkey says he was only brought back on condition that he accept the blame himself, and he was gone again by the middle of May. “I don’t blame anyone,” he told The Telegraph of the whole affair. “I blame The Who because they’re unpredictable, aggressive” — and rather more besides.
The response from outside the band was not sympathetic. Under one of Starkey’s statements, Sean Ono Lennon left a comment that got picked up everywhere: “Without Zak, who’s the who?” Scott Devours, the drummer from Daltrey’s own solo band, took the seat for the farewell run, which opened in Sunrise, Florida in August 2025.
The line that gave it away
There was a clue, for anyone paying attention. In that same June 2025 interview — barely weeks after the second sacking, with the farewell tour still ahead of them — Starkey let slip that Daltrey had already been back in touch.
“I spoke to Roger last week and he said, ‘Don’t take your drums out of [The Who’s] warehouse yet in case we need you,'” Starkey said. “I said, ‘Best let me know.'”
Fourteen months later, apparently, they let him know.
The episode cost Starkey elsewhere, too. He has since said he turned down a place on the Oasis reunion shows in order to keep his commitment to The Who — and then lost the Who gig anyway, ending up with neither.
What happens next
Almost nothing about this is settled. There is no announced tour, no record, and no statement from the band’s management. What exists is a rehearsal that both Daltrey and Starkey say went well, and a frontman cheerful enough about it to volunteer the fact to a paying audience.
A couple of things can be ruled out. Daltrey told the Review-Journal he has no interest in playing the Sphere, the Las Vegas venue that has become a default destination for legacy acts. “I think the Sphere’s got its place … it is an extraordinary thing, but I like the energy from a show just to come from the stage.” He has also, as recently as May, sounded ready to stop altogether: “After finishing the Who’s final tour of the U.S., it’s time for me as a solo artist to possibly do the same. After touring solo with different bands of musicians for the last 17 years, a less grueling life becomes more attractive – I’ll see.”
For now he is still working. Daltrey’s Great Night Out tour has two more nights at the Encore before moving on through California and the East Coast, finishing at the end of September.
As for whether The Who are genuinely back — it is worth remembering that this band has been saying goodbye since 1982, and that Showbiz411’s Roger Friedman, writing about the reunion, noted he had already attended farewell concerts in both the seventies and the eighties. “It ain’t over til it’s over,” he wrote. On the evidence of the last eighteen months, that goes for the arguments as much as the music.
