Zak Starkey might well be the most well-connected man in rock’n’roll. The son of Beatles legend Ringo, he’s also clocked up lengthy stints drumming with two more of the UK’s biggest ever bands: joining Oasis from 2004 to 2009, and playing with The Who for the best part of 30 years, until a recent well-publicised firing.
The latest addition to his hefty CV has been Starkey’s current band Mantra of the Cosmos: a wild, acid rock joyride co-passengered by Shaun Ryder and Bez of the Happy Mondays, plus his former Oasis bandmate and Ride frontman Andy Bell. Starkey, a disarmingly honest and ego-less conversationalist with absolutely zero filter, is loath to call them a supergroup. “It’s a fantastic group. I try not to use ‘supergroup’ but now I’ve realised I’m not gonna sell many records unless I say it…” he shrugs.
Either way, the band’s just-released new single Domino Bones (Gets Dangerous) is a brilliantly bonkers listen that has, he tells us, been dubbed “too violent” for radio; its Ryder-fronted blitzkrieg only tempered by a melodic turn in the chorus by another high profile mate, Noel Gallagher. Starkey doctored the track from an original idea Gallagher sent him that, he chuckles, “was a bit yacht rock”. “The High Sailing Birds…” he nods, with a glint in his eye. Starkey chopped it up, sped up some bits and out came Domino Bones as an almost remixed version, with no ‘80s pastel to be seen.
Mantra of the Cosmos, he says, have already got 14 songs ready to go. “Bez said, ‘These are weirder than the shit you send me at six in the morning’,” Starkey informs us of the material. “It’s darker, pulsating, political. One song, I had to edit out 100 Putins.” Their next single, meanwhile, will see three-quarters of a once-fabled next-gen Beatles band come to pass. Joining Starkey and his Mantra colleagues for it are Sean Lennon and James McCartney, the sons of John and Paul, who previously released their own joint single Primrose Hill together back in April of last year. Though Starkey had previously been against the idea (“I always refused because do you wanna get judged on that for the rest of your life?”), in the past five years he and Lennon have grown close.
