Billy Corgan Calls Travis Barker the Most Influential Drummer of the Last 30 Years, and Barker Recalls Drumming on Numb Hands

Billy Corgan told Travis Barker he is “probably the most influential drummer of the last 30 years” on an episode of Corgan's podcast The Magnificent Others released October 14, 2026. In the same conversation the Blink-182 drummer described drumming on numb, nerve-damaged hands after his 2008 plane crash. The episode came out eight days after he had nerve surgery on his arm.

The compliment had a twist built in: in the same conversation, Barker named Corgan's own Smashing Pumpkins bandmate, Jimmy Chamberlin, among the drummers who shaped him.

I guess power pop or rock drums, that comes directly from you because before you people didn't play like that, and after you, almost everybody plays like you.Billy Corgan, The Magnificent Others, as quoted by NME

What did Corgan actually say?

He started with the big claim and then built a case for it. “You have influenced more popular drummers in the last thirty years than any drummer I can think of,” Corgan said, according to NME. “When we talk about rock/alternative, something about the way you played kind of unleashed this different way of playing.”

Barker seemed caught off guard. “That means so much. Yeah, I mean, I don't even know what to say,” he replied. Then he credited the people he learned from, calling his style “just this weird kind of mixture of everything that I was raised on.” The list ran from Buddy Rich and the drummer of The Meters (he told Corgan he would sit at home trying to work out “Cissy Strut”) to Mötley Crüe's Tommy Lee, Chamberlin and Dennis Chambers. Then came the childhood hero: “Animal from the Muppets was my biggest influence as a child.”

Why are Barker's hands the real story right now?

The episode's most revealing passage was about the crash: going back to the drums was the first thing Barker did after leaving the burns centre, and there was something he kept from his burns doctor, Dr. Grossman. “No one knew, but both of my hands were numb. And I didn't want to say anything because I just wanted out of the hospital,” he told Corgan, as MusicRadar reported. Later, he said, “it turned out I had a bunch of nerve damage.” He played a practice pad while his hands were still scabbed, and that, he said, was when he “finally felt connected to something.”

Numbness is in the news for him again. On October 7 Barker posted on his Instagram Stories that he had surgery the day before. “My arm, hand, and fingers have been numb since a show I played last month,” he wrote, as quoted by Complex. A nerve test showed he “needed a cubital tunnel release to fix the nerve.” People explains that the procedure treats a pinched nerve at the elbow that causes numbness in the small and ring fingers. It is not the first time surgery has kept him behind the kit: in February 2023 he dislocated his ring finger and tore ligaments at a rehearsal, and by March 2023 he said the repair had been a success, People reported.

Corgan was praising a drummer whose career has been a long negotiation with his own hands.

Barker made clear this one was preventive. He wrote that he wanted “to get ahead of it and get it over with so that I can keep playing the way I play for a long time,” adding: “Should be good in a few weeks.”

What comes next for Blink-182?

Barker said earlier this year that Blink-182 are working on a new album, their first since 2023's One More Time…, NME reports, and the band played an intimate private show in California earlier in October. Their next announced dates are in Europe in June 2027, and as of October 21, 2026 we found no reports that any of them had been postponed or cancelled.

Festival sets at Rock am Ring, Rock im Park and Czechia's Rock for People round out the run. The long version of his comeback from the crash is the August documentary Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear. Corgan's podcast is the short one, about hands nobody knew were numb.