Profile: Ringo Starr - Grumble, grumble little Starr

Published on Saturday 18 October 2008 19:42

BE WARNED: if you plan to send an old drum stick, Beatles LP or Thomas The Tank Engine video to Ringo Starr to be signed, your memorabilia had better already be in the post winging its way to one of his homes in Los Angeles, Switzerland, Monte Carlo... almost everywhere but Liverpool.

For tomorrow is the last day that the 68-year-old will sign his name for his fans. After that, you can forget it. Anything that lands on the doormat is unceremoniously "gonna be tossed" by the man of whom John Lennon once famously said, when asked if Starr was the best drummer in the world: "He isn't even the best drummer in the Beatles." Fear not, though, because Starr still finds the time to send fans much "peace and love", though note that he won't be putting that in writing either.

He treated fans to this "serious message" on his website last week in a concise, curmudgeonly video in which he appeared dressed in black and wearing the requisite indoor shades. "I'm warning you with peace and love, I have too much to do," bemoaned the pensioner, in what must be the first time peace and love have been employed to deliver a warning. The world's eBay addicts will, however, be relieved that at least there is still one last chance to make a killing. Starr has asked fans to submit photos to him taken during a recent All Starr Band tour. The best among them will win, yes, an autographed drum.

It's been something of a grumpy year for Starr. In January he played to a crowd of more than 25,000 people in his home city, launching Liverpool's European Capital of Culture – his first performance there in 15 years – singing a new song that included the nostalgic line "Liverpool I left you, but I never let you down". The city watched, misty-eyed, at the emotional return of their (fourth) favourite Beatle. Days later, on The Jonathan Ross Show, he appeared to have changed his tune. When asked by Ross what he missed about Liverpool, he laughed and said "nothing". Liverpudlians were not best pleased, and not long afterwards a topiary sculpture in the city of the mop-topped Fab Four was mysteriously attacked, with Starr's head the unfortunate one to be decapitated. Yoko Ono, however, who Starr and his wife Barbara Bach flew out to comfort in New York after John Lennon was shot, disagreed. "Ringo loves Liverpool," she claimed. "If someone said anything bad about Liverpool he would punch them."

People have always had mixed feelings towards the Beatle who was christened Richard Starkey. To some, he is the man credited with making the drummer an equal partner in pop, elevating its musicianship status, as well as inventing a whole new style of drumming, a left-handed man playing a right-handed kit, adding unusual accents, stops and signature fills. Steve Smith of the Californian rock band Journey once said that if the rest of the music was taken away from a Beatles song to just leave Starr's drum part, you would still be able to identify it.

He is also seen as the glue in a band that always seemed to be coming apart at the seams – he was the only Beatle who accepted the presence of Ono, for example – and when the split happened in 1970 Starr was the only one to remain close to the other three while they all went through periods of falling out. Lennon, in fact, referred to Starr as "the soul" of the band, while he and McCartney said his offhand humour and gift for a snappy one-liner inspired their songwriting. In 1964, when Beatlemania was kicking into gear, Starr groaned at the end of a long session that it had been "a hard day's night", a line that went on to become the title of both film and song.

There is, of course, another version of the story. This is the one that paints Starr as the least talented of the Beatles, the luckiest drummer in pop history, the self-taught musician who managed to join the band, replacing the unlucky Pete Best, just as it was rocketing skywards. He is the one who composed the least, and is only credited with writing two songs: The White Album's 'Don't Pass Me By' and Abbey Road's 'Octopus's Garden'. Four songs, however, were written by Lennon and McCartney for his baritone voice, including 'Yellow Submarine' and 'With A Little Help From My Friends'.

Starr was given his first drum kit by his stepfather as a teenager. Growing up in Merseyside, his father, a dockworker turned baker, divorced his mother when he was three. As a child Starr was sickly, in and out of hospital and even in a coma for two months. The result was that he missed so much school he could barely read or write at the age of 15. "I had a girl who used to look after me who taught me to read," said Starr in a 1976 interview on American radio. "I'm intelligent, but uneducated."

After dropping out of school he worked as a delivery boy for British Rail, a barman on a ferry, and an apprentice joiner. Soon enough, though, he got swept up in Liverpool's skiffle craze and started drumming in bands. Wearing rings on all his fingers gave him his nickname, Ringo, and he legally changed his name under the advice of the band he was playing with at the time, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. In Hamburg in 1960, touring with Rory Storm, he met the Beatles and started sitting in for their various drummers. When he joined the band two years later it was George Harrison, in particular, who pushed for Starr to join and got a black eye from a fan of Pete Best as a result. Starr ended up joining in time for the first hit, 'Love Me Do', in 1962. When the Beatles first arrived in the US in 1964, Starr famously said: "So this is America. They must be out of their minds."

Six years later, it was all over. Since then, Starr has released 20 studio and live albums, but although being the only Beatle who became a film actor – his performance alongside David Essex in That'll Be The Day in 1973 is a minor classic – he remains the only Beatle who is not in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist. In the Eighties (when he went into rehab with this wife for alcohol addiction) he introduced himself to a new generation with his laconic narration of the TV series of Thomas The Tank Engine and started the All Starr Band, which continues to tour today.

Since Harrison's death in 2001 from lung cancer, Starr and Paul McCartney are the only surviving Beatles, which perhaps explains why the fan mail has increased to such absurd proportions. Funnily enough, we should really have seen this coming. In 1991, Starr appeared in an episode of The Simpsons in which he vowed to answer every bit of post he received from fans. His weary answer to Marge Simpson's question was: "Yes, in England we do have French fries, but we call them chips." Depicted as a once famous old rocker now sadly condemned to live out his days writing inane comments to fans, is it any wonder Starr has taken his fate in his own hands and put a stop to it? Still, he could always send his stock response to everyone. Anyone for peace and love?

- Starr wrote the song 'Octopus's Garden' when he temporarily quit the Beatles during the sessions for The White Album and spent a fortnight with Peter Sellers on his yacht.

&#149 Starr divorced first wife, Maureen Cox, with whom he had three children, in 1975. He met second wife Barbara Bach, who played the Bond girl in The Spy Who Loved Me, in 1980 and married her a year later. His son, Zak Starkey, is a drummer who plays with Oasis and the Who.

&#149 On meeting Elvis Presley, left, in 1965: "The saddest part is that, years later, we found out that he tried to have us banished from America because he was very big with the FBI. That's very sad to me that he felt so threatened that he thought, like a lot of people, that we were bad for American youth."

&#149 Starr was born three months before John Lennon, making him the oldest Beatle.

&#149 His 1973 solo release, Ringo, was the last album to feature all four Beatles together, though not on the same song.