Whatever happened to Ringo? (Daily Mail, 2006)

He was always considered the least talented of the four, the one who only joined the band when they were on the very cusp of fame, the one to whom Lennon and McCartney gave the easiest songs because he didn’t have a very wide vocal range; and the one non-musicians would sometimes snidely describe as the “lucky Beatle”.
          But mention his name and it’s enough to make an entire generation smile in affection. Because Ringo Starr, unassuming, plainly spoken, sad eyed and lugubrious behind his drums, was the Beatle with whom ordinary people could best identify: the little man grandmothers and small children loved.
Because while Lennon and McCartney dazzled with their wit and songs, and George Harrison suggested mysticism, it was level-headed Ringo people trusted; Ringo who sang about the Yellow Submarine; and Ringo with the knack of summing up the absurd in a homely, honest phrase.
“I think you’re both nuts,” he said bluntly to John Lennon and Yoko Ono when, for avant garde reasons, they took to performing on stage inside black bags, as the other two Beatles, irritated beyond belief, tried not to notice.
          “It was just like Butlins,” he decreed when descending from the transcendental Himalayan ashram of the Beatles guru, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
And “it’s been a hard day’s night”, he groaned after a gruelling period of work, a phrase which, with the help of a Beatles hit song, has become part of the English lexicon.
          But all that was decades years ago. Where has he been since? We’ve always heard a lot about the other three, much of it ultimately tragic; and Paul McCartney is hardly ever out of the news, although recently he may wish that were not quite the case. But Ringo? To British fans, he’s almost become the forgotten one.
          Well, that may be changing, and for two reasons. Firstly, his drumming is suddenly being positively revalued, following the release of the remixed, best-selling Beatles’ album, Love, where, thanks to the magic of digital sound, his contribution can finally be heard much more clearly. (The other Beatles weren’t idiots. They knew what they doing when they asked him to join them.)
And secondly, he’s become the subject of a petition to the prime minister that he be recommended to the Queen for a knighthood.
         Now, although one suspects that the columnist on The Times newspaper who launched the petition may have been behaving with a mischievous tongue in his cheek in starting this campaign, it’s already gathered nearly eight hundred signatures.
And Ringo? What does he make of all this? Does he think that being one quarter of the most iconic band ever qualifies him for an upgrade from the base level MBE he got in 1965 to a first class Sir in some future honours list?
          Unfortunately it’s impossible to say. He must have an opinion, but he isn’t voicing it. Instead he’s gone on holiday and resolutely doesn’t want to be disturbed. (At least, unlike John Lennon, he didn’t later send his MBE back.)
          Of course some might believe that his life since the Beatles has been one long holiday, and certainly he’s probably been a lot less busy these past thirty odd years than most of us.  But that isn’t the full story. Although we may not hear much about it over here, he’s been performing, touring and recording in America for over fifteen years with Ringo’s All Starr Band, albeit without the publicity which accompanies Paul McCartney’s tours, and with no certainty that the smaller  halls he plays will even be full.
          He probably doesn’t mind about that too much. He hardly needs the money. And, as he says, he just loves to be in a band. That was why he joined one in the first place.
Everyone of a certain age remembers Ringo with the Beatles, but what has it been like to be Ringo without the Beatles, to be Ringo today at the age of 66, a grandfather of two, with the Hollywood sunglasses and the arm tattoes?
          Well, for a start, John Lennon’s worry that the Beatles’ drummer might end his career ignominiously having to scrape a living by playing the northern clubs, thankfully never came to pass. With the continuing sale of Beatle albums Ringo is rich from his royalties, and is estimated to be worth around £125 million today.
          And then there are his houses. There’s his tax exile home above the Mediterranean in Monaco, his American houses, one in Los Angeles, just down the road from Jennifer Aniston and Tom Cruise, and another in Colorado. Then over here there’s his flat in Chelsea, and his seventeenth century 200 acre mansion in Cranleigh, Surrey.
          He’s said to be a good neighbour down in Cranleigh, turning up at fetes and lighting the fire on bonfire night when he’s in the country, and he campaigned heartily, though unsuccessfully, for the reprieve of Cranleigh Hospital. That was understandable. Hospitals have played a big part in his life, two years of his boyhood being spent in one, years that deprived him of a proper education.
As for hobbies there’s his new found interest in naïve painting which he began in Monte Carlo when he kept hearing people comment on the “great light” down here. There are also his dogs, horse riding, and, it’s claimed, though seems scarcely believable, watching polo. Indeed he appears to have found a contentment in life which for a while threatened to elude him.
          Ironically, and against all the odds, when the Beatles broke up Ringo was quickly of the blocks with his big solo hits like It Don’t Come Easy and You’re Sixteen. Following his successful appearance in A Hard Day’s Night there was a burgeoning film career, too, and he was offered a lot of silly parts.
          Unfortunately he was silly enough to take some of them, appearing in big budget flops like The Magic Christian with his friend Peter Sellers, Candy and Sextet. He was not flattered by the reviews for any of them. But in a film I wrote, That’ll Be The Day (and for which he was very helpful during my research, when he recalled his days working in a holiday camp), he was terrific, winning excellent notices. He should have done more like that. I suspect he was probably a better natural actor than he ever realised.
         Gradually, however, his life was changing. Following a friendly divorce in 1975 from his first wife Maureen Cox, whom he’d known since his days at the Cavern Club in Liverpool (she died of cancer in 1994 with Ringo and their children at her bedside), he married American actress, Bond girl, Barbara Bach. They’d met while they were making Caveman, a film fortunately not well remembered, the dialogue of which consisted of a series of grunts.
His life with the Beatles had been crippling, non-stop work, “eight days a week,” as he put it, and, when asked, he still played with all three Beatles on their solo albums. But soon he’d fully embraced a rock star’s jet-setting, druggy lifestyle. There was no rock and roll party in Los Angeles if Ringo wasn’t there.
          And, though he was drumming again as he guested with other old pals, it was irregular work. Without a real career he had time on his hands. And eventually, inevitably almost, a drink problem arose.
          True to character, Ringo is honest and succinct in summing up his lost years. “I’ve got photographs of me playing all over the world,” he once said, “but I’ve absolutely no memory of it. I played Washington with the Beach Boys---or so they tell me. But there’s only a photo to prove it.”
Finally in 1988 he and Barbara, who had joined him in his alcoholism, went into a rehab clinic in Tucson, Arizona. He’d recognised for some time that he had a problem, but it was only when he began to worry that he couldn’t stop drinking that he sought help.  “I’m not a violent man,” he remembered recently, “but I was getting violent. And it was just painful, waking up in the morning and starting drinking again.” At one point he trashed his own house.
He was lucky. The clinic saved him. Since then he’s been on the wagon, not a drink nor a drug passing his lips, with funds being set aside to go to a charitable trust to help, among others, those whose lives have been wrecked by drugs or drink.
         Music had steered his life since his step-father bought him a ten pounds set of drums when he was a teenager, and it was music which was to reshape his future after his years of alcoholism. In 1989 he put together his own group, Ringo’s All Starr Band, an ever-changing group of musician friends like Gary Brooker of Procol Harum, Joe Walsh from the Eagles, Dave Edmunds, Peter Frampton, Jack Bruce and Billy Preston. And with a variety of different line-ups, the All Starr Band  has been playing ever since.
          “For me it works as a great formula,” he says. “It’s an incredible array of musicians. Everyone has had hit records, so the show consists of me upfront and then I go back behind the drum kit and support the others. It’s just good music and I’m having a lot of fun.”
Quite why he frequently tours America, Japan sometimes and even some European countries, but not Britain is unclear, other than for his feeling, quite wrongly, I believe, that he isn’t loved in Britain.
Perhaps it’s because it was the Americans who “discovered” him, in producer George Martin’s words, on the Beatles’ first US tour, that he feels so at home there.
          Certainly getting noticed in the first rush of British Beatlemania behind the egos of McCartney and Lennon can’t have been easy, and in his earliest days with the group he could have been forgiven for a sense of insecurity. Not even invited to John Lennon’s first marriage, he was initially so nervous he was replaced on drums at the Beatles’ first recording session. Little by little, however, he gradually found his feet and his confidence with the band, but it’s interesting that a couple of years ago he published a book of postcards from John, Paul and George, Postcards From The Boys, which they’d sent to him from around the world in the Sixties, and which he’d kept. Did the other Beatles keep all the postcards he sent them, one wonders. I’d be surprised.
          He and Barbara Bach never had children together, but his sons from his first marriage both became musicians, Zak, the elder making a successful career playing drums, at first with his father’s All Star Band, and more recently with The Who and Oasis, while his daughter, Lee, is a fashion designer.
To many readers Ringo will, of course, be far more famous as the deep, warm, Liverpool voice which narrated the early Thomas the Tank Engine television series, and which have been endlessly rerun for over twenty years, than he ever will as a Beatle.
          But if the number of names on that petition to the Prime Minister for him to be knighted grows so long that it can’t be ignored, and if one day Richard Starkey, the poorly little boy from Liverpool’s Dingle area, become Sir Ringo Starr it won’t be for entertaining millions of small children. It will be for his one quarter part in the most famous band ever, an English group which helped redefine Britain’s place in the cultural world. It will be because he is one of only two surviving Beatles. And Paul McCartney is already a Sir.
         If they can give a knighthood to Tom Jones, how can they possibly turn down Ringo?

December 2006, Daily Mail

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