He was unmistakable then, he’s unmistakable now. Ringo Starr appears on a video call from his home in Los Angeles smiling and relaxed, framed by a circle of well-trimmed brown hair, accessorised by the lightest of jewellery and an air of mischief.
“You’re from The Irish Times? Oh, I know Ireland. Because, you know, I’m from Liverpool – the capital of Ireland,” he says. His chuckle is infectious.
The Beatles visited Dublin on official business only once, for two fan-frenzied performances at the Adelphi Cinema on Middle Abbey Street at the start of Beatlemania, in 1963. But Starr has returned many times, most recently in the 1990s, with his wife of 43 years, Barbara Bach (best known for playing a Bond girl in The Spy Who Loved Me).
“We just hopped over on a plane, rented a car and found a little guesthouse to stay in for two nights. When we were leaving we’d ask where we could go next, and the owners would send us to another lovely guesthouse. I went to give one of the guys a tip. He said, ‘No, you don’t tip me. I’m family,’” he says, as incredulously as one might expect from someone used to the transactionism of American hospitality. “Plus no one got crazy, like, ‘Guess who’s in town.’ We had such a great time.”
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That chuckle again.
There’s no trace of the airs and graces that can come with the level of fame that Starr and his bandmates achieved. If they were ever there, they’ve been replaced by a comfortable confidence and a way of talking about The Beatles as if the group were a mere rung on his career ladder, albeit one he holds dear.
He asks questions and appears to quite like the chance to talk about his life and work for the umpteenth time. He’d be quite the dinner party guest.
Unsurprisingly, Starr’s enthusiasm is most evident for his new solo album, his 21st release. Look Up is classic country. But he’s not hopping on the crossover wagon set in motion by Beyoncé, who released the country-tinged Cowboy Carter last year, and now also occupied by Post Malone and Lana Del Rey. The musician has been keeping it country for as long as he’s been Ringo Star: Richard Starkey chose his stage name in part because of its western credentials.
Sometimes I think maybe we would have gotten back. Maybe we could have pulled it together. We don’t know. And there’s no way of knowing any more
— Ringo Starr on a Beatles reunion
“That was when Rory Storm and the Hurricanes had a job in Butlin’s for three months,” he says, referring to his pre-Beatles band. “We all changed our name, and I changed mine from Richard to Ringo because it was in a cowboy movie I saw. But Ringo Starkey didn’t sound so great, so I took off the ‘key’ and added an ‘r’. And that’s been my name most of my life.”
Starr’s contributions to The Beatles “were always more or less country tracks”, he says, and his second post-Beatles solo album, Beaucoups of Blues, which he made in Nashville in 1970, was a country album that saw him collaborate with the late, great producer Pete Drake.
Forget The Beatles’ sometimes long recording sessions: that album was done and dusted in three days, and released three months later. “This album, however, took a lot longer,” he says.
Look Up began life after Starr bumped into his old friend T Bone Burnett, famed as a producer as well as for playing guitar for Bob Dylan in the 1970s, at an event in LA to mark the late Beatle George Harrison. After the event, Starr asked Burnett to send him a track for a series of EPs that Starr was recording, but instead of one he had nine tracks that interested Starr.
“So I went into this room here,” Starr says, pushing his Zoom camera towards an adjoining room full of drum kits. “And I played on six of them. I sent him away, he put them together, and I carried on and did the rest of them, because I just loved the songs and ideas. I wasn’t planning on it, but I’d recorded a country record.”
The 11-song album canters from the singalong country anthem Time on My Hands, its lead single, to Thankful, its closing track, which is an ode to gratitude that’s reflective of the album’s positive vibe. Starr, who says that “the record feels a bit old school, maybe because I’m old school”, invited a line-up of contemporary country musicians to mix in new tones, including the Grammy-winning stars Alison Krauss, Billy Strings and Molly Tuttle, who adds her bluegrass talents to the rollicking duet Can You Hear Me Call, among others.
Does Starr have an opinion about Beyoncé’s country album? “I haven’t listened to it. I’m not going to pretend I have, but I know all about it because it was the biggest thing. For fun, I thought I would call this one Be on Say, but I got told no,” he says with a chuckle.
To support Look Up, he and the album’s guest artists will be playing two nights next week at Nashville’s revered Ryman Auditorium, where he’ll also give his older tracks a country-and-western makeover. “I’m excited to hear Octopus’s Garden in a country style,” he says.
After that he’s set to tour the United States with his main project, Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band. At 84, and reportedly the world’s richest drummer, what’s the motivation to take to the road after so many years? “It’s what I do,” he says.
He recalls his difficult childhood in Liverpool, where he nearly died from complications after his appendix burst when he was six. He was released from hospital after a year, only to contract pleurisy and tuberculosis at 13, which required another two years of medical care. When he returned to good health, drumming became his raison d’etre.
“As soon as I came out of hospital I would go looking in music stores in Liverpool, wanting to be a drummer. Now I am a drummer, and I love to be in a band. It’s just what I do. I’m still in the studio and on the road. I’m still playing. That’s the good news for me.”
That’s also true of the other Beatle still with us, Paul McCartney, who recently finished his Got Back world tour at the age of 82. That’s no surprise given their history, Starr says.
For those of us who weren’t around for The Beatles’ decade together, it’s hard to imagine what it must have been like to see the four lads from Liverpool shapeshift in real time from the infectious beat pop of Please Please Me to the revolutionary Let It Be before the group imploded.
The thing is, Starr says, “We split up, and then we all went straight back into a studio ... It’s like we just carried on. I’ve got the other three on my solo records anyway. It’s not like we just dismissed it all to do something else. We still played, and everyone was writing, but mainly we did it separately.”
Starr and McCartney were reunited on stage just before Christmas, playing Helter Skelter and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band during the final concert of McCartney’s tour, at the O2 in London, at which they paid tribute to their late bandmates.
The personal bond between the four, and their shared dedication to music, could have been enough to have seen a Beatles reunion if they were all alive, according to Starr. “Our two brothers,” he says with a sigh, looking to the sky as he thinks of Harrison and John Lennon. “Sometimes I think maybe we would have gotten back. Maybe we could have pulled it together. We don’t know. And there’s no way of knowing any more.”
Their legacy has been brought to a new generation through films by Peter Jackson, whose compelling eight-hour docuseries The Beatles: Get Back charts the fraught making of the band’s final album, and, more recently, Martin Scorsese, producer of Beatles ’64, which follows the band’s arrival in the States (“the most thrilling thing we ever did” says Starr).
Coming up in 2027 is The Beatles’ biopic. Directed by Sam Mendes, it’s set to be an epic series of four films, each from the perspective of a different band member, that together tell the story of the band’s relatively brief life. Paul Mescal will reportedly play McCartney – and, as Starr recently confirmed, Barry Keoghan is set to play Starr. “I believe he’s somewhere taking drum lessons, and I hope not too many,” he told Entertainment Tonight.
Certainly those castings will help pique the interest of younger music fans – if they’re not already watching Starr on TikTok. “I’m on about four sites, and it’s great,” he says about his social-media habits. “I put up a post on one of my sites, and [the team] put them on all the others. I don’t know how to do that. I’d like to say I’m in the modern age, but I’m not.”
Look Up is released by Lost Highway Records/Decca
