Ringo Starr

• 1. Introduction

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  Ringo Starr was born on the 7th of July 1940 at 9 Madryn Street in Dingle, one of the oldest and poorest inner-city districts in Liverpool. His real name is Richard Starkey, and he grew up in a neighbourhood where, as his childhood neighbour Marie Maguire Crawford put it, every family was part of "an ongoing struggle to survive." The houses there were, in Beatles biographer Bob Spitz's words, "poorly ventilated, postage-stamp-sized... patched together by crumbling plaster walls." Violent crime was a near-constant concern. Children spent much of their time at Prince's Park, escaping the coal-soot air.

  By the time Starr was a teenager, he had survived a coma, tuberculosis, and two years in a sanatorium. He had barely learned to read. He had held a string of failed jobs. And yet within a decade, he would be sitting behind the drum kit of the most famous band in the world, playing to 73 million viewers on American television.

  How a sickly, largely self-taught drummer from Dingle ended up replacing Pete Best, earning his own fan mail, and shaping the sound of a generation is a story that turns on accident, stubbornness, and a particular way of hearing music that nobody else could quite replicate.

• 2. A Dickensian Childhood

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  At the age of six, Richard Starkey developed appendicitis. The appendectomy led to peritonitis, which sent him into a coma lasting days. His recovery stretched across twelve months at Liverpool's Myrtle Street children's hospital, far from his family. When he finally came home in May 1948, his mother kept him out of school. At age eight, he was still illiterate, with a weak grasp of mathematics.

  His father, also named Richard Starkey, had by then drifted out of the picture. The family moved in 1944 from Madryn Street to Admiral Grove, and his parents separated shortly after. The elder Starkey visited his son as few as three times following the separation. His mother Elsie survived on thirty shillings a week in ex-husband support payments and eventually became a barmaid, a job she held for twelve years.

  Elsie remarried on the 17th of April 1954, wedding Harry Graves at the register office on Mount Pleasant, Liverpool. Graves was an enthusiastic fan of big band music and its vocalists, and introduced his stepson to recordings by Dinah Shore, Sarah Vaughan and Billy Daniels. Starr later said: "He was great... I learned gentleness from Harry."

  In 1953, before that remarriage could take hold, the second catastrophe struck. Starr contracted tuberculosis and was admitted to a sanatorium, where he stayed for two years. The medical staff encouraged patients to join a hospital band to stimulate movement and relieve boredom. Starr's first percussion instrument was a makeshift mallet crafted from a cotton bobbin, which he used to strike the cabinets beside his bed. Crawford, his surrogate sister, gave him a copy of the Alyn Ainsworth song "Bedtime for Drums" as a convalescence gift. He later described that hospital band as the real beginning of his drumming life, saying: "I never wanted anything else from there on."

• 3. Skiffle, Rings, and a Stage Name

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  Roy Trafford, a co-worker at Henry Hunt and Son, a Liverpool school equipment manufacturer, introduced Starr to skiffle music in mid-1956. The two began rehearsing in the factory cellar during lunch breaks. Trafford later recalled: "I played a guitar, and Ritchie just made a noise on a box... Sometimes, he just slapped a biscuit tin with some keys, or banged on the backs of chairs."

  They were joined by guitarist Eddie Miles, and the group eventually became known as the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group, named after a Liverpool landmark. They played songs including "Rock Island Line" and "Walking Cane", with Starr raking a thimble across a washboard. On Christmas Day 1957, Graves gave Starr a second-hand drum kit: a snare drum, a bass drum, and a cymbal fashioned from a rubbish bin lid. Crude as it was, the kit helped the band secure more prestigious local bookings.

  By November 1959, Starr had joined Al Caldwell's Texans, a group looking to convert from skiffle to full rock and roll, which soon settled on the name Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. Around this time, Richard Starkey became Ringo Starr. The name derived from the rings he wore and also suggested a country and western influence. His singing slots were billed as Starr Time. By early 1960, the Hurricanes had become one of Liverpool's leading bands, and in May they accepted a three-month residency at a Butlins holiday camp in Wales, which required Starr to end a five-year machinist apprenticeship he had started four years earlier.

• 4. Hamburg and the Beatles' Door

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  On the 1st of October 1960, the Hurricanes joined the Beatles at Bruno Koschmider's Kaiserkeller in Hamburg. Storm's band were given top billing over the Beatles and received higher pay. On the 15th of October 1960, Starr sat in with John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison for a recording session, backing Hurricanes singer Lu Walters on the song "Summertime." It was the first time he recorded with the group.

  Also during that Hamburg stay, Tony Sheridan valued Starr's drumming enough to invite him to leave the Hurricanes entirely and join his own band. Starr briefly did so in early 1962, after quitting the Hurricanes in January of that year, before returning for a third Butlins season.

  On the 14th of August 1962, Starr accepted an invitation from Lennon to join the Beatles. Two days later, Beatles manager Brian Epstein fired Pete Best. Best later recalled Epstein's words: "He said 'I've got some bad news for you. The boys want you out and Ringo in.' He said Beatles producer George Martin wasn't too pleased with my playing and the boys thought I didn't fit in."

  Starr first performed as a Beatle on the 18th of August 1962, at a horticultural society dance at Port Sunlight. The following day, at the Cavern Club, Best's fans held vigils outside the venue shouting "Pete forever! Ringo never!" Harrison received a black eye from one upset fan; Epstein's car tyres were flattened. He temporarily hired a bodyguard.

  At Starr's first recording session as a Beatle, on the 4th of September 1962, producer George Martin was unconvinced. For a follow-up session on the 11th of September, Martin replaced him with session drummer Andy White for the band's first single, "Love Me Do", while Starr played tambourine. Starr feared he was about to be discarded. Martin later clarified: "I simply didn't know what Ringo was like and I wasn't prepared to take any risks."

• 5. Beatlemania and the Drum Kit

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  By February 1964, the Beatles performed on The Ed Sullivan Show in New York City to a record 73 million viewers. Starr commented: "In the States I know I went over well. It knocked me out to see and hear the kids waving for me. I'd made it as a personality."

  The "Starr Time" tradition from the Hurricanes days continued during Beatles concerts. Lennon would place a microphone in front of Starr's kit and audiences would erupt. In 1964, "I love Ringo" lapel pins were the best-selling Beatles merchandise. Cher released her first single under the pseudonym Bonnie Jo Mason, "Ringo, I Love You", also that year.

  The Ludwig logo on the bass drum of Starr's American import kit gave the manufacturer such concentrated publicity that it became the dominant drum company in North America for the next twenty years. When the Beatles filmed A Hard Day's Night, critics praised Starr's deadpan one-liners and his non-speaking scenes. The extended silent sequences had to be arranged by director Richard Lester because Starr had been drinking all night and was, in his own words, "incapable of saying a line."

  Despite the acclaim, Starr grew increasingly isolated from the band's musical activities as the Beatles moved beyond conventional rock. During recording sessions he spent hours playing cards with road managers Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans while the other Beatles perfected tracks. After one difficult session during which McCartney harshly criticised his drumming, Starr briefly quit the Beatles and went on holiday to Sardinia, where he and his family stayed on a boat loaned by actor Peter Sellers. During lunch on the boat, a chef served octopus; Starr refused to eat it. A subsequent conversation with the ship's captain about the animal inspired the song "Octopus's Garden", which Starr wrote on a guitar during the trip and which would appear on the Beatles' Abbey Road album. When he returned to the studio two weeks later, Harrison had covered his drum kit in flowers as a welcome-back gesture.

• 6. The Drummer's Legacy

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  Starr's playing philosophy ran counter to the prevailing standard. He stated that he did not believe a drummer's role was to "interpret the song." Instead, he described his approach: "I am the foundation, and then I put a bit of glow here and there... If there's a gap, I want to be good enough to fill it."

  George Martin, who had initially doubted him, later revised his view entirely: "Ringo hit good and hard and used the tom-tom well... He's got tremendous feel. He always helped us to hit the right tempo for a song, and gave it that rock-solid back-beat that made the recording of all the Beatles' songs that much easier."

  Drummer Steve Smith described the shift Starr produced in the wider culture of drumming: before Starr, drum stars were measured by soloing ability. Starr's popularity introduced a new model in which the drummer was seen as an equal participant in composition. Phil Collins, who drummed for Genesis, said Starr was "vastly underrated" and cited the fills on "A Day in the Life" as "very, very complex things." Collins described his drumming on the 1983 Genesis song "That's All" as an affectionate attempt at a Ringo Starr drum part.

  The story about Lennon quipping that Starr "wasn't even the best drummer in the Beatles" is widely repeated but false. According to the source, the line actually originated in a 1981 episode of the BBC Radio 4 comedy series Radio Active, and gained wider circulation when the television comedian Jasper Carrott used it in 1983, three years after Lennon's death. In September 1980, Lennon told Rolling Stone that Starr was a "damn good drummer" whose talent would have emerged even without the Beatles.

  In his own opinion, Starr's finest recorded performance was on the Beatles' "Rain". In 1999, he was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame. In 2011, Rolling Stone readers named him the fifth-greatest drummer of all time.

• 7. Solo Years and Sobriety

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  The 1973 album Ringo, produced by Richard Perry, was the high-water mark of Starr's solo career. It reached number two in the US and number seven in the UK, and featured individual contributions from Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, a rare post-breakup convergence. Author Peter Doggett described the album as a template for everything that followed, writing that as a musician first rather than a songwriter, Starr "would rely on his friends and his charm, and if both were on tap, then the results were usually appealing."

  "Photograph", co-written with Harrison, reached number one in the US and number eight in the UK. "You're Sixteen", written by the Sherman Brothers, also hit number one in the US. The commercial momentum faded as the decade wore on, and Starr was candid about why. Speaking in 2001, he attributed the decline to not taking enough interest in his music, adding of himself and friends such as Harry Nilsson and Keith Moon: "We weren't musicians dabbling in drugs and alcohol; now we were junkies dabbling in music."

  Starr and Moon were both members of a Hollywood drinking club called the Hollywood Vampires. In April 1979, Starr was taken to the Princess Grace Hospital in Monte Carlo after becoming seriously ill with intestinal problems tracing back to the peritonitis he had suffered as a child. During an operation on the 28th of April, several feet of intestine had to be removed. He nearly died.

  During October and November 1988, Starr and his partner Barbara Bach attended a detox clinic in Tucson, Arizona, each completing a six-week treatment for alcoholism. Starr later described the years of addiction: "Years I've lost, absolute years... I've no idea what happened. I lived in a blackout."

  Having embraced sobriety, he launched Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band in 1989. Their first concert, on the 23rd of July 1989, drew an audience of ten thousand in Dallas, Texas. Since then he has toured with sixteen variations of the band, a career-spanning endeavour that has continued across more than three decades.

• 8. Honours and Persistence

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  Starr was inducted twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: first as a member of the Beatles in 1988, and again as a solo artist in 2015. Unlike the other former Beatles, who were inducted under the Performers category, Starr was inducted under Musical Excellence. In the 2018 New Year Honours, he was appointed a Knight Bachelor for services to music, knighted at Buckingham Palace by Prince William.

  The minor planet 4150 Starr, discovered on the 31st of August 1984 by Brian A. Skiff at the Anderson Mesa Station of the Lowell Observatory, was named in his honour. His star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, installed on the 8th of February 2010, sits at 1750 North Vine Street, in front of the Capitol Records Building, alongside those of Lennon, McCartney and Harrison.

  In December 2015, Starr and Bach auctioned personal and professional items through Julien's Auctions in Los Angeles. Among the lots were Starr's first Ludwig Black Oyster Pearl drum kit, instruments given to him by Harrison, Lennon and Marc Bolan, and a first-pressing copy of the Beatles' White Album numbered "0000001." The auction raised over $9 million, a portion of which went to the Lotus Foundation, the charity Starr and Bach established together.

  Despite stating in 2021 that he would no longer release full-length albums, preferring EPs instead, Starr released a country and roots album, Look Up, produced by T Bone Burnett, on the 10th of January 2025. A second album with Burnett, Long Long Road, followed on the 24th of April 2026, featuring Billy Strings, Sheryl Crow, St. Vincent, Molly Tuttle and Sarah Jaroux. The boy from Dingle who once beat biscuit tins with sticks has not stopped making music.