Ringo Starr, the god with feet of clay

I’ve always wondered about Ringo fans. No band, before or since, inspired favouritism like the Beatles. If you liked your boys edgy, you chose John. If you wanted them pretty, it was Paul, who was equally if not more domineering than John but hid it well. Some girls went for the bashful, mysterious George: Joan Bakewell was one of them. But wasn’t Ringo the real counter-cultural choice? His posture, his face, his entire being said: what the hell is going on? As the girls of the early Sixties screamed in a new era of sexual liberation, those who chose Ringo kept a toe outside the madness. Perhaps they wanted to mother him, small and upbeat as he was, and shield him from the chaos he was caught in. Ringo, of course, came last to the band (someone has to) replacing Pete Best on the advice of George Harrison in August 1962. No one on the outside was happy about the change, least of all the Beatles’ roadie Neil Aspinall, who was at the time engaged in an affair with Pete Best’s mother. The screams of “We want Pete!” are audible on the early recordings Tom Doyle pored over for this book. Ringo’s interviews are famously unrevealing, and limited to a strict 20 minutes (such a nightmare for a journalist), so, although Doyle has met him on many occasions, he needs tapes, YouTube clips and other field evidence to flesh out the man and get beyond the platitudes, the shrugs and the peace signs. Ringo’s trouble with speaking is entirely understandable. Of the many Beatles counterfactuals – what would have happened had Paul never gone to the Woolton church fete and met John? What if John had never met Yoko? – no one could deny that the Beatles would still have existed without Ringo. That must be a tough one to live with, especially when you are one of the last two remaining Beatles on the planet, side by side with the modern Mozart. That the band would have been the same thing, though, is doubtful: it was, McCartney always said, a case of the magic circle within the square, and sometimes the person to complete the magic circle is the one who fits in seamlessly. Pete Best was very earnest, while Ringo spoke in one-liners, like Lennon but kinder, batting back press-conference enquiries with surreal jokes. He was the best actor among them: the Express compared his A Hard Day’s Night performance to Harpo Marx. Perhaps, in a more obvious way than the others, Ringo embodies what Ian Leslie described, in his recent John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, as a whole new 1960s personality created by the Beatles – self-deprecating, self-ironising, thoroughly modern in its way. Ringo was pure working class while the others were middle or aspiring to it. His tiny house in Dingle, Toxteth, is now an Airbnb: a mural of his face grins on the side of the pub his mother worked in as a barmaid. The streets around his childhood home are part of a new anti-gentrification scheme whereby young couples can buy a cottage for £70k, providing they’re local and promise to live there five years. But while Richard Starkey was very poor, estranged from his father and spent months and months of his childhood in hospital with tuberculosis and peritonitis, he also had a securer home, in some ways, than John and Paul, with a mother who adored him and a stepfather who not only adored him but bought him his first drum kit. Note: this does not mean the same as it would today. In the late 1950s, people didn’t own their own instruments. Liverpool’s 500 working bands would hire their amps and basses from shops like Hessy’s on Stanley Street in the city centre. Possessing his own kit, Ringo was in high demand as a drummer, swept up into that first generation of poor boys who made it to millionaire rockstars. Yet he has always had so little to say about it. He and Paul McCartney have the same strange habit of talking about the band in the third person (“We were in the Beatles”), as though they can’t quite believe it happened. Tom Doyle has a convincing theory that they spent the Seventies and Eighties going through various stages of PTSD after the band’s break-up, and are probably still in recovery. In 2008 Ringo released a strange, angry video telling fans to stop sending him fanmail: anything posted after 20 October “is gonna be tossed!”. He had some pop success in the Seventies, which at first suggested he’d come off rather well with regard to the break-up and the PTSD – a string of solo numbers that charted, and many slapstick comedy films. But by the late Seventies he was drinking heavily: “I would come to your house just to insult you,” he said. He ruined his delicate stomach with over-indulgence and had to have five feet of his intestines removed. Unable to drink and smoke for a time, would hang out in the lobby of the Hôtel de Paris, where he was living, lighting other people’s fags just to get a buzz. He once said that he sometimes felt like he had 50 people in his brain, and they all had something to say. These days, Ringo is known as the most Zen of the Beatles. He still repeats a mantra the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi taught him every day, though he hated the famous trip to India in 1968 and had a lower attention span for meditation than the others – he was only able to focus for an hour at a time and preferred the local shopping. He later compared Rishikesh to Butlin’s. His peritonitis left him with all sorts of allergies – to onions and garlic and curry – so he’s been a vegetarian since 1965. In much of Doyle’s book, Ringo is a bystander, mediator, observer or packhorse, lending fellow rockers his Montagu Square flat when they needed it; beating the kit through 18 takes of Lennon’s “Revolution”; accepting Yoko Ono’s constant presence far quicker than the others did – possibly because he had so much sitting and waiting to do himself in the studio, just like her. He was, of course, the first Beatle to leave: he walked out during the White Album sessions because Paul was pushing him, and he began to feel that he was “playing pretty shitty”. He had a tendency to feel “unloved and out of it” around the other members. As he holidayed on a yacht owned by Peter Sellers to think his decision over, the remaining Beatles stayed in the studio and shared out playing the drums on “Back in the USSR”. Then they sent Ringo a telegram saying, “You’re the best rock and roll drummer in the world, come on home, we love you.” That naughty quip – “Best drummer in the world? Ringo wasn’t even the best drummer in the Beatles!” – was said not by John Lennon, as pop lore goes, but by Jasper Carrott in 1983. Ringo was certainly the first drummer to be a celebrity in his own right. He has a shambling originality, thought to come from his left-handed playing of a drum kit rigged for a right-handed man, his attaching of felt to the snare and the bass pedals, and his habit of doing little fills round the voice and the guitar, like a second voice in harmony. Yet the fact that I know this says much of the flak his playing has taken over the years, and the arguments people have used to defend it: who defends McCartney’s bass or Harrison’s guitar? Starr will always be viewed as an ordinary earthling in a band of alien beings. This is the lasting interest in him – the feet of clay. It was a difference that by, his own account, he always felt. Ringo: A Fab LifeTom DoyleNew Modern, 384pp, £25 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops