(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Fri 2 January 2026 19:45, UK
From the minute The Beatles broke up, Ringo Starr never had any problem being treated as the lovable Fab friend rather than a solo superstar.
He may have had an astonishing run of hits considering how little he wrote for his old band, but even to this day, he seems happy to have lived that part of his life and spend the rest of his days rocking and rolling for anyone who would have him. But Starr also wasn’t afraid to toot his own horn when he landed on a song that neither Lennon nor McCartney could have ever written.
Then again, a lot of Starr’s greatest tunes can be a lot more simplistic than a lot of people would be listening to. He’s completely fine laying the drums and never straying from the same formula that everyone from Buddy Holly to Chuck Berry made popular back in the day, and even if he has some help from Todd Rundgren or Joe Walsh behind the scenes every once in a while, he’s always at home in the old-school half the time.
In fact, some of the worst moments in Starr’s career usually came when he was playing against his strengths half the time. He always excelled in making rock and roll and the occasional country tune, so was anyone really asking him to channel his inner disco king on Ringo the 4th or start writing message songs in the 2010s about how everyone is on Facebook and losing their minds to technology?
No, we wanted the drummer who had all the likability of a fun uncle, and that always came through whenever he made his pop tunes. And while Ringo benefited from having every single member of The Beatles working on at least one tune, it also managed to highlight one of the greatest unsung partnerships of the Fab Four: Starr and George Harrison.
They didn’t always see eye to eye at every turn, but whereas Lennon and McCartney seemed to share the same brain when putting together their tunes, Harrison was more than happy to give Starr a hand when he started writing towards the end of their tenure. He was humble enough to leave his name off the songwriting credits on tunes like ‘Octopus’s Garden’ or when he came up with the foundation for ‘It Don’t Come Easy’, but no one in their right mind would have let a song like ‘Photograph’ slip away.
The song was far from Harrison’s spiritual exercises, but Starr considered their collaboration on the track to be one of the best moments of his career, saying, “‘Photograph’ is beautiful. That’s one of the best songs I’ve ever written. I was writing it with George Harrison, so that also helped. In those days, and still to this day, I only play three chords. I’d write these songs, and then I’d give them to George and he would put in 10 more chords, and they’d think I was the genius.”
And for all the jokes that have been made about Starr’s voice over the years, he actually manages to sell the tune a lot better than anyone else could. No, he’s not going for those McCartney-style high notes or anything, but when the song is about someone realising that their lover has walked out of their life and is never going to return, it’s a lot better to hear the downtrodden version of Starr than the same guy who was singing ‘Yellow Submarine’.
This probably explains why the song went down so well when Starr played it at The Concert for George later down the line. It was one of their few true collaborations on paper, but it’s also one of the few non-playful songs in Starr’s catalogue that could have easily stood alongside the greatest solo Beatles songs his old buddies came up with.
Related Topics