(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)

Tue 13 May 2025 20:13, UK

A lot more goes into a rock and roll career than a bunch of good songs. Although a lot can be done with having the right material to work with whenever you go into the studio, there’s a certain mystique around some of the greatest artists that ever lived that makes them irresistible even when they’re not performing onstage. And while The Beatles had their own sense of charisma amongst each other during every era of their career, Ringo Starr knew there were a few times when his reputation was in jeopardy.

Then again, Starr was always the one who got made fun of a little too much compared to his bandmates. He might not have had a hand in writing most of the songs as his fellow bandmates, but had he not provided the perfect backbeat to many of their tunes, every one of their hits would have fallen apart, whether it was the cymbal work on ‘I Feel Fine’ or every single second of ‘Rain’.

And when he got his share of vocal highlights, he was always a bit more lighthearted than his fellow Fabs. John Lennon and Paul McCartney could certainly get away with writing a tearjerking ballad, and even George Harrison had the odd love song that tugged at people’s heartstrings, but it seemed like Starr would get the kind of tunes anyone could sing along with like ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’ or ‘Yellow Submarine’.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, either. Some of Starr’s best moments often come from when he’s playing the opposite of what everyone else is doing half the time. For all of the strange detours that happen on an album like Abbey Road, it’s nice to have ‘Octopus’s Garden’ to serve as a nice palette cleanser before getting back into the stranger stuff that the rest of the band was working on.

As far as weird moments are concerned, though, all bets were off when they began work on The White Album. There are moments on the record that are almost designed not to have any rhyme or reason to them, and when they do find some space to calm down, it’s usually with the other members’ sombre tunes like ‘Julia’ or ‘Blackbird’. So for an album stockpiled with weird moments, how the hell did Starr end up closing up shop once the horrors of ‘Revolution 9’?

“I told Paul this. They ruined my whole career when they gave me ‘Good Night’. I wanted to be a rocker.”

Ringo Starr

Even though he sings the song ‘Good Night’ perfectly to leave everything on a happy note, Starr felt that his decision to sing it was one of the most glaring mistakes of their career, saying, “I told Paul this. They ruined my whole career when they gave me ‘Good Night’. I wanted to be a rocker. They’d written it, and they felt I could present that in a great way, which was a nice feeling.”

Despite Starr not wanting to be a balladeer, he’s not half bad at it, either. He often made casual putdowns when it came to his own voice, but listening back to the way he delivers this tune, it’s hard to think of any other Beatle having that kind of calming demeanour, even if Macca thought that Lennon did a fantastic version of it that was never officially released. 

But if Starr didn’t like the idea of not being a rocker, he did at least lean into it a little bit, managing to make albums like Sentimental Journey work well enough, even if it wasn’t what everyone expected out of him. He stood by his principles as a rocker first and foremost, but had he stayed behind as the lone drummer behind the scenes singing the old rock and roll tune, he would have been selling himself short in lots of ways.

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