I don’t dwell on it or live with that fear, but I suppose I’m like everyone else‑we all think if we’re going to get, we’re going to get the death one. I remember one time Barbara was having a procedure and she was in there getting better afterwards and I’m trying to wake her up-“Come on, let’s go, let’s go!”īut there is a fear factor. So no, I’m not like, “Oh, I’ll be back in hospital.” But I can’t even visit hospitals, I hate them. And we sort of conned our way out so that I could have my fifteenth birthday out of hospital, because I had my fourteenth birthday there. Yeah, I had TB, which in those days meant you spent eleven months in hospital. Has this time made you think about that isolation? You spent lots of time as a kid in the hospital. But you’ve just got to get into that space of, this is it. In June last year, we thought it would all be over. And then I just got over it.Īnd what did we know? Last March, I told everybody that we’re cancelling the tour in May and June, but we’re going to do it exactly like that next year. So I was like “Oh, man, I want to be on the road, I want to play, I want to be out there ‘Peace-and-Love’-ing.” And that’s not going to happen, but that’s how I reacted. But odd days, I’ve just had enough-“I want to do this, I want do that.” Last year was pretty hard, because I had two tours booked. “Now we’ve got some of the other part,” he says. Starr expresses excitement about the side of the Beatles that the new film will show, since Let It Be was such a downer, a sour eulogy for the greatest band of all time. This summer will see the hugely anticipated release of Get Back, for which Peter Jackson ( Lord of the Rings) has recut the footage shot for 1970’s Let It Be movie. In addition to Zoom In, Starr recently put out Ringo Rocks, a fat photo book chronicling thirty years of touring with the All-Starrs it’s worth noting that soon, he will be affiliated with this group four times longer than his stint with the Beatles. Behind him on the screen, a couple of painted Ringo cut-outs are visible (one with a Santa hat), and an acoustic guitar hangs on the wall, with a Rubber Soul-era photo of him embossed on the front. Starr looks astonishingly fit for an octogenarian, in a black zippered pull-over, his hair a little longer than the usual close crop and a bit tousled on the top. “I could never do it, it’s just something that’s not in me. It’s the same crowd, we just go and sit somewhere else.”Įven with the enforced solitude, he still can’t bring himself to practice the drums without a band present. I’ve been to three other homes in a year and they’ve been to mine. “I have several friends, and we hang out,” he says. A few musicians came by to record their parts, but mostly it was done by sending tracks around digitally-included the sing-a-long choir (which features everyone from Paul McCartney and Dave Grohl to Chris Stapleton and Jenny Lewis) on the first single, “Here’s to the Nights.”īut while he remains addicted to the road, Starr has resolved himself to limiting his contact (beyond Barbara Bach, his wife of forty years) to the minimum. The project was mostly assembled in the room he’s currently sitting in, and an adjacent guesthouse where his drums are set up. The tracks range from the roots reggae of “Waiting for the Tide to Turn” to the solidly rocking “Teach Me to Tango,” produced by studio whiz Sam Hollander, who’s worked with folks like Panic! at the Disco and Katy Perry. He had to cancel two tours last year with his All-Starr Band, but he hasn’t wasted his pandemic time, recording a five-song EP, appropriately titled Zoom In, which comes out this Friday. Though he celebrated his 80th birthday last year, Sir Richard Starkey has had no trouble with keeping himself going. But in our current circumstances, he says that “it keeps me going.” “I get up in the morning,” he says over Zoom from Roccabella West, his home studio in Los Angeles, “and I beg my publicist to give me people like you to talk to!” The inconceivable fame that comes with being a former Beatle has sometimes made him seem reticent in conversation (“In some people’s minds, we’re still those people from Hard Day’s Night,” he once said to me, “like the boys that never grew up"). In lockdown, Ringo Starr has a new appreciation for doing interviews.
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