#and I guess the whole point was to act insufferable and to get his interviewees to act out

[thestarsarecool]

Who The Hell Does RINGO STARR Think He Is?

Tom Hibbert, Q, June 1992

He was The Lovable One who cracked his daft mop-top jokes for The Queen. The Fab With The Big Nose who you could take home to meet yer mum and yer dad. But no more. For he just experienced a nasty charm by-pass and suffered a sudden humourectomy when Tom Hibbert innocently enquired...

RINGO, WHY do you wear two rings on each hand?

"Because I can't fit them through my nose."

Beethoven figures in one of your songs. What do you think of Beethoven?

"He's great. Especially his poetry."

How did you find America?

"We went to Greenland and made a left turn."

But that was nearly 30 years ago, innocent times when the small one – Ringo, how tall are you? "Two feet, nine inches" – with the extended nose sat with the other three before the press of the world and cracked his mop-top jokes, playing the clown and acting the goat, The Lovable One, the one you could take home to meet yer mum and yer dad. In The Great Throne Room at Buckingham Palace, October 26, 1965, the Queen asked the "Fabs" how long they had been together and, quick as a flash, came Starkey's reply. "40 years!" The wag.

It is now much later, April 1992, but that "natural" Scouse "wit" of olden times remains intact: The Lovable One clambers aboard a podium at London's Dorchester Hotel and drily announces: "My name is Ringo Starr." The assembled members of the press laugh loudly at the pithy sally; a female reporter from Belgium, in the excitement of the moment, squeaks "Yah!" It is quite like old tunes...

We are gathered here today to hear exciting news. Ringo is about to release a new LP and it is called Time Takes Time. Furthermore, his new amusingly-named All-Starr Band – featuring Dave Edmunds and Joe Walsh and Todd Rundgren and diminutive trampoline champion Nils Lofgren – is touring Europe in the summer. Cameras clack and the PR woman sternly warns us to limit our questions to "the present and the future" (ie nothing about them – The Beatles – and nothing about alcoholism, if you please). And so the probing begins as a girl from Sweden asks the occasional drummer why he is starting his tour in Sweden: "Why not?" Uproarious laughter. And a girl from Italy asks him why he is finishing his tour in Italy: "Crazy question. It may be a surprise to you, lady, but I am a musician." Hoots. And a girl from somewhere equally foreign asks him if he is "reaching out to the new generation" – "You had zis Thomas Ze Tank Engine, no?" – and he says he's just playing his kit now because he is a musician and he likes to feel the "love" flowing from an audience because it's in his blood. Somewhere along the way we learn that Ringo has absolutely no intention whatsoever of playing with George Harrison at tonight's Albert Hall concert in aid of The Natural Law Party because what Ringo's doing now is promoting his album which is really jolly good and everything so everybody should buy it...

TWO HOURS later, upstairs in a hotel suite, Ringo Starr is staring at me through his darkened spectacles. The expression on his somewhat wizened face is somewhat sour. "This record deserves to be a Number 1," he is saying. "It's a fine album." The ready quips are not dropping from the lips of The Lovable One this afternoon. His impressive nose is twitching in irritation. I have made a dreadful mistake. I have dared to ask him about...them.

He had entered the room in seemingly stony mood. He had thrust himself down upon a sofa and had glowered. "Is this yer first time?" he had muttered. Er, come again, Mr Starkey? "Is this yer first time?" My first time what? My first time in a posh suite at The Dorchester Hotel or what? "Just joking," he had muttered bemusingly. My opening question had been designed to be one of the most psychologically challenging – nay, disturbing – ever to be posed within the context of a rock interview. It was this: Have you, Mr Starr, or have you not, felt a twinge of pity ever for Pete Best (The Good-Looking One who was booted out in favour of Ringo, of whom John Lennon was once heard to remark, "When I feel my head start to swell, I look at Ringo and know perfectly well we're not supermen")? There was a pause containing the faintest twist of menace. "Crazy question," The Nice One murmured, adding a withering stare for good measure.

"Did. I. Ever. Feel. Sorry. For. Pete. Best?" Yes, that was the enquiry. "No. Why should I? I was a better player than him. That's how I got the job. It wasn't on no personality. It was that I was a better drummer and I got the phone call. I never felt sorry for him. A lot of people have made careers out of knowing, er...The Beatles."

He has said it. He has uttered that word, that thing that we are not supposed to mention because Ringo has "moved on" and is living for today and for tomorrow and not for, in the word of his old mucker in the rhythm section, yesterday. He has said "Beatles". So can we talk about The Beatles, then? Ringo shrugs his shoulders. "Sure," he grunts. So tell me about your image. You were The Goofy One. Was this an imposed personality or was it the real Starkey or what?

"That's not how I am. That was how we were in the movie, in Help! and A Hard Day's Night. That was what people felt we were like."

But didn't you mind always being given the goony songs to sing, 'Octopus's Garden' and 'Yellow Submarine' and that awful one about "the greatest fool who ever made the big time"?

"They were writing a lot heavier songs than I was and the ones they wrote for me were never that heavy, either. That's what made the combination that we were. All completely different but together we were a mighty force."

Presumably this "difference" in personalities was what made the break-up of The Beatles particularly acrimonious and acid. Discuss.

"That's stupid. We'd changed. We didn't have the time to put in all that energy. We were all married then. Most of us were married. I had children. John had a kid. George got married. So it was a natural end to it. We finished. That's it."

At the morning's press conference, Ringo had been banging on about how you can't beat the feeling of playing live, of how he's "addicted" to it, the love teeming from the audience, the "buzz", the "vibe" etcetera. But if we examine the history (and leave out the Ringo Starr and his All-Star Band jaunt of '89), we see that since '66, he has played on stage hardly at all. This is not a criticism, I was just wondering whether...

"Look, playing live is how I started," he snaps. "That's where my blood is. We played live for four years as The Beatles but in the end it was impossible because the reaction we used to get was so loud that I was turning into a bad musician because I could only keep the off-beat, so we were deteriorating. How often do you want to play stadiums? We as The Beatles lost the contact. I want to feel the love from the audience and you don't get that in a stadium. Bruce Springsteen loses the love and the audience contact and Guns N' Roses and the Stones and Paul McCartney, they all lose the love and the contact. They just forget that it's a great privilege to play to an audience, so on my tour I'm playing Liverpool and I'm playing Hammersmith and..."

And so he goes on for several weeks about all the intimate sheds he's going to bash his drums and sing that one about "You're sixteen and you're beautiful and your mii-iine," or whatever it is, in.

So stadiums are useless. I had always imagined, in my simplicity, that The Beatles at Shea Stadium was just one of the most thrilling moments in all of popular music history. Am I entirely incorrect?

Ringo tuts and he crosses his arms, a huff-orientated posture.

"Shea Stadium was brilliant," he goes. "We were breaking new ground. Of course it was brilliant. But if you see the video on Shea Stadium, you see how crazy we all were, anyway. John wasn't playing it note-for-note. John went mad. It was a thrill."

Did Ringo go mad all those years ago, what with all those American girls saying he should be President and swooning at his shaking fringe?

"It wasn't only American girls, you know," he points out, helpfully. "It was English girls and Swedish girls. So, yeah. I went absolutely mad round about 1964. My head was just so swollen. I thought I was a God, a living God. And the other three looked at me and said. Excuse me, I am the God. We all went through a period of going mad."

Presumably drugs made a major contribution to the mental mayhem.

"The drugs came later. Well, there was always some element of alcohol and amphetamine and then several other substances came into play and then The Beatles was over."

And in '68, you all went to India to "groove" with Mr Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. That was mad...

"Well, I was in hospital with my ex-wife (Maureen) delivering Jason, my second son, and I got back and there was two messages on the answerphone, a message from John and a message from George, and they were saying. We've been to see this Maharishi guy. So I said. What's that all about? so they told me how great it all was and I met Maharishi and I fell in love with Transcendental Meditation and I got to India and I took two suitcases, one full of clothes and one full of baked beans because I don't eat curry, and it was high for a while and then I thought. 'That's the end of it for me, thank you very much'..."

By this time, the drummer of the Perky Personality had embarked upon his unlikely career as a screen actor, playing a gardener who has love on billiard tables in the hippy sex romp Candy (which featured Marlon Brando as a guru personage not a billion miles removed from Mr Maharishi), and then a foil for Peter Sellers in the simply awful The Magic Christian (and then being actually quite good as a teddy boy drummer in That'll Be The Day). Ringo doesn't think that talking about his Thespian pursuits is very interesting at all because he's moved on and music's the thing, like...

"We just decided we wanted to be an actor. I'm not interested in that acting anymore..."

In the mid '70s, Starr made (along with some really dud LPs) a couple of splendid pop singles: 'Photograph' and 'It Don't Come Easy'. The man who, in 1963, said "whenever I hear another drummer I know I'm no good" (and who sits here today peering at me with a certain chill and insisting "I am the best rock drummer on earth and it's not just me saying that, many fine musicians say that" when I have never even questioned his capabilities) comes over refreshingly modest for once when I say I liked those tunes.

"Well, I just decided to make some singles because The Beatles always took so long to make albums and so I started to write but I could never finish a song. I was great for two verses and a chorus but I could never finish a song so I'd have to ask George to finish it and we'd just have rows because George would always put in the 'God verse' and I don't sing about God, so after a few smashes it all went downhill because, er, well, yer know..."

I do know. It all went downhill because Ringo was hitting the sauce with alarming abandon.

"It was my addictive personality. Suddenly you're starting to drink at nine in the morning and I was procrastinating me balls off and I was just trapped as an alcoholic, a drunk."

He was too drunk even to pay any great attention to the shooting of John Lennon, he says.

"I wasn't well when he got murdered and I wasn't well after it. I was in such great pain that I hardly noticed..."

The voice of Thomas The Tank Engine and The Fat Controller was killing itself with booze. But then – hey presto! – Ringo booked into De-Tox Mansions, USA, and everything was all right again.

"One day I had a second, maybe half-a-second, of clarity and I was in so much pain and I knew that Barbara (Bach, second wife who he met on the set of the dismal Caveman film in '81) had mentioned a sort of re-hab situation. She had a problem, too. She found this place in Arizona. I haven't had a drink or a drug since and that was October '88 and I've given up smoking cigarettes, too."

Ringo was cured of his urges by the power of love.

"It was love. It's love. And the proof of the difference in my life-style is that I've put a band together, I've made this album and..."

Ringo takes this opportunity to tell me what a great musician he is and how his new LP is really jolly good and everything until I interrupt to suggest that however good his new LP is, it can hardly hope to top Abbey Road, can it? He looks at me as if I am deranged:

"What, as an album? My album can't beat the Abbey Road album as an album?" That is, in a nutshell, what I was driving at.

"Well, the so-called B-side of Abbey Road is one of my favourite sides, the one with 'Bathroom Window' and 'Polythene Pam', but just by chance I was re-listening to Sgt. Pepper the other day and that's a fine album too and it's a bloody marvellous album, it's a bloody fine album and The White Album was great because we were like a band after Pepper and all the craziness and Rubber Soul was great and the first album which took 12 hours to put down was an achievement...So I don't know what you're talking about. That was 30 years ago, man. I'm still making records and you can hear that I'm a great musician on the new record, Time Takes Time, if you can ever be bothered to mention it. This is an actual bloody legend in front of you. I'm not expecting you to comb the bloody legend's hair but you could mention the new LP and these other fine musicians I'm still playing with."

Ringo Starr is close to rage and I don't know quite why. I decide to placate him by talking about his All-Starr Band. This ploy is not a success. What is it like working with Todd Rundgren, I enquire? Todd Rundgren's a bit mad, isn't he?

Ringo lunges forward in the sofa, almost doing himself a mischief.

"What? What? Have you met him? Why would you say shit like that? You don't even know the man. How dare you say shit like that about a friend?"

I meant "mad" as in "genius". It is a compliment.

"You're talking shit. That's like saying Frank Zappa's mad. Frank Zappa's probably the nicest man I ever met in this business. I've been in the game too long for this shit! I've done my bit. I've made a record, I've made the thing and I hope it's a Number 1 because I've done my bit, I'm promoting the thing...or I am trying to promote the thing..."

What manner of umbrage is this? Ringo Starr seems to feel – and strongly – that my failure to spend this interview discussing his new LP and the brilliance of Tom Petty and Jeff "Skunk" Baxter and Harry "Schmilsson" Nilsson and everybody else who played on it – is impudence of the first order. But wouldn't such an interview be a trifle limiting and boring and...? I am unable to make this suggestion because The Clown, The Lovable One, seen here in his updated role of Pop's Mister Crosspatch, continues to rant away...

"If you bothered to listen to the single 'Weight Of The World' you'd hear this line in it which goes...er, er...well, it says that you can't live in the past and that sums it up. Because you're living in the past. As far as this interview has been going on, it's shit because it's been The Beatles interview and you haven't even mentioned Time Takes Time or Weight Of The World. But that's OK. You've got the time. That's what you asked. I've answered your questions. And..." Ringo rises from the sofa, two feet nine inches of unbridled anger ..."That is it!" And it is. He flounces from the room, a cry of "Thanks a lot!" that oozes with sarcasm, his cheery farewell. What this man needs, in my estimation, is a stiff drink, or a cig, or both...

THAT NIGHT, on stage at the Albert Hall, George Harrison played 'Taxman' and a lot of other aged songs and then announced "a blast from all our pasts" and on bounded Ringo. How could this be? Had not the man assured us earlier in the day that he would most definitely not be gracing this political rally thing with his presence? Well, there he was, anyway, and he played drums on 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps' and 'Roll Over Beethoven', no doubt feeling all the love wafting up from the auditorium. Then, at the conclusion of this horrid old rock'n'roll novelty, up strode some representatives of the peculiar Natural Law Party to talk embarrassingly about this "night of magic" that the crowd had been privileged to witness. And as the spiritual oration continued, a lone cry of protest rang out from the back of the stage, a bellow of annoyance, a sharp "Shut up!" The culprit of this ill-mannered intrusion was identified only as a man with drumsticks and a great big nose…