RINGO – A Fab Life by Tom Doyle

Pity the poor drummers, left high and dry when the band no longer needs them, even one as famous as Ringo Starr. Singers and guitarists are shown the red carpet but drummers can’t figure out what to do with themselves. Charlie Watts sat in, but couldn’t drive, his high-priced cars while reading his ultra-rare first editions; Keith Moon drank himself to death; Ginger Baker squandered his riches on polo; Clem Burke played with a Blondie tribute band. Ringo tried pretty much anything and everything, and by 1979 was perpetually drunk. Diagnosed with a life-threatening intestinal blockage that year, a doctor told him that if he left the hospital without the recommended treatment he would die. To his great credit he sobered up, though it took a while, and is still with us, now Sir Ringo. In July he’ll be 86.

        There is no rational explanation why Ringo has, until now, been largely ignored by biographers but to the best of my knowledge A Fab Life – great title, by the way – is only the second [1] book to have been written on him while those about his band (and three bandmates) could fill a library. Perhaps the reason lies in this quote from Ringo’s close friend and fellow drummer Jim Keltner: “He seemed too overly humble… almost beyond humble… totally unaware that he’d done anything. That’s what I must have been like to be the drummer with The Beatles.”

Ringo’s diffidence is to blame, then, for the paucity of books about him but the truth of the matter is that his life is just as interesting, and indeed more comical, than John, Paul or George. Within a year of being drafted into The Beatles, just as they began their recording career, he found himself amongst the most famous men in the UK, and a year after that he was America’s favourite Beatle, and all the while he just kept grinning blithely and muttering plays on words, amusingly dry malapropisms that became known as Ringoisms, the best known of which was the title of The Beatles’ first film. 

This is a good-hearted book about a good-hearted man, and it covers all the important events in Ringo’s life, albeit not precisely in linear fashion. Wisely, Tom Doyle has opted to tell Ringo’s story through a series of snapshots, seventy in all, bite-sized chapters that are roughly chronological and in their often droll fashion somehow suit the character of the smallest, oldest and most lovable Beatle. There is a school of thought that Ringo, born Richard Starkey and known to his friends as Richy, is the luckiest man alive but he has lived up to his billing, even if his passage through life, as recorded here, occasionally reminded me of the character of Chance The Gardner from Being There, Peter Sellers’ last great movie role. 

If you’ve taken the trouble to keep tabs on Ringo’s extraordinary life during the past 50 years then you probably won’t find much that is new in this book. Nevertheless, Doyle has done his research admirably and listed among the many chapters every film in which Starr has appeared and every album that carried his name – and there’s lots of them, certainly more than I thought – and every one of them is critically analysed, their merits or otherwise noted in a detached manner.  One thing I didn’t know, and that Doyle makes clear, is that the well-known aphorism that Ringo wasn’t the best drummer in The Beatles, falsely attributed to John Lennon, was in reality a Jasper Carrott joke, uttered in 1987, that Carrott subsequently regretted. “I’ve never met Ringo,” says Carrott, “but if he was in the same room as me, I’d skirt around it very quickly.”

Of more import, perhaps, is the genuine love that Ringo inspires among his many friends. Aside from the period when he was so drunk that people avoided him, no one has a bad word to say about him, which reinforces the widespread view that he was the diplomat amongst the Beatles; bluff, warm and engaging, never one to raise his voice in anger or throw a tantrum, a born light entertainer who was probably more at home during The Beatles’ early years than those that followed. Indeed, Doyle’s portrait led me to feel a bit sorry for Ringo during those times in his life when he was drifting aimlessly, famous for having once been famous and, for a while in his middle age, little else. It comes as something of a relief when, sober, he rediscovers his love of drumming and goes back on the road with a series of bands under the Ringo’s All Starrs banner. 

Ringo: A Fab Life has 389 pages but, sadly, contains no photographs and isn’t indexed. This is poor, and can probably be blamed on excessive penny-pinching by Putnam, the publishers. What’s more, the Lennon quote on page 294 about the likelihood of The Beatles reforming isn’t credited to Melody Maker, let alone myself who conducted that particular interview in 1973. 

[1] The first was Ringo Starr: Straight Man Or Joker by Alan Clayson (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1991, subsequently republished by Sanctuary) which appears to be out of print though used copies can be found on the Internet.