Ringo Starr

Ringo Starr: The Left-Handed Accident That Made the Beatles Swing

On 11 September 1962, at the Beatles' first proper session, George Martin quietly replaced his new drummer with a session man named Andy White. Ringo Starr played tambourine on "Love Me Do" and maracas on "P.S. I Love You" and thought: "That's the end, they're doing a Pete Best on me." Forty years later he was inducted into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame, alongside Buddy Rich. The distance between those two facts is the argument about Ringo Starr in miniature.

Two Years in Hospital

Richard Starkey was born on 7 July 1940 at 9 Madryn Street in the Dingle, one of the poorest districts of Liverpool. At six he developed appendicitis; peritonitis followed the operation and put him in a coma for days. He spent twelve months at Myrtle Street children's hospital, emerging in May 1948 barely literate and hopeless at arithmetic. Classmates at St Silas Church of England school nicknamed him Lazarus. At thirteen he caught tuberculosis and went into a sanatorium for two years. He never went back to school afterwards.

Those two illnesses did two things. They made him ineligible to sit the eleven-plus and closed off grammar school permanently. And in the sanatorium, a hospital band handed him a makeshift mallet cut from a cotton bobbin, and he discovered he liked hitting things in time. Back home in 1955 he stayed in listening to records and beating biscuit tins with sticks. His stepfather Harry Graves gave him a second-hand kit at Christmas 1957: a snare, a bass drum, and a cymbal made from a dustbin lid.

Starr Time

He worked briefly for British Railways, failed the medical, then waited tables on a day boat to North Wales. In mid-1956 he became an apprentice machinist at Henry Hunt and Son, a job he held for about five years. A workmate, Roy Trafford, introduced him to skiffle, and in 1957 they formed the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group.

In November 1959 he joined a band that would become Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. He took the name Ringo Starr from the rings he wore; his drum solos were billed as "Starr Time." Within months they were one of Liverpool's leading groups, and in October 1960 they landed in Hamburg at Bruno Koschmider's Kaiserkeller — with top billing over the Beatles. On 15 October he made his first recording alongside Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, backing the singer Lu Walters on "Summertime." Tony Sheridan thought enough of his playing to try to poach him.

The Drummer Nobody Wanted

On 14 August 1962 he accepted Lennon's invitation. Two days later Brian Epstein fired Pete Best — "The boys want you out and Ringo in." At the Cavern on 19 August, aggrieved Best loyalists chanted "Pete forever! Ringo never!", gave Harrison a black eye and flattened Epstein's tyres. Martin's reservation was less personal: "I simply didn't know what Ringo was like and I wasn't prepared to take any risks." Starr's own account is that Martin thought he "was crazy and couldn't play [...] because I was trying to play the percussion and the drums at the same time." By November he was receiving as much fan mail as anyone in the group, and the question was closed.

Inside the Beatles

He sang roughly one song per album — "Yellow Submarine" gave him his only British number one as lead singer, and "With a Little Help from My Friends" gave him the one everybody knows. He wrote and sang two Beatles songs outright, "Don't Pass Me By" and "Octopus's Garden," the latter conceived on a boat off Sardinia after a conversation with the captain about octopuses. He held co-writing credits on three more.

He was also, increasingly, the odd man out. Of *Sgt. Pepper's* he said flatly that it "wasn't our best album. That was the peak for everyone else, but for me it was a bit like being a session musician [...] They more or less direct me in the style I can play." He spent hours playing cards with the road managers while the others perfected tracks. During the White Album sessions, worn down by McCartney's overbearing manner, Lennon's passive aggression and Yoko Ono's permanent presence — and stung by McCartney's criticism of his drumming — he quit the band and went to Sardinia on a boat lent by Peter Sellers. He came back.

Why Ringo Is Called a Genius

This is not a claim about intellect, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest: he left school at thirteen barely able to read and told Dan Rather in 2024 that he never practised, found it boring, and "did all my learning with other musicians." The claim is about a physical craft, and it is more specific than most people who make it realise.

Starr is naturally left-handed and plays a right-handed kit. That single mismatch means his fills lead with the wrong hand and travel around the toms backwards — inside out, relative to how a right-handed drummer's hands would fall. The Beatles Bible describes him as "a rock-steady drummer, whose open hi-hat and four-to-the-floor bass drum helped energise The Beatles' sound," and notes that "his droll variations on this [...] delighted orthodox drummers and added to the newness of The Beatles' sound." What sounds like a stumble is a hand-path no right-hander would produce. He also pioneered matched grip, tuned his drums lower than the convention, and muffled his tonal rings — decisions that shaped how rock drums have sounded ever since. His playing "emphasised feel over technical virtuosity," and in doing so influenced a generation of drummers to think about their part compositionally rather than athletically. He named "Rain" as his best recorded performance, and it is the right answer.

Lennon, who had every reason to be unsentimental, put it plainly: "Ringo's a damn good drummer... I think Ringo's drumming is underrated." The institutions eventually agreed — Modern Drummer's Hall of Fame in 1999, the Percussive Arts Society in 2002, fifth-greatest drummer of all time in a 2011 *Rolling Stone* readers' poll, a solo induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015 on top of the Beatles' in 1988.

The counter-case is substantial. Martin's initial judgement was that he could not play. McCartney's criticism was harsh enough to drive him out of the band. He wrote two songs in eight years and admitted the limit: "I jump into chords that no one seems to get into. Most of the stuff I write is twelve-bar." The author Peter Doggett's summary of the solo career is devastating and fair — he relied "on his friends and his charm, and if both were on tap, then the results were usually appealing." Take away Harrison's songs and Richard Perry's production and the hits thin out fast. The honest verdict is that Ringo was not a virtuoso and never claimed to be. He had taste, time, and an accident of handedness he turned into a signature.

Legacy

The solo career produced two American number ones in 1973, "Photograph" and "You're Sixteen," and a run of albums that thinned out badly by the late seventies. He beat the alcoholism that had erased what he called "absolute years" of his life in a Tucson clinic in 1988 with his wife Barbara Bach, and came back the following year with the first All-Starr Band — sixteen line-ups and counting since. He narrated *Thomas the Tank Engine*, played Mr. Conductor, directed a T. Rex film, and was knighted in the 2018 New Year Honours for services to music. His Ludwig logo, sitting on the front of the bass drum on every television broadcast of 1964, made the company North America's dominant drum manufacturer for twenty years. He is the only Beatle whose contribution is still argued about, which is its own kind of monument.

Achievements

• Member of the Order of the British Empire — 1965
• Academy Award for Best Original Score — 1971
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — 2015
• Knight Bachelor — 2018
• Instruments: drum, percussion instrument and drum kit
• Genres: rock music, pop rock and pop music