This article is taken from the July 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Ringo Starr’s grinning, head-shaking figure flailing away behind his Ludwig drum kit was as much a trademark of the early Fab Four as their collarless jackets and three-part harmonies. In interviews, his deadpan wit was the equal of John Lennon’s more acerbic humour, and the morose persona he presented in the 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night broke just as many female hearts as Paul McCartney’s doe eyes.

All this helped make this practitioner of a craft that had previously been a ticket to a lifetime of standing in the shadows of others the most popular Beatle: sales of “I Love Ringo” badges left those for his three colleagues standing. Such was The Beatles’ stature, it made Starr among the most popular human beings alive.

“What an amazing drummer Ringo Starr is. Few people have ever caught on … but he has the most incredible feel”

However, when it comes to his status as musician, Starr was and is spoken of in terms ranging from dismissive to derisive. While Lennon and McCartney were acclaimed as the greatest songwriters of the twentieth century and George Harrison was recognised as a guitarist and songwriter of considerable talent, the consensus is that Starr’s one distinction was having the most fortunate bit-part in history. 

It was a view which only increased in intensity in the late Sixties when for the first time the drum kit began to be seen as an instrument as interesting as the guitar: late-Sixties critics expressed scepticism about whether it was really Starr providing the necessarily adventurous percussion on the band’s increasingly ornate fare. 

This attitude continued after the group’s split. Decades on, a gag in an episode of the BBC sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf proposed a parallel universe where “it could be that Hitler won the Second World War; it could be something even more incredible, like perhaps Ringo was a really good drummer”. 

All of this is intensified by the perception of Starr’s post-Beatles life as a vast coda. By the early Eighties, even the most diehard Fabs fans had ceased to view his spotty solo albums delivered in his nasal, flat voice as essential. His mid-Seventies quote “You just try to fill the day” has an oddly melancholy quality for a vastly wealthy man. Born Richard Starkey in 1940, Ringo has since 1981 at least found married bliss with actress Barbara Bach, was knighted in 2018 and leads lucrative tours with his celebrity-packed All-Starr Band. As though submitting to assumptions, however, these performances typically find him disdaining to climb behind a drum kit and taking the microphone instead. 

So vast is the chasm between the way Starr is perceived and his actual talents that it would not be going too far to say he is the most underrated musician of all time. While his talent is not of the same stripe as hyperactive geniuses such as Ginger Baker, Keith Moon or Mitch Mitchell, it actually involves greater variety and imagination. He serves songs rather than swamps them, at the same time providing character. His nuanced skill frequently lifts recordings from the merely great to the classic. Witness “She Loves You” (1963). The Beatles’ second number one, it summed up their singular life-affirming charm and ensured they became less a chart act, more a social phenomenon. 

Starr’s contribution is pitch perfect. To a recipe containing an unforgettable vocal hook, an anthemic chorus and trilling harmonies, he adds a dramatic opening roll, breathless pace, sizzling hi-hat and gleeful cymbal-splashes, the perfect final ingredients to a dish of exhilaration. 

Just as “She Loves You” quickly came to seem like juvenilia in the context of The Beatles’ lightning-fast evolution, so Starr’s contributions rapidly assumed new levels of sophistication. On the band’s exquisitely gloomy 1965 single “Ticket to Ride” he plays an extraordinary dragged beat, orchestrates an unexpected but seamless shift into double time in the bridge and at the end of every chorus throws in a delightful vibrating roll. 

That he makes the drum track interesting in itself is something of which Starr seems mischievously aware. The final chorus features not a roll but an anti-flourish: a flat slap on the snare drum that is the aural equivalent of mockingly snatching his palm away as someone makes to shakes his hand.

One might pity starr for the dilemma of deciding what to play on the Sgt. Pepper standout “A Day in the Life” (1967), a track so innovative that it was unlike any song heard before. The ever-inventive Ringo neither needs our sympathy nor understands the fuss. As an eerily emotionless Lennon intones his disconnected anti-saga and McCartney throws in his apropos-of-nothing upbeat middle eight, Starr devises epic, haunting tom-tom fills which serve to turn a merely sublime creation into a phantasmagoria. 

Other Starr performances are less conspicuous but no less brilliant. It’s difficult for a drummer to stamp his mark on a ballad without intruding on the mood, but “Hey Jude” (1968) boasts crisply busy percussion where more unimaginative sticksmen would have timidly refused to stray from a banal beat-to-the-bar. Meanwhile, his relentlessly driving, cymbals-less backing on 1969’s “Get Back” provides a quite hypnotic groove. 

It is “Rain” that confirms Starr’s greatness beyond dispute. The B-side of the 1966 single “Paperback Writer” occupies a unique status in the Fabs’ corpus in being the only Beatles track where every band member contributes as an equal. In a pounding piece of proto-psychedelia, Lennon provides a quavering melody and scathing lyric, McCartney a belligerent, brawny bass and Harrison shimmering guitar shapes, while Starr goes gloriously haywire. 

After kicking off with a dive-bombing tattoo, he weaves spell-bindingly blistering patterns. His unremitting display — heedlessly maintaining hectic playing on downbeats — sees him running the risk of distracting from Lennon’s anti-orthodoxy philosophising, but the shameless showboating never offends simply because its elevated quality justifies him being a joyous law unto himself.

There’s no similar fireworks display on Let it Be (1970), from the band’s troubled 1969 back-to-basics “Get Back” sessions, but on an album that lurches uncomfortably between majestic and raggedy his efficient yet imaginative work makes him the record’s most consistent contributor. 

It certainly entranced one of the men at the console. Glyn Johns was then in the foothills of a career that would see him become one of the industry’s most celebrated producers. He later said, “One of the things that came out of it for me … is what an amazing drummer Ringo Starr is. Very few people have ever caught on to that … but [he] has the most incredible feel.”

Confirmation of Johns’ s assertion came from the most esteemed of musicians. After working with Starr, Elvis Presley’s drummer D.J. Fontana marvelled, “He had the greatest conception of tempo I’ve ever heard.