“I had a blast. Thank you”: Original Beatles drummer Pete Best retires, aged 83

Pete Best – the original drummer in the Beatles – has announced that he has officially retired.

For many years he has run his own group, The Pete Best Band and they had been pencilled in to play the Beatles Museum in Liverpool this coming August. However, his bandmate (and half-brother) Roag Best has cancelled the appearance and confirmed that this is the end of the road for the veteran drummer.

He posted on Twitter/X: “Well what an absolutely wonderful ride we’ve had. However, everything comes to pass. My brother Pete Best has announced today he is retiring from personal appearances and performing with the group. His daughter has informed me it’s due to personal circumstances.”

Best himself reposted his bro’s tweet, and wrote: “I had a blast. Thank you.”

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He has had, it must be said, a unique career. His name has become a byword for misfortune in music; the luckless member sacked before success is invariably referred to as a band’s ‘Pete Best’. Carrying that weight of infamy around for decades could easily have seen him go under. Indeed in 1967 he attempted suicide, and was saved by his brother Rory.

He drifted into regular work and for years worked in a job centre in Liverpool. In the late 1980s he was convinced to give music another go after playing a one-off gig at a Beatles convention. And so the Pete Best Band has been a going concern for the past 37 years.

The basement in his old family home, at Hayman’s Street, West Derby, which his mother opened as the Casbah Club and saw a number of early Beatles gigs, has for years been an unofficial Beatles museum, albeit one in which history stops in August 1962. That was when - two months before the release Love Me Do - Brian Epstein informed him that the band didn’t require his services any more.

It was reported last year that Best and his brother had converted the Casbah into an Airbnb. There are five separate apartments, each named after a Beatle – John, Paul, George, Stuart and Pete. But no Ringo. Of course.

Best though is insistent that he has never felt resentment towards the man who replaced him. “As far as I’m concerned, it happened 60-odd years ago,” he told the Guardian last year. “I’ve lived my life, I’ve had a great life. It did cause me initial heartache and resentment, but that’s showbusiness.”