Ringo Starr releases a new album this week. Look Up is his first for six years and his first to reflect his long-held love of country since way back in 1970, when he cut Beaucoups Of Blues in Nashville.
In a new interview with the Sunday Times, the 84-year-old ex-Beatle has been talking country, his voice and perils of playing new tracks live when you have a much-loved back catalogue at your disposal.
“Country’s been good to me,” he said. “I keep saying Liverpool was the capital of country music. In the streets I lived in every other house had some 18 to 25-year-old who was in the ‘merch’ [ie, the merchant navy]. And you could always tell those kids - there’d be a camel saddle in the living room because they’d been to Egypt. But they also went to America and came back with all the records, so we were getting them before everyone else.”
Much of Look Up is written by T Bone Burnett, who is also interviewed and made some interesting observations about the veteran drummer. “The Beatles started as a skiffle band, as a folk music outfit," he said. "But when Ringo joined them, he was the electricity underneath them. I don’t think they were the Beatles before Ringo joined them. And he was the biggest country fan. George Harrison also was very smitten. He played big-string rock’n’roll on a Gretsch Country Gentleman, which is very much a hillbilly guitar. It’s not a rock guitar. He’s certainly not a rock player, and neither is Ringo. They’re both swing musicians.”
He continued: “For me, rock’n’roll and country are all really woven together. Rock started later at some point. But Ringo, almost everything he did with the Beatles was country. Matchbox, Honey Don’t, What Goes On, Ask Me Why, Act Naturally, even Octopus’s Garden.”
The interviewer also broached the subject of Ringo’s voice; never, it must be said, the most mellifluous of instruments: “I always wanted to be someone else, like Jerry Lee or someone,” he admits. “I mean, I can hold a tune, as long as it’s in my key. And it just worked out with the Beatles because John and Paul were great writers. That’s what made us. And I’d get one song. And a couple of them were really good, you know, With a Little Help from My Friends and Yellow Submarine. They’re still huge and I still do them on tour.”
Ringo is back touring with his All Starr band this summer and revealed that there won’t be too much of the new album in his sets: “In the late '90s, I would put in, like, two or three from the new album, and you could feel the room empty. It happens to everybody.” Indeed he remembers being in the crowd when it happened to Elton John at Wembley in 1975. “I was with his mother. He came on and said, ‘I’m only going to do the new album.’ Me and his mother left after three tracks because we didn’t know them."
