Ringo was kind, warm, had no ego issues and always looked fondly towards the other band members.
In public during The Beatles years, Paul was probably the nicest of them to meet. George liked his privacy and John and Ringo were married with children.
He was dubbed the “quiet one,” the Beatle who made music on his own gentle terms. If John was the headline-grabbing radical, he was the press-shy recluse.
This May, we're celebrating musical legend John Lennon.
In 1960 they would go on to form The Beatles. A chronical of the Beetle's would be a book in its own right, although it is worth saying that John was de-facto leader alongside Paul and was sometimes called “the Smart Beatle”.
Paul McCartney didn't used to be cool. Even back in the Nineties, when the Beatles-indebted Britpop scene was in its pomp, “Macca” always seemed like a cheesy elder statesman.
In 1968 McCartney started a secret affair with American star Francie Schwartz. Asher found out when she returned from an acting job early and found the Beatle in bed with Schwartz.
Ringo's goofball personality was on display in the movies “A Hard Day's Night” and “Help.” “Ringo has a natural affinity for clowning around and comedy … he did make several movies while the Beatles were together. And then after they broke up, he really went whole hog into movie making,” Starr said.
Pete Shotton, known in Beatles lore as John Lennon's best friend during their childhood days in Liverpool and a member of Quarrymen, has passed away.
In the Beatles, the two forerunners of the band were John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They were known as "The Intelligent/Witty One" and "The Cute One," respectively. They wrote most of the songs and composed most of the music. They were also the most extroverted.
Harrison and Lennon were possibly the closest friends in the group at the time — and following the band's breakup with the guitarist notoriously featuring Lennon's famed Paul McCartney attack song — but their relationship was dramatically withering.
It's easy to see why those two extremely popular British bands were pitted against each other, but when it came to innovations in the songwriting, arrangements, and production of pop music in the 1960s, The Beatles' greatest rivals were The Beach Boys.
Not most, but definitely more girls preferred Ringo than any of the other Beatles in 1964 in the USA.
Ringo. One future Beatles did experience a Dickensian childhood combining poverty, ill health and paternal abandonment. Richard Starkey grew up in an area of the city notorious for crime and poverty. But he would not meet the other Beatles until October, 1960.
Jimmy Tarbuck, the Liverpudlian comedian – who was a schoolmate of John Lennon's – was referred to jokingly as the Fifth Beatle, as he became famous at around the same time, emulated their hairstyle and clothes, and had the same type of accent.
As the Beatle with the longest solo career, it's no surprise Paul McCartney has the most solo number one singles. Paul can lay claim to nine number-one songs outside of The Beatles. His biggest hit was Wings' 'Silly Love Songs', which held the top spot for five non-consecutive weeks in May, June and July of 1976.
Eric Clapton was Harrison's closest friend, but he had actively pursued Pattie Boyd romantically while she was married to Harrison. He wrote “Layla” in 1970 with Derek and the Dominos about his painful desire for the famous model.
The two have said over the years that they stay in touch and Starr told Jimmy Kimmel in 2021 that they FaceTime "regularly." “I was just in England and we actually saw each other physically,” Starr said at the time, adding that they'd gone to dinner with their wives and George Harrison's widow, Olivia.
During a chat with DJ Alan Freeman on his 1970s show Rock Around The World, George said he felt inferior in some ways to lead singer Paul, now 80. He said: “I had no confidence in myself as a guitar player having spent so many years with Paul McCartney, he ruined me as a guitar player.”
Lennon cried out for help, but he was living in a world full of people who couldn't hear. In the song, he talked openly about his insecurity, his depression, and his need for someone to help him, for someone to help him get his feet back on the ground.
In an interview with Playboy, published just two days before he died, Lennon admitted, "I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically... any woman. I was a hitter. I couldn't express myself, and I hit."
Red-blooded seems an understatement when it comes to Harrison, who had an abiding fondness for other men's wives — much like his devotion to marijuana and sitar music. Beatles expert Bill Harry told me this week: "George had hundreds and hundreds of affairs.
Emotional abuse of his son
Julian Lennon - his son with Cynthia - has made no secret of John's emotional abuse, once claiming that his dad's former bandmate Sir Paul McCartney was more of a father figure to him.
Familial upheaval in infancy had a less obvious impact on Ringo than it did John. What marked him more profoundly was a series of health crises in his childhood and adolescence.
Paul McCartney is released from a Tokyo jail and deported from Japan.
Paul McCartney formed the band Wings with his wife Linda in 1971, and they would go on to perform the best commercially of all the ex- Beatles acts. By the time of their split in 1981, the band had won six Grammy Awards, while selling some 14 million records, earning seven platinum and nine gold discs along the way.