The famous director Sam Mendes is turning a biopic on Ringo Starr, legendary drummer of the “Fab Four”. He will tell the restless life and gestures of love. Perhaps, even of that time he asked Sinatra …
“Frank you have to do me a favor, my wife Maureen turns the years in a few days and is you a fan of yours could you sing something for her?” In the absence of eyewitnesses, you can only imagine the expression of Frank Sinatra, The Voice, in front of the drummer of the Beatles Ringo Starr who breaks into his home in Los Angeles with the most irritation of the requests. But Sinatra, like Ringo, was a master of the twists, as well as a gentleman: impassively, the doors of the Capitol Studios is wide open, convenes a pianist and transforms his hit the lady is a tramp into mauren is a Champ, even changing a verse and transforming it into: «She Married Ringo, and she coulan have haed paul. That’s Why the Lady is a Champ “(he married Ringo but he could have had Paul McCartney. That’s why the lady is a champion, ed.).
With the coil under Abraccio, Ringo returns to London, makes a single copy of the 45 rpm prints and gives it to his sweet half. To date we do not know if this legendary curtain will be part of the biopic that the director Sam Mendes is turning to England. A film for each of the Beatles, with the Irish actor Barry Keoghan in the role of Mr. Starr, the fourth Fab Four, the last to enter the group, often obscured by Lennon, McCartney and Harrison, the least “spectacular” drummer ever, but at the same time what he made the songs of the Beatles what they are: no show behind the drums, only instinct, brilliant touches. «In the Beatles I played what passed through my head in that instant. Often by listening to the old songs I don’t have the slightest idea of what I was doing. I would not be able to replicate what I recorded in the studio », he says today with 85 springs on the shoulders, an incredible life that could have closed within fifteen years.
First a peritonite made at the last moment followed by ten days of coma and one year in the hospital, then the tuberculosis accompanied for two years in remedy. An uphill start: sick, raised by her mother Elsie in Dingle, the worker district of Liverpool, the school attended little and badly due to health conditions and a totally absent father. The image of his revenge is the arrival in a London hospital aboard a Rolls Royce for an annoying tonsillitis. It was June 1964, and the whole England was already madly in love with the four boys with a helmet hair. It is a single great film dotted with triumphs, disappointments and unexpected ones, the life of what for years has been nicknamed the “sad beatle”.
Starting with August in 1962, when he replaces Pete Best in the Beatles for twenty pounds a week. He goes on stage the first time with John, Paul and George, and the fans of the former drummer begin to scream “Pete Forever, Ringo Never!” (Pete forever, Ringo Mai, ed). After the first concert, the Abbey Road Studios arrive. The Beatles must affect Love Me Do, but to the manufacturer, George Martin, do not like the way Ringo plays the piece and calls a shift player to replace him. And Ringo? For the duration of the song, the tambourine sounds disconsolate. Another uphill start before becoming in all respects one of the Beatles, the most popular and influential band ever. It has always been an outsider Ringo Starr, the only English musician madly in love with the American country to the point of engraving two records (the last is Look Up came out in January 2025) dedicated to the sound of Nashville and surroundings. From here at the end of the year he will be around the world with an All Star Band of great musicians: to be part of it, he imposed as a mandatory rule, it is necessary to have played in a group with at least three international hits. Married since 1981 with Barbara Bach (the first marriage ended in 1975), the Bond Girl of the best seller The spy who loved me, Richard Starkey (this is the real name of Ringo Starr) has long filed the addictions to alcohol and drugs that had afflicted him in the 1980s. Now he is an iron health that occasionally climbs on the stage of Paul McCartney to relive the Beatlesian thrill. The last time, in December 2004, they sang together with shiny eyes Sgt. Peper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Helter Skelter.
A tribute to themselves and to the two who are no longer there: John and George. There are two missing also at the Who (the drummer Keith Moon and the bassist John Entwistle), the contemporary band of the Beatles who, irony of fate, for thirty years has had the son of Ringo as a drummer Zak. Then, a few weeks ago, the letter of dismissal for Starkey Junior due to misunderstandings with the singer Roger Daltrey. Ringo has chewed bitter and he said nothing, but he, if we talk about misunderstandings in a band, is one who knows it long: in the middle of the recordings of the Beatles’ White Album, feeling put in a corner from a creative point of view and not considered enough by the other three, he left the group, fled to Sardinia on the yacht of the actor Peter Sellers and wrote what he became a classic of the Fab Four: Octopus Garden. «The captain of the ship told me that the octopus move on the bottom of the sea in search of shiny stones, cans and bottles to put in front of their underwater shelters to create a sort of garden. I thought it was a wonderful starting point ». He on the boat and the Beatles blocked in the recording studio. To stop the stall, a telegram from London: Starkey feels he won and returns. To welcome him to the incision room, a huge welcome banner and his battery literally submerged and surrounded by flowers. «I could not have done differently: the telegram said I was the best drummer in the world and that they loved me. It does not happen every day to read those words signed by three Beatles … “
