In his mind, Ringo Starr never stopped being 24. When his second son Jason was fretting about turning 40 in 2007, telling his dad that he felt like he was 27, the world’s most famous drummer was compelled to administer a gentle parental put-down. “I said you can’t be 27, I’m only 24,” he tells me, speaking by video call from his home in Los Angeles. He chuckles.
His actual age is . . . well, Ringo doesn’t really like seeing it in the cold glare of print. Suffice to say he first turned 24 in 1964, the year of the “British Invasion”, when the US fell hard for The Beatles and “I Love Ringo” badges were all the rage. In the book The Beatles Anthology, he described this as the moment when, having been the last to join the group, he felt fully accepted: “Suddenly we were equal.”
The perpetual 24-year-old certainly looks trim and fit. There’s no trace of grey in his wavy dark hair and beard. He wears tinted glasses and a necklace with a peace sign symbol. The collar of his denim jacket is upturned in classic rock ’n’ roll style. He speaks from his recording studio in the Beverly Hills house where he and his wife Barbara Bach live.
Ringo — Sir Richard Starkey for official purposes — recently finished recording the vocal and drum parts for a follow-up to the country album he released earlier this year, Look Up. An electric guitar hangs on the wall behind him, covered with stars: a present from one of his sons. A star-shaped abstract painting with vivid streaks of colour is propped next to it.
This is an original Starr artwork. Like his fellow surviving Beatle, Paul McCartney, Ringo is a part-time artist. But whereas Macca’s brightly hued figures and landscapes have been exhibited in establishment spaces such as the Walker Art Gallery in the pair’s home city of Liverpool, Ringo’s similarly colourful output is less well-known.
“The pleasure is if I get off my arse and walk over here to do it. Some days I do, and some weeks I don’t,” he says of his painting and printmaking. His voice is comfortingly familiar, a deep burr of Liverpudlian with transatlantic inflections.
“I just go to the canvas and start . . . And then you realise you’ve been there two hours. I’m always shocked. What, it’s like 4pm already? I just love it. And then I can have a cup of tea with Barbara or I can give the dog a biscuit. It’s great.”
He currently has an exhibition in Las Vegas. It’s showing at the Animazing Gallery in the Grand Canal Shoppes, an only-in-Vegas mock-up of Venice that doubles as a ritzy shopping mall. The show has coincided with Ringo’s visit to the desert resort for six gigs with his All Starr Band at the Venetian hotel and casino this month.
The gallery’s walls are lined with Warhol-style prints showing a younger Ringo in a bandanna and surreal pop art depictions of the four Beatles as wooden men. Cartoonish faces with giant eyes and big grins beam from frames. “I can’t paint you looking like you,” he says. “I don’t have that skill.”
The works on show are for sale. Prints cost between $2,000 and $10,000. Original paintings range from $50,000 to $200,000. The proceeds are going to the Lotus Foundation, the charity that Ringo founded with his wife, whose aims include helping people with addiction problems. (Both he and Bach went sober after a rehab programme in 1988.)
Ringo had the toughest upbringing of the four Beatles. When he mapped his genealogy in later life, he struggled to trace his antecedents back more than two generations. “You think there’s going to be a couple of princes or princesses, or an Egyptian queen, but no: we had nothing. Just a lot of soldiers and tramps.”
Art hardly featured in his childhood. “We lived in a very tight little house,” he says. “Because my dad left when I was three, we became lower working-class. My mum had to work her arse off, day and night, to pay the rent and feed us. And she was helped by my grandparents. I was brought up by three of them: mum, my nan and my granddad.”
A high wall and tenement block opposite blotted out any sunshine. “I always wanted to get somewhere in the light,” Ringo says emphatically. “As soon as I could make enough money to do so, I moved.”
He first got an eye for art in his late twenties or thirties during sojourns in Amsterdam. “That’s when it really started to kick in. Marijuana had something to do with it. Make up a joint, go to the art gallery and . . . ” — he mimes being giddily stoned. “But I’m not on that anymore.”
Rembrandt is his favourite painter. “A lot of grey because that’s what Amsterdam is. You can sit there for a week looking at ‘The Night Watch’,” he says of Rembrandt’s colossal masterpiece, which hangs in the Rijksmuseum.
One of his first paintings was a big canvas of “like, a crazy tree”. He daubed it after moving to Monaco in 1975. There was no grey waiting for him there, just Mediterranean sun and sparkling blue sea, the European mirror image of his life in California. “Anywhere I go, I love the ocean,” he says. “How big are you? Look at the ocean.”
The Beatles had numerous links with visual art, including John Lennon’s art school training and Yoko Ono’s concept art career. With Peter Blake’s design for Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, they created an iconic example of the album sleeve as artwork.
“That’s nearly as famous as Abbey Road,” Ringo says. “I love the story of Abbey Road because we’re all sat around in a circle talking about how we’ve got this album, let’s go to India and do it, let’s go to Everest, let’s go to the Pyramids — or let’s just walk across the road. And that’s just what we did! A lot of times The Beatles just sat around talking about expansive things, but ah, let’s just go across the zebra crossing. And it worked out really well.”
It’s still working out well. The Beatles are having a productive 2020s, including the television series Get Back and last year’s reactivated single “Now and Then”. The Beatles Anthology (not the book but its accompanying documentary series, first shown in 1995) returns in a remastered version in November, with a new episode.
“Every generation, if they’re into music, listens to us,” Ringo says. “And you know, we’re still selling records. We do billions of streams a year! It’s far out. I know why. The music was great, the songs were great, the attitude was great. Paul and I are still doing what we were doing then. We’re on the road, we’re making records.”
We speak during a two-day break in his current tour. He talks with undimmed enthusiasm about the current line-up of the All Starr Band and audiences being “on their feet, having a good time”. The word “time” is drawled, as if stretched as far as it will go. “Listen, man, it’s been cool,” Ringo says as my own time in his company draws to a close. “Peace and love.”
‘Starr Art’, Animazing Gallery, Las Vegas, until October 15, animazing.com
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