Beatles News
The humility that Ringo Starr has always promoted in his public persona belies the fact that this guy is a hitmaker. For a while in the early to mid-70s, Starr proved more reliable than his Beatle bandmates when it came to denting the charts.
His biggest hits are contained within a relatively short period of time. Here are the five songs released by Ringo that did the best on the US pop charts.
5. “Oh My My” – No. 5 in 1974
Ringo Starr grabbed the world’s collective ear and held it tight on his 1973 album Ringo. The LP was notable for having the other three Beatles all contributing to it. Even beyond that, a slew of top session men eagerly helped. It’s a testament to the goodwill Ringo had fostered among musicians. On “Oh My My”, that included Billy Preston and Klaus Voorman, both members of the Fab 4 extended family, as well as Jim Keltner doubling up the drums with Starr. Vini Poncia, who’d go on to collaborate with Starr often throughout the years, co-wrote the boisterous track.
4. “It Don’t Come Easy” – No. 4 in 1971
Instead of jumping right into the pop music wars in the wake of The Beatles’ breakup, Ringo Starr wisely slow-played it a little. He released two solo albums in 1970 dedicated to covering songs from his favorite genres (the Great American Songbook and country). When he finally struck with “It Don’t Come Easy”, the public was anxious to hear what he had to say. The crisp rock track, which included George Harrison as a clandestine co-writer, features an all-time opening couplet: “Got to pay your dues/If you want to sing the blues.”
3. “No No Song” – No. 3 in 1975
Ringo Starr wouldn’t achieve sobriety for good until the late 80s, so many of his pronouncements in “No No Song” have to be taken with a grain of salt. By all accounts, the making of Starr’s albums in the mid-70s included all kinds of wild antics spurred on by excess. Even within that atmosphere, however, he was keeping his eye on the pop music prize. This song, written by Hoyt Axton and David Jackson, was Starr’s second Top 10 hit from his 1974 album Goodnight Vienna, following his cover of The Platters’ “Only You (And You Alone)”.
Source: Jim Beviglia/americansongwriter.com
The Beatles legend Ringo Starr is looking back on his incredible career in a new episode of "On The Red Carpet: ICONS."
"Every generation listens to our music," he said. The 85-year-old drummer and singer has been a superstar since the 1960s, when he and bandmates John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison became one of the most successful and influential bands of all time.
This year, 55 years after The Beatles broke up, they won their latest Grammy for the song, "Now and Then." "We have sold records and streams now, a billion streams a week or whatever, forever!" Ringo told On The Red Carpet. "It still carries on."
All of his success is even more amazing when you consider Ringo had to overcome childhood illnesses that nearly killed him. "Three times they told me, I'll be dead in the morning," Ringo explained. "So, I think the universe had some sort of plan for me."
Recently, that plan has included an ongoing tour with his popular supergroup, "Ringo Starr & His All-Star Band," and this year, a number one country album, "Look Up." "I love the atmosphere of 'Look Up,'" Ringo said. "We're not looking down all the time. Let's look up. It's much better for you."
On The Red Carpet's George Pennacchio also asked Ringo about the phrase "peace and love," which has become like a mantra. "We were around the '60s and so was flower power and that's really where it came from," Ringo explained. "And it was such a great time to be around."
In recent years, Ringo has made his birthday an annual celebration of peace and love after someone asked him what he wanted from his fans. "And I don't know where it came from," he said. "I'd like them to go, 'peace and love,' and we did."
In this special episode of "On The Red Carpet," Ringo also talks about his artwork that benefits his charity, The Lotus Foundation, what he told Prince William when he was knighted, his thoughts on reuniting with Paul McCartney, his advice for Barry Keoghan who's playing him in an upcoming movie and more!
Source: Joe Maxfield/abc7.com
Sam Mendes’s quartet of Beatles biopics are the cinematic equivalent of a distant asteroid headed steadily towards Earth. They’re a few years from impact—a 2028 release date is pencilled in—but when they hit, they’ll be big. Legendary playwright Jez Butterworth and Adolescence creator Jack Thorne are among the writers. Mendes, who is directing all four films, each told from the point of view of one of the Fab Four, has full rights to their life stories and the all-important song catalog. And he has a crack team of young stars playing the leads: Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr, and Joseph Quinn as George Harrison.
What about everyone else in the Beatles Cinematic Universe—the friends, lovers and collaborators? The band’s story has loomed over pop culture from the 1960s to the present; read any Beatles biography, and you’ll see they have Kevin Bacon-like powers of ubiquity.
Some of the supporting roles have been confirmed, or almost confirmed. As per reporting from Variety, Saoirse Ronan is playing Linda McCartney, Macca’s first wife; How to Have Sex’s Mia McKenna-Bruce will be Starr’s first wife, Maureen Starkey; while Shogun star Anna Sawai and The White Lotus’s Aimee Lou Wood are “circling” the respective roles of Yoko Ono and Harrison’s first wife, Pattie Boyd.
And James Norton, according to Deadline, is our first locked-in actor for all those “fifth Beatles” indispensable to the band’s success: he’s to play Brian Epstein, the band’s manager during their rise to fame until his death by overdose in 1967. That still leaves a lot of famous (sometimes very famous) faces to cast for. Here’s who we think Mendes should be ringing up.
Source: Josiah Gogarty/gq.com
There’s eating crow, and then there’s the Swedish music critic who once claimed The Beatles were a band of “no musical importance whatsoever” in 1963. A pop reviewer for Karlstad newspaper, Nya Wemlands Tidning, attended an early Fab Four concert in a secondary school hall in 1963. This show predated the band’s historic television debut in the States by several months. The young quartet was still cutting their teeth around Europe, hardly at the level of fame they would come to enjoy in the next several years. And as they learned the day after their Karlstad show, part of cutting one’s teeth in the entertainment industry is getting a lousy review.
And the Nya Wemlands Tidning review was lousy. According to Mark Lewisohn’s Complete Beatles Chronicle, the reviewer “thought the Beatles terrible, their music corny, and their playing out of rhythm, adding that the group should have been grateful the fans’ screams helped drown out their awful performance, and then he concluded by stating that The Beatles were of no musical importance whatsoever and that their local support group, The Phantoms, decidedly outshone them.”
Of course, Beatlemanic Swedes would have disagreed with the music critic. Just days before, The Beatles attempted to sightsee in Stockholm but had to call it off after fans began swarming them. If their popularity with the general public wasn’t convincing enough evidence of their importance, the sales of the record they were working on in tandem with their tour certainly would be.
Source: Melanie Davis/americansongwriter.com
Ahead of the highly-anticipated release of their forthcoming Anthology 4, The Beatles have shared a new version of their song “I’ve Just Seen A Face.
Released in 1965 and written by Paul McCartney, the track originally appeared on the group’s album Help—although in North America, it was first released on their record Rubber Soul. The ode to love at first sight has since been covered by the likes of Brandi Carlile, The Dillards, George Martin, Holly Cole and McCartney’s band Wings. In fact, it was among the first Beatles songs Wings played live, and appears on their 1976 live album Wings Over America.
This version of “I’ve Just Seen A Face” is just some of the new material set to appear on Anthology 4 upon its release on November 21st. Curated and remastered by Giles Martin, Anthology 4 will feature 13 unreleased demos, rare sessions from 1963-1969, and new mixes from their original producer Jeff Lynne. Earlier this year, they shared a new mix of “Free As A Bird,” alongside a restored music video. On October 14th, a 25th-anniversary edition of The Beatles Anthology was also released by Apple Corps Ltd. and Chronicle Books—it contains more than 1,300 photos, documents, artwork, and other memorabilia from the band’s archives.
Source: Sam Armstrong/udiscovermusic.com
More than five decades after The Beatles broke up, Paul McCartney is finally sharing how it really felt to walk away from the band that changed music and his life forever.
The Beatles — made up of McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr — broke up in 1970 due to a combination of factors, including growing creative differences, the death of their manager Brian Epstein and a major dispute over their new manager, Allen Klein. McCartney publicly announced his departure in April 1970, and Lennon had privately told the others he was leaving in September 1969. The band was officially and legally separated by December 1974.
The famous English rock band began with McCartney and Lennon in 1956, then Harrison joined in 1957 and Stu Sutcliffe and Pete Best later on. In 1960, they adopted their name, The Beatles. A year later, Sutcliffe left the group, and by 1962, the band signed a recording contract and replaced Best with Starr. In their decade of taking over the music industry, they released 12 studio albums and multiple tours. By 1964, they were international stars who reached unprecedented levels of success.
On Nov. 4, McCartney will release his new memoir, Wings: The Story of a Band, which will tell the story of the legendary rock group from their humble beginnings to their final days from his point of view.
On Thursday, Vulture shared a part of the memoir, specifically the section where rumors were swirling around that McCartney had passed away, and the singer's reaction to the fake news.
In 1969, a conspiracy theory went around claiming that "Paul was dead" and he was replaced by a lookalike when the singer reportedly died in a car accident in 1966. The theory gained traction in September of that year when college students published articles with "clues" supposedly found in Beatles records, but the claims were debunked by TheNew York Times.
Source: Liz Lindain/yahoo.com
Even if Paul McCartney had permanently hung up his instruments after the dissolution of the Beatles, he’d still be regarded as one of the best songwriters in rock history. Watch him in the invaluable eight-hour documentary Get Back, and you’ll see a meticulous 26-year-old leader who’s constantly writing, revising, rearranging, and pushing his bandmates (no slouches themselves) to elevate a song from merely perfect to immortal. So what else is there to do after reinventing pop music forever before even turning 30?
Apparently, you run away to a desolate Scottish sheep farm and plot a second chapter for the ages. As McCartney writes below in the foreword to his upcoming book, Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run, a funny narrative was forming around himself and his new wife, Linda: They’d traded Swinging ’60s London for sleepy ’70s Scotland, yet the rest of the world thought Paul was simply dead. In reality, he was working on his new life. His next decade would bring on an ambitious new band, endless trips around the world, and ten albums that would grow to be, among later generations, as beloved as his previous band’s records. It would also involve headline-grabbing controversies, a stay at the Tokyo Narcotics Detention Center, and, inevitably, another musical breakup. But, of course, McCartney’s story wouldn’t end there. It’s still being written today by the man himself.
“Well, the rain exploded with a mighty crash as we fell into the sun.”
The strangest rumor started floating around just as the Beatles were breaking up — that I was dead.
We had heard the rumor long before, but suddenly, in that autumn of 1969, stirred up by a DJ in America, it took on a force all its own, so that millions of fans around the world believed I was actually gone.
At one point, I turned to my new wife and asked, “Linda, how can I possibly be dead?” She smiled as she held our new baby, Mary, as aware of the power of gossip and the absurdity of these ridiculous newspaper headlines as I was. But she did point out that we had beaten a hasty retreat from London to this remote farm up in Scotland, precisely to get away from the kind of malevolent talk that was bringing the Beatles down.
Source: vulture.com
Though they typically kept it light, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones had a rivalry in their heyday that echoes in their respective fandoms to this day. There wasn’t any major fueding, and they ultimately respected each other. However, there were a few occasions when their beef was taken seriously. There was one night when Paul McCartney purposefully attempted to upstage The Stones at their own party.
The Stones were gearing up to release Beggars Banquet in the late ’60s when they hosted a party at a club owned by their friend, Tony Sanchez. The album played in its entirety for the a-list invitees. It was proving to be a rousing success until McCartney walked in.
McCartney reportedly went up to Sanchez, who was in charge of the music, and nonchalantly handed over one of the greatest songs ever written, “Hey Jude.”
“As Paul walked in, everybody was leaping around to Beggars Banquet, which was far and away the best album of The Stones’ career,” Sanchez once said. “Paul discreetly handed me a record and said, ‘See what you think of it, Tony. It’s our new one.’”
“I stuck the record on the sound system and the slow thundering build-up of ‘Hey Jude’ shook the club,” he continued. “I turned the record over, and we all heard John Lennon’s nasal voice pumping out ‘Revolution.’”
Though they didn’t have the context we do of how successful “Hey Jude” would become, everyone in attendance felt its power in the moment.
“So there we all were, having a wonderful time, and in strolls Paul McCartney—a little smile on his lips, hands behind his back,” ’60s icon Marianne Faithfull added elsewhere. “‘What have you got, Paul?’ we cried out. ‘Oh, nothing, really,’ says he. [He then] put on Hey Jude. It was the first time anyone had heard it and we were all blown away.”
Source: Alex Hopper/americansongwriter.com
Fans will have to wait until April 2028 to see The Beatles’ biopics hit the big screen, starring Paul Mescal, Harris Dickinson, Joseph Quinn, and Barry Keoghan as Paul, John, George, and Ringo (there are four films set to premiere in total). In the meantime, revisit the journey of one of the world’s most iconic rock bands through the newly reissued 25th Anniversary Edition of The Beatles Anthology.
Dropped on Oct. 14, 2025 (it was first debuted more than two decades ago), this 368-page coffee table book, according to the product description, “tells the complete story of The Beatles, from growing up in Liverpool to their rise to global phenomenon and ultimate breakup. Created originally with the complete support of Paul, George, Ringo, and Yoko Ono Lennon, with the words of John painstakingly compiled from sources worldwide, this 25th anniversary reissue offers the only story of The Beatles by The Beatles.”
The anthology features smooth, full-color pages, thousands of photographs, and interesting tidbits about the original boy band. It’s the ideal gift for yourself or any Beatles fan — and is a must-have addition to your music collection. This premium release lets you experience the group’s narrative firsthand, from their early days as unknown musicians to international superstars.
Source: Alexis Mikulski Ruiz/rollingstone.com
It was a pivotal moment in the Gavin & Stacey Christmas special, but needed a frantic email to Sir Paul McCartney to make it happen.
Oscar Hartland, 16, who played Neil the Baby, left the cast "bawling their eyes out" as he performed Blackbird by The Beatles.
It took place during the wedding ceremony of his on-screen dad Smithy, played by James Corden, with Hartland admitting he practiced for hours for the "make or break" moment.
But it almost didn't happen, with Corden requesting permission from McCartney after realising the show's budget did not cover permission to use it.
Corden thought it was "a beautiful song" and had lined it up for Hartland to sing, he said in new book When Gavin Met Stacey And Everything In Between.
"In terms of getting permission to use the song, the BBC have a licensing agreement which is great for UK transmissions of music," he said.
"But I think The Beatles sit outside of that, which we didn't know, and it's so expensive if you want to use one of their songs."
With the sitcom's budget not covering the cost of paying for the track, Corden wrote to McCartney asking permission to use it.
He said: "I wrote just telling him that I felt this was a pivotal moment in the show and that I would never request anything if I thought it was going to be in any way derogatory."
How did Sir Paul McCartney influence the Gavin & Stacey finale?
Corden added that he wasn't sure of the details but believes McCartney waived involvement which meant the programme could afford it.
"He said in his email that he was so touched and honoured, and he would love nothing more than this to happen, and they'd do everything in their power to make sure it could, and then, within 20 hours, it was done, and we had clearance to use the song," Corden said.
Hartland knew Corden had taken a risk on him and wanted it to be the best he could make it, he told Justine Jones on BBC Radio Wales.
"I just put so much into it and just tried to sing it with that raw emotion. That humanity level of emotion where you're like 'this is it'," he said.
Hartland said it was his "biggest task" in the episode, but he was in his element.
Source: Maria Cassidy/bbc.com
