Ringo Starr

Ringo Starr, born Richard Starkey in Liverpool's Dingle in 1940, spent long stretches of his childhood in hospital with serious illness, and came out the other side hooked on skiffle. He co-founded the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group in 1957, graduated to Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, played Hamburg with them, and in August 1962 got the call to replace Pete Best in the Beatles. The rest you know, though it's worth saying what he actually brought: a feel-first, song-first style of drumming that got a generation of players thinking like composers, plus low-tuned, muffled drums and a matched grip that changed how the kit sounds. His own pick for his finest moment on record is "Rain", and he's hard to argue with.

He was also the Beatles' secret weapon at the microphone, usually singing one song per album, from "Yellow Submarine" to "With a Little Help from My Friends", and he wrote "Don't Pass Me By" and "Octopus's Garden" himself.

Once the band was done, he did just fine on his own: "It Don't Come Easy" went top ten in the US, "Photograph" and "You're Sixteen" went to number one, and the album Ringo made the top ten on both sides of the Atlantic. Goodnight Vienna brought the "No No Song" in 1974. Since 1989 he's led sixteen different versions of Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band on the road. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has inducted him twice, as a Beatle in 1988 and on his own in 2015, and he was knighted in 2018.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.