(Credits: Ringo Starr)
Wed 18 March 2026 1:00, UK
For being in one of the biggest bands in the world, Ringo Starr seemed to be the only person who didn’t have the same sheen as the rest of The Beatles.
He was one of the greatest drummers that the world had ever seen, but when you look at the number of songs he actually wrote, it’s not like he was going to be anywhere near the same level as John Lennon and Paul McCartney once he ventured into his solo career. You could say that he needed a little help from his friends, but even with the biggest names in music by his side, sometimes his records were dead on arrival before they even dropped.
Then again, there’s a certain curve that Starr tends to be judged on compared to his old bandmates. Everyone understands that he probably isn’t going to have a record as big as ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’ under his belt, and while no one is necessarily asking him to become one of the biggest names in music all over again, they could at least appreciate it when Starr turned every one of his albums into a party every single time his friends like Lennon and George Harrison stopped by.
Goodnight Vienna and Ringo weren’t absolute knockouts from back to front, but for anyone looking to catch even a whiff of that Fab magic, this was about as close as they were going to get at the time. But it seemed like the further we moved away from the band’s final days, the less likely it seemed that Starr was going to be an all-out superstar. But we also could have done without some of the more forgettable parts of his career as well.
Or at least the parts that we don’t want to remember. Because as much as people might like to laugh at albums like Harrison’s Gone Troppo or McCartney’s Give My Regards to Broad Street, it seemed like Starr’s career officially stalled the minute that he began making records without his friends. Ringo the 4th could have been the record that got him back in everyone’s good graces by going disco, but the fact that the whole thing was a shitshow, Starr’s career never really recovered.
And when I say never recovered, I do mean it. Yes, he still tours and makes the rounds around the world with that peace and love mantra, but he never seemed to trouble the charts all that much, and even when he made records that were great like Time Takes Time, they tended to fade into the background compared to what his bandmates were doing. But if a record like Bad Boy was looked at as a disaster, Old Wave was the point where even America didn’t have time for the drummer anymore.
Starr was all set to get the record out, but when he came to release it, no one in America was willing to give him a label to put it out, saying, “It was real disappointing. That’s when I really started to throw in the towel. To have been a Beatle and go through that was not easy.” So the record must be one of the most abysmal records a Beatle ever made, right? Well, not exactly.
No, the record isn’t very good and a little bit below Starr’s usual standard, but it does have more than a few tunes that work decently well. His work with Joe Walsh always tends to be a fun rocker, but in between the few songs that do work, there are others like ‘Hopeless’ that paint a far more grim picture of where Star’s career was as he was slowly becoming a relic of the 1960s for most Fab fans.
Every other member of the band would have been happy to get Starr back on his feet, but after years of getting a donated song here and there, this was the first moment that a Beatle could have been seen as a has-been. It seems unimaginable now, but all Starr needed was to endure a few more years before his transformation into the lovable peace-and-love icon that we all know today.