(Credits: Far Out / Bradford Timeline)
Thu 16 October 2025 15:30, UK
It’s about time that Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney realise that they will forever be known as the Beatles.
As much as they would like to run away from the reputation they had in their 20s, the music that they played over that short stretch of time is still considered the gold standard for what every single artist should aspire to do with their career. But while Starr was content to move on with his life after the 1960s faded, he knew that the Fab Four would live on in some fashion later down the line.
Because if you look at the amount of music that they recorded within the span of eight years, you would have sworn that they were among the finest musicians in the world. None of them claimed to be a musical savant by any stretch of the imagination, but after learning from each other and getting the right guidance from George Martin, every one of their albums turned into a musical trip for the ages, whether that was the conceptual masterwork of Sgt Peppers or the anything-goes mentality of The White Album.
I mean, if you look at some of the individual songs back to back, most of them don’t sound like they’re coming from the same band. Songs like ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, ‘Eleanor Rigby’, and ‘Oh! Darling’ are each fantastic on their own, but you’d be forgiven for thinking that they weren’t all being played by the same group, much less being sung by the same person every single time.
In fact, there’s no real explanation for where everything started changing. It’s easy to chalk it up to drugs, but the massive jump in quality from an album like Beatles for Sale to Revolver within the span of a few years is insane. But even when they were making their masterpieces, the one throughline that went throughout their career was always love songs.
They had that personal angle on tunes like ‘She Loves You’ from way back when, but when they started making more experimental music, that love theme was expanded on a little more. ‘Norwegian Wood’ was a much more adult look at romance, and even when making tracks like ‘All You Need Is Love’, John Lennon was trying to get into a more cerebral mindset when talking about love that wasn’t strictly about the puppy love they had sung about earlier.
And while albums like Abbey Road cover a range of different topics, Starr was proud for the band to go down in history for singing about love, saying, “Everybody loves to put a tag on everything, but we were the peace and love band. That’s all it was. ‘All You Need is Love’ – we did that track, and it was very high on our agenda. We did ‘Hey Bulldog’ and ‘Paperback Writer’ and a lot of other stuff. But I think it’s not a bad thing if you look at the Beatles and the representation is peace and love.”
The drummer does have a point in being a little bit pigeonholed by the greater musical community, but anyone who knows the Fabs realises that there was far more to explore. Half of their deep cuts set the stage for genres that hadn’t even been invented yet, and even on the moments where they were having a laugh in the studio, they were still on the cusp of making the finest music of their career when working on tracks like ‘Helter Skelter’ or the anything off of Let It Be.
Not every song was about love, per se, but even if you want to take that angle, The Beatles should still be commended for helping everyone dream bigger. They wanted to start thinking about love in a much deeper way, and thanks to everything from ‘All You Need is Love’ to ‘Something’ to ‘Because’, each of their romantic tunes had a much greater weight than the teenybopper bands on the charts.
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