(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Sat 7 February 2026 20:15, UK
When talking about the rise of The Beatles, it’s easy to forget about the kind of impact Ringo Starr has had.
No, he might not have been gifted with the greatest songwriting chops in the world, but his internal sense of rhythm when playing all of their songs always put him one notch above every other drummer in his field. He wanted to make the song leap out of the speakers every single time he got behind the kit, but even after the band parted ways, Starr was going to get by with a little help from his friends no matter what.
Because, for as much as the band may have needed some space away from each other, Starr was always the lovable one who could always find time to jam with them. It was going to be a little bit more difficult to make amends with Paul McCartney after Starr was kicked out of his house for sending him a message on behalf of the other Beatles, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t still find time to work with his old friends.
After all, George Harrison was always the one who helped him get his songs off the ground in the first place. ‘It Don’t Come Easy’ and ‘Photograph’ wouldn’t have existed if not for Harrison adding his signature touch to those chords, and even when making the Concert For Bangladesh, Starr wasn’t going to miss out on the chance to play with some of the biggest names in music like Leon Russell and Bob Dylan.
But John Lennon was a much different story. Given how limited he was as a guitar player, he was never the kind who could simply jam with anyone and see what happens. His strong suit was always in songwriting, and if he was going through primal therapy to help deal with his inner demons, he was going to need just the right musicians to help fill out the songs that ended up on Plastic Ono Band.
And while Starr was giving the initial pulse of every tune, having Klaus Voorman round out the trio made for one of the most barebones albums that any ex-Beatle had ever made. It didn’t have the same sense of majesty that All Things Must Pass and wasn’t exactly homemade in the same way McCartney was, but with nothing else to hide behind, people could really focus on the songs before anything else, whether that was the screaming of ‘Mother’, the sombre tone of ‘Working Class Hero’ or even the final nail in the coffin of The Beatles’ career at the end of ‘God’.
There was a lot of heaviness that went into making a record like this, but Starr always stood by the fact that it was one of the best times that he ever had in the studio, saying, “John and I really knew each other, so we were psychic [about] where the atmosphere was going to go. It’s one of the best experiences of being on a record I have ever had. Just being in the room with John, being honest, the way he was, screaming, shouting and singing. It was an incredible moment.”
Not everything was going to sound perfect when they got finished, but Starr’s fills on the record are on par with anything that he did in The Beatles. The songs didn’t warrant him flying off the handle in the same way that he did on ‘Rain’ or anything, but you can hear the great propulsion in his groove on ‘I Found Out’ or the primal fills that he threw into the end of ‘God’, where he seemed to grow more impassioned as Lennon stripped every piece of his musical identity away.
Compared to the party atmosphere that Starr managed to create on nearly every single one of his albums, the reason why Plastic Ono Band works so well is his understanding of the material he was playing. He was the good-natured friend of the Fab Four, but he knew when to rein things in and get a little bit more serious when the time called for it.
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