RINGO STARR GAVE AN INTERVIEW TO THE BBC

“I think that’s what did it,” he says laughing, adding that he tells all his grandchildren to stop practising music alone and to get together and join a band. “If you play piano, bass, saxophone, I will play with you all night,” he says. “Get with people.”

For Long Long Road, Starr teamed up with legendary producer T Bone Burnett who played guitar for Bob Dylan in the 1970s. It’s their second collaboration in less than two years. This time, they co-wrote the album and recorded in Los Angeles and Nashville. Ringo says T Bone knows all the great musicians in Nashville. “And because they’re recording in Nashville, they just pop in to play. It’s great.” Country music now is very cool, of course. Even Beyoncé’s making country music. Her album Cowboy Carter won the top prize at the Grammys last year, rare for country music. “She made a great album,” Ringo says, whose love for the genre goes way back.

Liverpool was “the capital of country music in England,” he says, noting that merchant navy workers were bringing in records to the port city from every genre from all around the world, including plenty of country music from Texas. “Liverpool loved country. I know I loved it,” he says.

After finishing school, Ringo says he was expected to go to work in a factory. Instead, when he was 18, he and a friend decided to move to Texas to be near the American blues singer and guitarist Lightnin’ Hopkins. But he got bored with the paperwork required to emigrate and changed his mind.

“He was the blues guy that got to me,” he says of Hopkins, laughing at the thought of how life could have been different had he moved to Texas in 1959. A prolific songwriter now, he only wrote two songs when he was with The Beatles; one of them, 1968’s Don’t Pass Me By, is a little bit country. “We did it in a country fashion,” he says, singing a few bars. “I think it would be more country now if we did it with T Bone.” He says McCartney, Lennon and Harrison laughed at his early writing attempts.

“They’d all be just laughing hysterically because all I’d done is rewritten another song,” he said. “So it took me a while to get through that moment into writing my songs, you know, and in the end they started turning out really good.”

Ringo is taking his own new album on tour of the western US in May and June. Starr has been making headlines for decades. I ask him about some of them and whether or not they were really true.

Did he coin the phrase “A Hard Day’s Night” – which later became the title of their first movie, a song and album? He sure did. Was he the first member of the Beatles to smoke pot? “Yes,” he says. “I took the first puff,” he adds with a laugh. Has he really never eaten pizza or curry? “I never have,” he says.

His life has also been covered extensively in films and documentaries. Director Sam Mendes is due to release four Beatles movies about each of the band members in 2028. Barry Keoghan is playing Starr and has been spotted around town with an iconic Beatles-style mop top hairstyle. The actor came to Los Angeles to meet Starr “to hang out” – not to study his movements. “It wasn’t like one of those in-depth things,” Starr says, noting the actor didn’t question him on things like “which hand do you use to pick your nose”. “It was none of that. It was just hanging out and saying ‘hi’.”

He adds that he also visited the film set.

“I had a bit of trouble because I was thinking documentary. They are not documentaries, they are films and I had to get used to that.” He wouldn’t elaborate about any poetic licence being taken in the movie. Is he worried about how it will perform at the box office and which Beatle will be most popular at the cinema? “No.”

He thinks the four films should be viewed in one long marathon day of movie-watching. “Put us all on,” he says. “That would be cool to sit there. Bring sandwiches.”

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