The best album Ringo Starr thought The Beatles ever made: “My very favourite”
For anyone who considers themselves to be a fan of the band, choosing a favourite album by The Beatles is a near-impossible task, given how virtually all of their albums reach a similar standard of excellence and are almost inseparable from one another in this regard.
Admittedly, very few people are going to look at their first four or five albums, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not still worth a listen as an example of how they show the rapid progress and evolution of the band from happy-go-lucky lads from Liverpool to become forward-thinking pop savants. Similarly, few people tend to pick out Let It Be as their favourite, despite the fact that it highlights the direction each member was about to head in post-breakup.
Frankly, nobody is going to choose the Yellow Submarine soundtrack album either, given how it sticks out as an outlier in their catalogue. Only half of the songs from the album are truly Beatles songs in the first place, with the second half of the album being a series of orchestral scores by George Martin, and despite it being an integral part of the animated film, it doesn’t have the same effect on record as it does in the context of the movie.
Perhaps wrongly so, but Magical Mystery Tour also often gets overlooked, and ought to be due a reappraisal despite it ostensibly being a compilation of peculiar singles from the same period as Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. For my money, it’s arguably better than the album it succeeded, but its overall strangeness can often be seen as a stumbling block for listeners.
The five records by the band that most people tend to plump for as the greatest records made by the band are the aforementioned Sgt Pepper’s, Rubber Soul, Revolver, The White Album and Abbey Road, and while they all offer something different, they’re prime examples of why The Beatles were such a formidable force, especially from 1965 until 1969.
All of these records are hugely ambitious efforts where the band pulled out all the stops and even went to great lengths to diversify their sound, incorporating everything from Indian classical music to psychedelic rock as influences across this non-consecutive run.
However, if you were to ask the band themselves what their own personal favourites are or were, they’d probably all say something different. Given how they all went their own separate ways in their solo careers due to the growing artistic clashes, there are likely to be elements from each record that one wouldn’t be quite as fond of upon reflection.
As far as Ringo Starr is concerned, he divulged during a 1975 interview taken from The New Beatles Fan Club fanzine that his personal favourite record that he made with the band happens to be their most expansive and diverse.
“Well, Abbey Road is awful good,” he initially proclaimed, before revealing his number one choice. “But really, my very favourite is The White Album.” While the ambition of Abbey Road can’t be denied, The White Album arguably asked more of Starr as a performer, with perhaps the greatest range of drum performances from him, as well as his first-ever songwriting credit on ‘Don’t Pass Me By’.
Even though he found himself on the brink of departing at the start of the album’s recording sessions, with Paul McCartney deputising on drums on ‘Back in the USSR’ and ‘Dear Prudence’, the sheer scope of The White Album must have been thrilling for Starr to have participated in, and it is a worthy choice for being his favourite.
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