“The stumbling block”: Ringo Starr on the real reason why The Beatles never reunited
The ‘What If’ game is a dangerous one to play. If you allow yourself to go down the rabbit hole, wondering what might have happened if X or Y had or hadn’t occurred, you can quickly end up rewriting history into a whole other story when, in reality, the fact is that the world will never know it’s various alternative outcomes. In music, there are plenty of those kinds of questions, wondering what certain artists might have done if they’d had more time or what music might have sounded like if a particular group had never come together. But even since 1970, the question of what the Beatles might have done if they’d reunited has been a key one, with Ringo Starr asking himself it too.
The politics of the Beatles’ split is messy. When people ask why the band split up, the fact is that there is no easy answer. It involves years of built-up tensions and arguments, the impact of drugs, lingering resentments, bad business deals and so on. If there had to be one short response to summarise it all, it would be that the band had grown apart. Having broken through at a young age, it was really incredible that the four friends had managed to grow together through so many changes for so long but by 1970, with all the other issues in the mix, it became impossible.
But that decision wasn’t reached lightly or even amicable. In their final years, each member took their turn kicking off and storming out. But it was when Paul McCartney sued his bandmates in an attempt to protect their music from a dodgy deal with Allen Klein that the final nail was hammered into the coffin. Especially between McCartney, Lennon and Harrison – the situation was bad. But for Starr, who had generally always been more than happy behind his kit, he just wanted to see his friends back together again.
“When I go to town I wanna see all three,” Starr sings on ‘Early 1970’, his track dealing with his sadness at the split and his desire for them all to make up. Out of all of them, he was the one most in favour of a reunion, but he also revealed why that never worked.
Throughout the ‘70s, the band received several major offers for a reunion, including being offered £154 million from a promoter in 1976 to being invited to a 1979 concert proposed by the United Nations to raise money for Vietnamese refugees. While they turned them all done, Starr revealed that there were conversations about trying to make it work behind the scenes, they just never went far enough to actually work it out.
“I think the stumbling block was just sitting around and saying, ‘Okay, let’s do it.’ We never got to that,” he said, adding “We did in twos, we talked about it,” as getting all four members in one room for a discussion proved impossible. While Harrison was mad at McCartney, Lennon was mad at McCartney and McCartney was both mad at and sad about both, Starr’s role as the middle man could only go so far.
And then, tragedy struck. On December 8th, 1980, John Lennon was fatally shot, making any reunion impossible and leaving the friends and their fans to grieve that they never managed to make it work when they had the chance.
