The Ringo Starr solo album that reunited The Beatles in the studio: “We were like big girls again”
The ironic thing was, despite the fact that The Beatles seemingly hated each other’s guts by the end and had to call it curtains before things truly got messy, they could never keep out of each other’s pockets in the years that ensued.
Of course, with no hint of a weak link to be found in this chain, it was inevitable that the solo ventures of each of the Fab Four were always going to be laced with gold dust – but a major part of this continued rise even further than the top was that, handily, they all still had their old bandmates by their side to guide them through. The mantra of ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’ was evidently one that they lived and died by.
Even though they faced their share of sticky moments along the way, by and large, by the time it reached the year of 1973, things were much more plain-sailing between the band, even to the point that they were able to achieve the closest possible thing to a reunion, albeit if it was only within the confines of the studio. But nevertheless, this was exactly what happened when it came to Ringo Starr’s Ringo album: it was one man on the title, but in reality, it was actually a whole team effort.
Bringing three-quarters of the band back together in the form of John Lennon, George Harrison, and, naturally, Starr, it was randomly the album track ‘I’m The Greatest’ that did the trick. Having been written by Lennon and gifted to Starr, things admittedly could have had the potential to become awkward, given that the last time they found themselves together in this position, it was more than a little explosive. But suddenly, everything just melted away.
“We were like big girls again,” Starr later jokingly confessed in a 1977 interview. “We were all looking at each other smiling. We hadn’t played together in four years. We were just smiling while we were playing. It was nice.” The elephant in the room, however, was the missing Macca – everyone knew how relations between him and Lennon hadn’t been great – but clearly unperturbed by his absence, Starr still found a way to get him involved.
Flying all the way to London to seek McCartney out, it was evident that the reluctant bandmate had to return the favour for all of Starr’s persistence, and hence they recorded the tune ‘Six O’Clock’ together. McCartney had written this specifically for Ringo, and even roped his wife, Linda, into the affair; it turned into a whole family occasion. As such, while it may not have been in the same room nor quite in their classic form, Starr’s surreptitious charm meant he managed to create the closest thing to a full Beatles reunion that the world would ever see.
You could class it as a blinding form of trickery that Starr managed to achieve this feat all while putting it under the guise of his one single name, but even though they were the biggest rock stars in the world, no such blatant sense of ego ever seemed to jade The Beatles as much. Instead, it probably was just a valiant attempt to get back in the studio with his brothers, whom he may have fought with, but still loved deep down. While that didn’t quite yield the full reunion of dreams, it was at least one step in the road to recovery.
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