Ringo Starr performing in Paris with The Beatles - 1965

Credit: Bent Rej

When Ringo Starr was threatened by an assassin: “It’s just an occupational hazard”

Fri 20 October 2023 18:00, UK

Whilst they might be universally known as the world’s most influential band, when thinking about The Beatles, I’d contend that it’s rare that those who weren’t around at the time fully consider just how immensely popular they were at their peak. Due to the excellent songwriting and tremendous marketability of the ‘Fab Four’, they rose quickly. Before long, they had shed the sugary pop of their early days and were pushing against an array of musical and cultural boundaries.

Whilst The Beatles’ success might have brought them untold riches, reverence and a myriad of other earthly goods, experiencing such an insane level of fame came with its stark downsides. Most tragically of all, this resulted in the assassination of frontman John Lennon in 1980 at the hands of Mark David Chapman. He is a mentally ill former fan of the group who was so incensed by Lennon’s lifestyle, statements such as that the band were “more popular than Jesus”, and the lyrics of songs that he felt compelled to kill him.

It wasn’t just Chapman that The Beatles would fall afoul of either. Due to Lennon’s infamous statement about his band being more popular than the Son of God, the group would be banned from Apartheid-era South Africa – which to most normal people wasn’t a bad thing – but more surprisingly, would even come into direct contact with America’s most prominent group of murderous racists, the Ku Klux Klan.

Whilst the murder of John Lennon remains shocking, years before it, the group were shown just how perilous that level of fame can be. When on tour in Canada in the mid-1960s at the peak of Beatlemania, Beatles drummer Ringo Starr received a death threat over the telephone before a show in Montreal. In addition to dealing with the stress and pressure of being the era’s biggest band, he now had to deal with a danger to his life. To protect himself, he positioned his cymbals vertically.

In an interview years later, Paul McCartney provided more insight into the would-be assassin, revealing that their motivations were to do with their extreme hate for the Queen and Britain, and for once, nothing The Beatles had said.

He recalled: “We used to get all of that, you know, it’s just an occupational hazard. I mean, we went on a tour of America in the early Beatle days, well, Canada it was, in fact, it was French-speaking Canada, it was Quebec, you know, the French bit, and somebody there, one of the French men, one of the French men who didn’t like the Queen, warned that they were gonna shoot Ringo. So Ringo had to go through the whole tour just keeping down behind his cymbals.”

He concluded: “But what can you do? When the time comes to die, that’s it; nothing I can say about it. So, I don’t worry. It’s like I saw Muhammad Ali was asked that question, he says, ‘When Muhammad says it’s time…’, that’s about how I feel, really. There’s nothing I can do about it. Obviously, I don’t want to get shot… I don’t know anyone that does.”

Watch footage of the show below. You can see how high Ringo’s cymbals are.