Ringo Starr first drummed on hospital cabinets with a cotton-bobbin mallet
At 13, Richard Starkey entered a tuberculosis sanatorium for two years. To ease boredom, staff formed a patients' band, and he banged a makeshift mallet made from a cotton bobbin against the cabinet by his bed. From then on he wanted nothing but drums, and eight years later he replaced Pete Best in the Beatles.
He was born on 7 July 1940 in Dingle, one of Liverpool's oldest and poorest districts, the only child of two confectioners. His father drifted off to the pubs, the couple divorced within a year of moving house in 1944, and Starr later said he had no real memories of him. His mother cleaned houses and then worked as a barmaid for twelve years. Beatles biographer Bob Spitz called the childhood a Dickensian chronicle of misfortune.
Illness defined it. At six, appendicitis turned into peritonitis and a coma lasting days, followed by a year in a children's hospital. At eight he still could not read. A neighbour's twice-weekly tutoring had nearly caught him up when tuberculosis struck in 1953. Classmates nicknamed him Lazarus. Too far behind to sit the 11-plus, he never went back to school, instead drumming along to records on biscuit tins. His stepfather Harry Graves introduced him to big band singers and, Starr said, taught him gentleness.
After a string of failed jobs, including one on a day boat he quit for fear the navy might conscript him, he became an apprentice machinist, where a workmate turned him on to skiffle. In 1957 he co-founded the Eddie Clayton Skiffle Group, then played with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes in Britain and Hamburg until the Beatles asked him to join in August 1962.
His style put feel ahead of flashy technique and pushed drummers to think like composers; he helped popularise the matched grip and lower, muffled drum tuning, and he rates his playing on Rain as his best. He sang Yellow Submarine and wrote Octopus's Garden. Solo, he scored US number ones with Photograph and You're Sixteen, narrated the first two series of Thomas the Tank Engine, and has toured since 1989 with his All-Starr Band. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has inducted him twice, with the band in 1988 and on his own in 2015, and he was knighted in 2018.
Source: Ringo Starr
