what is ringo strarr doing in his career?

Answer 1

Living in the past

Answer 2

he is currently performing in his band, Ringo's All Starr Band

Answer 3

writing music

Answer 4

THis is from an interview with Ringo on his web sight. The new album called Love which was beatles songs will also come out soon.No sooner have we exchanged hellos, than the suite’s air of calm is suddenly fractured. “May I have your attention please,” says a voice that sounds like a Dalek with a Spanish accent. “This is hotel security. The city of Beverly Hills is experiencing a temporary power outage. Please remain calm and await further information.” “There you are,” smiles Ringo. “A power cut in Beverly Hills. You know when they’ll all notice? When the air conditioning goes off. Then there’ll be a million people screaming, ‘My God! What happened? It’s hot in Beverly Hills!’”

He talks about the local neighbourhood with the casual insight of a long-standing local, something only underlined by an accent that somehow combines traces of both inner-city Liverpool and the American West Coast.

Ringo has kept a home in LA since the mid-Seventies, luxuriating in the climate, the blissfully opulent lifestyle, and the presence of scores of fellow musicians. He even bears the self-inflicted marks of a true Californian: two tattoos, etched on to his skin in the parlours that sprinkle Sunset Boulevard.

On his left arm is a shooting star crossing the moon, put there in 1976; on his right, there’s an image of a cross, set against what looks like a volcano, the result of an impulsive decision in 1994. “With the second one,” he says, “I took my daughter to have her tattoo brightened up, and I thought, ‘Well, while I’m here, I’ll have one too.’ But I promise you: I’ll not be having any more tattoos. In ’76, there was no pain. In ’94 – lots of pain.” He’s alluding, it seems, to the anaesthetising properties of brandy.

“Yeah,” he laughs. “Thank you, Martell.”

Ringo Starr’s origins lie in rather different surroundings than the luxurious, perfumed place in which we meet: he was born Richard Starkey in July 1940, in the hard-bitten area of central Liverpool known as The Dingle.

Having served out his musical apprenticeship – and taken on his stage name – with a fondly-remembered local band called Rory Storm & The Hurricanes, he was invited to join the Beatles in the summer of 1962. The group’s break-up at the tail-end of the Sixties saw Ringo propelled into a post-Beatles existence notable for three things: a stop-start musical solo career, the odd acting role (the most celebrated of which put him alongside David Essex in the 1973 British film That’ll Be The Day), and a love of the high life that eventually resulted in a spell of treatment for alcoholism.

That was 15 years ago. These days, of the two surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney is such a ubiquitous presence that he rather nudges his ex-colleague into the shade – but Ringo has an altogether more active working life than you perhaps might expect, occasionally touring both Europe and the USA with his trademark All Starr Band (an ever-changing collective of rock royalty, usually taking in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties), and regularly releasing solo albums.

There’s one currently in production, set to follow 2003’s Ringo Rama, a record that racked up underwhelming sales, but prompted the odd burst of heart-warming praise: Rolling Stone magazine, for example, reckoned it was his best post-Beatles album since the peak of his solo career in the mid-Seventiess.

In between his professional commitments, he pursues the kind of lifestyle best described as “enviable”. Married to the sometime Bond Girl Barbara Bach since 1981, he largely splits his time between California, Monte Carlo and the home the couple keep in Cranleigh, Surrey. He has three children from his first marriage, to the late Maureen Cox: his daughter Lee, and two sons Jason and Zak, the latter of whom has eked out a successful career as a rock drummer – he currently plays with no less an attraction than Oasis – and fathered Starr’s two grandchildren.

Music and family aside, Ringo also has time for the odd one-off project. The latest is Postcards From The Boys, a plush hardback that collects some of the contents of his letterbox from the late Sixties and Seventies: cards sent by the three other Beatles, as they wended their way around the globe. “See you for Xmas dinner,” writes the characteristically taciturn George Harrison, on an Australian jaunt in 1978. From 1971, there’s a slightly cryptic message from John and Yoko Ono, written midway through a trip to Japan: “Doing nothing at all, the sea-slug has lived here for eighteen thousand years.” Every so often, you get a sneaking glimpse of the chemistry that held the Fabs together – as with a Paul McCartney card from early 1969. “You are the greatest drummer in the world,” it says. “Really.”

The cards – which would surely send any Beatles collector into delirium – were unearthed six years ago, when the Starrs were once again preparing to shift their possessions from one continent to another. “Unbeknown to me,” he says, “one of my secretaries had put all these postcards in envelopes, in a shoebox, which had been packed away in a trunk. There were other things in there, too: my All You Need Is Love outfit, and my Magical Mystery Tour costume: that kaftan thing with the orange shoes. I thought they’d gone: it was like Aladdin’s Cave.

“But I put the cards on the shelf, and kept thinking, ‘I should really do something with those.’ And then I had this idea: they’d really make a great book. A lot of the postcards have little drawings on, and they’re like an itinerary of what the other three were up to – it’s a really interesting piece of nostalgia. And because of the bits I write about each item, it’s also like a semi-autobiography.”

Proceeds from the book will go to the Lotus Foundation, a London-based charitable trust set up by the Starrs to provide a leg-up for organisations working in all kinds of areas, from animal welfare to the care of abused women and children. It also funds projects that assist those whose lives have been blighted by drink and drugs. “We relate to that,” he says. “We both ended up in rehab, and we have addictive personalities, so we try to help people in the same boat.”

Many of Ringo’s wild years were played out a stone’s throw from where we’re sitting – when, in the wake of The Beatles’ split, he became a regular at the kind of roped-off establishments that attracted the Seventies rock nobility.

He had fallen for LA’s charms a decade before, when the Beatles’ first visits to the States convinced him that he would always prefer West to East.

“When they come here, the English make a choice: New York or LA,” he says. “And LA suited me better. I just feel comfortable here.” In that sense, it’s perhaps not surprising that the city’s footprints are stamped all over his personal history – beginning in August 1964, when the Beatles played two nights at the iconic Hollywood Bowl, and found themselves billeted to a raffish address in Bel Air.

“Dean Martin came round to the house,” he recalls, still sounding ever-so-slightly amazed, “and we went to Burt Lancaster’s place. That was the best. He invited us over. It’s very LA: ‘Who’s in town? Give those boys a call!’ I can remember going to his house, dressed up as a five-year-old cowboy, with fake guns, and a poncho, and a fake Stetson. And he said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘Hey, man! I’m in America! I’m a cowboy.’ And he eventually sent me over a cowboy belt and a pair of matching Colt 45s. Real ones.”

A year later – almost to the day – the Beatles were back in town: this time being chauffeured to one of the most celebrated meetings of their career: with Elvis Presley, who had so entranced all four of them back in Liverpool. “That was a very big thing. It was Elvis. But he was a very charming man. And he had the first TV remote control we’d ever seen: he was just sitting there changing TV channels, and we were like, ‘Oh? wow.’ What was incredible was, it was this big meeting of Elvis, who was the King, and these British boys who were now the tops – but there were no photos, and no one was filming it. We came away just thinking, ‘Wow – we’ve met Elvis now. What’s next?’”

Just under a decade later, a period characterised by brandy glasses, non-existent mornings and reckless company had begun in earnest. In 1974, for example, Ringo briefly shared a beach villa in Santa Monica with John Lennon (then in the midst of the 18-month separation from Yoko Ono he called his “Lost Weekend”), the legendarily excessive Who drummer Keith Moon, and the singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson, a close friend of both Starr and Lennon whose not-inconsiderable talent was lamentably overshadowed by his love of a drink.

“It was the commune from hell, but it was the commune of love too,” says Ringo. “It was interesting: the first couple of mornings, it’d be ‘Can you pass the coffee, please?’ All of us would be sitting round the table after the night before. And then everyone relaxed: we’d go and sit on the beach, and at six o’clock, it’d be time to go to the recording studio. It was the rock’n’roll dream – but after a couple of weeks of it, you’ve had enough.

“It’s always fun when everybody at the party’s going in the same direction – but some nights, people want to go to different places.” Lennon soon went back to Yoko, and the five-year period of domesticity that was hideously ended by his assassination. Keith Moon continued to pinball from party to party, until he died of an accidental overdose in 1978, aged just 32. “Keith had a great heart: he was a really good man,” says Ringo.

“But he would take medication by the bucketload – and, you know, that’s the chance you take. We’ve lost a lot of good people like that: you take one pill too many, and that’s all it has to be.” Ringo, meanwhile, continued to skip around the globe, rubbing shoulders with the celebrity elite (his friends included Peter Sellers, Jackie Stewart and Elizabeth Taylor), and seemingly revelling in a booze-fuelled existence built on nocturnal roistering: this was the period when he described himself as “a jet-setter – wherever I go, it’s a swinging place, man.”

In 1980, he met Barbara Bach on the set of the best-forgotten movie Caveman (in which the only dialogue consisted of a series of grunts), and the couple married the following year. But if a new domesticity seemed to be calling, it failed to materialise: his new wife simply joined him in his increasingly ill-advised lifestyle.

By the mid-Eighties a solo career that had peaked spectacularly in the mid 1970s had fallen into disrepair, the appeal of the endless parties had started to pall, and Ringo was – in his own estimation – “bored”.

“You do get bored after so many years of it: it’s like, ‘Here we go again,’” he says. “But it wasn’t like I sat at home one day and said, ‘Oh well, that’s it? It’s Friday at 9.30 and that’s the end of it.’ I couldn’t stop like that: I had to have a lot of help.” What was it that finally pushed him to seek treatment? “The fear that I knew I couldn’t stop. And I’m not a violent man, but I was getting violent. And it was just painful, waking up in the morning and finding yourself drinking again. And of course, the night before, you’d said, ‘Never again – Oh God, no.’ But you’d get up and start again. And I got lucky: I ended up in a great rehab place, where they gave me some tools to be able not to live that way.”

In September 1988, Ringo and Barbara enrolled at a clinic in Tucson, Arizona, and began recovering from alcoholism via the Minnesota Method, one of the most popular 12-step programmes. “I didn’t know anything about it before we went,” he says. “I thought it was orange juice round a pool – a break. But it worked. And that’s it: a day at a time. I haven’t had a drink or a drug for 15 years.”

“A day is longer now,” he explains. “Nights were longer then. Suddenly, you love the light. And you get on with your day doing stuff. I’m in the middle of making a CD now, but I don’t have to wait till four in the morning before I become creative. I start at midday – and before that, I get up and have breakfast, and say hi to the family, and walk the dogs, and work out – a lot of things.”

Among his favoured recreational pursuits is painting. “That started in Monte Carlo. I just thought, ‘Everybody keeps talking about the great light here’ – which is true, it’s golden – and I went to the art shop and bought canvasses and lots of paints and big easel, and started slapping the paint on the canvas, and having a lot of joy getting lost in the process. It was, ‘Suddenly two hours have gone by, and I’ve just been doing this’.”

He also relaxes by using a skill he learned during his time as a Beatle: Transcendental Meditation, the mind-calming technique they were taught on their celebrated trip to India in 1968. Back then, Ringo seemed the least keen, returning to the UK after a fortnight, while his colleagues’ stay stretched into months; these days, however, he sounds newly enthusiastic.

“Even if I’ve not meditated for months, I can do it,” he says. “It’s something I do a lot more now than I have been over the last 15 years. “For me, meditation is a break from thinking. The benefits to me are quietening my mind and soul down. At the end of a day, I can end up just totally wacky, because I’ve made mountains out of molehills. With meditation, I can keep them as molehills.”

Then the camera crew start to call him – but before I take my leave, one recent event demands a mention. In July this year, echoing one of The Beatles’ most fondly-loved songs, Ringo turned 64.

“Everybody asked me about that,” he says, slightly wearily. “They couldn’t help themselves. But when it happens to Paul, he’ll have to go to Fiji and hide from it. It’s going to be hell for him.”

It must have seemed a long way off back then, I suggest. “Oh yeah,” says Ringo, gazing into the Californian sun and taking a sip from his glass of water. “When I was 20, 64 seemed ancient. Now my body’s there, but in my head I’m still 24. I guess that’s how it works.”