Ringo Starr has been out on the press trail promoting his latest EP, Change The World, and took time out to talk about the Beatles and Peter Jackson‘s upcoming six-part documentary, The Beatles – Get Back. The doc will roll out over three days, November 25th, 26th, and 27th, 2021, exclusively on Disney+. Each of the three episodes is approximately two hours in length.
Ringo told BBC Radio about the power of the “Fab Four” strictly as a working band, recalling, “When the four of us played, it was just the best space on the planet to be in. Besides being famous, I was in all of those spaces, with the joy of playing with John (Lennon), George (Harrison), and Paul. . . If Paul hadn’t been in the band, we’d probably have made two albums because we were lazy buggers. But Paul’s a workaholic. John and I would be sitting in the garden taking in the color green from the tree, and the phone would ring, and we would know, ‘Hey lads, you want to come in? Let’s go in the studio!’”
He went on to say, “So I’ve told Paul this, he knows this story, we made three times more music than we ever would without him because he’s the workaholic and he loves to get going. Once we got there, we loved it, of course, but, ‘Oh no, not again!’”
Regarding the loss of John Lennon who was murdered in 1980 and George Harrison who succumbed to cancer in 2001, Ringo said, “Some days it really hits home. I do miss John and I do miss George, and they were my friends, and besides musicians, they were my friends. I like to tell you, I’m an only child and I had three brothers, it was just the best of me.”
During his chat in 2018 at the Liverpool College Of Art with Pulp‘s Jarvis Cocker, Paul McCartney was asked whom he would choose to work with considering all the musicians he’s played with over the decades: “Of all the ones I’ve worked with, it would be fellow Beatles. It would be John (Lennon) — who was pretty cool — and George (Harrison), and Ringo (Starr). Y’know, having worked with John, so one on one, I got to see his brilliance before the world did. So, y’know, I would get to hear ‘Across The Universe,’ and ‘Julia’ and some of these songs, y’know, and I’m a big fan.”