Tom Doyle – Ringo: A Fab Life

Author:Tom Doyle

A decent Ringo biography in the mould of Philip Norman’s biographies of his 3 bandmates is long overdue. Perhaps Norman has one in the works. In the meantime there is this new and comprehensive tome written by Tom Doyle, published in the UK on 31st October. (My copy was purchased from a bookseller who clearly hadn’t checked the publication dates of his new stock).

Tom Doyle has form in this kind of endeavour, having previously written books about Kate Bush, Elton John, Billy Mackenzie and Paul McCartney, none of which I’ve read, so I am unfamiliar with his style of writing. His biography of Ringo clocks in at 384 pages and gives equal weight to Ringo’s pre- and post-Beatles career as well as covering his time in the Fab Four. The Beatles part of the story treads familiar ground with anecdotes and snippets of the band’s history that have inevitably been written about before. The book follows an ‘episodic mosaic’ pattern detailing specific aspects of Ringo’s story, rather than being a straight chronology. Chapters are short and seldom follow on from each other. The author did interview Ringo for the book, and the content of those interviews top and tail it, but it’s not obvious where and if they have been used to inform the story. The interviews were also very short. In keeping with his no more autographs, no more questions from fans mantra (“peace and love, peace and love”) Ringo is parsimonious with his time and restricts himself to 20 minutes, hardly creating the environment for the makings of an authorised and fully co-operative biography (which this is not). It’s a difficult job, to be sure. For all his endearing nature and clowning, Ringo was never the artistic heart of The Beatles, and his talents have long lived in the shadows of those of his bandmates. He has long dismissed the idea of writing his own autobiography on the grounds that people would only be interested in The Beatles, not the 9 chapters before them or 15 chapters after them that he tongue-in-cheek envisaged.

Doyle’s book is a largely enjoyable read, but it’s unclear if there is much new here, or whether the author is simply rehashing already well-known facts. His one piece of overt investigative journalism deals with the well-known joke about Ringo not even being the best drummer in The Beatles, apocryphally credited to Lennon, traces it back through Jasper Carrott, and identifies its source as the Radio 4 comedy Radio Active. Doyle’s writing style is curiously detached though; it never becomes entirely clear if he is heavily invested in his subject or not. It’s a largely enjoyable read, easy to pick up and put down due to the chapter length and episodic style of the writing. But by the end of the book I wasn’t sure if I knew much more about Ringo than I did at the start. The book is heavy on facts and details, but little emerges about who Ringo Starr really is. I know a lot about what he did, and who with, and how, in his long and colourful career, but the author never really probes beneath the facts to discover how Ringo thinks and feels, what kind of a man he is, and how that has changed over his life’s journey. That, for me, is the mark of a successful biography, and I’m not sure this is it. Perhaps we will just have to wait a bit longer.

Length of Read:Medium

Might appeal to people who enjoyed…

The countless other Beatles books already out there….

One thing you’ve learned

….there may yet be room for one about Ringo.

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