Starr, Ringo

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    He’s Ringo. And Nobody Else Is.

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    In the summer of 1985, Ringo Starr’s friend and fellow drummer Max Weinberg flew to England for the former Beatle’s 45th birthday.Though the pair had become chummy since meeting five years earlier in Los Angeles, backstage at a concert Weinberg was playing with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Weinberg remained somewhat intimidated by his boyhood hero in the early stages of their friendship. (The ever-amicable Starr offered advice: “Sometimes it helps if you call me Richie.”)While celebrating at Tittenhurst Park — the sprawling estate outside London that had previously belonged to John Lennon and Yoko Ono — Starr turned to his younger friend, then 34, and said something that remains an inside joke between them: “Well, Max, I’m going to be 45. Doesn’t that make you feel old?”That line is classic Ringo — a dryly clever, double-take koan from rock ’n’ roll’s Yogi Berra, the man whose tossed off “Ringo-isms” became immortalized in Beatles song titles like “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.”Each year, Starr would update the line for Weinberg, until its recitation became something of an annual tradition. “I imagine if I was speaking to him on July 7,” Weinberg said in a phone interview, “him saying to me, ‘I’m 85.’ And it doesn’t sound so old anymore.”Ringo Starr will be the first Beatle to turn 85, and like his surviving bandmate Paul McCartney, he never retired. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Rediscovered Thomas the Tank Engine Pilot Is Released

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      The episode, from 1983, was found in storage by accident. It was restored and made available for viewing for the first time on Friday.Thomas the Tank Engine notices a funny smell. He breaks a rule, has a mishap and gets stuck. He is rescued and learns a lesson. Ringo Starr provides the narration.If you have ever seen any of the more than 500 episodes of the children’s show “Thomas & Friends,” you might imagine you have seen it before. But you really have not, because this scene is from the newly rediscovered pilot episode, which has been restored and was made available for viewing for the first time on Friday.The episode, filmed in 1983 and titled “Down the Mine,” was found accidentally in storage, Ian McCue, a producer of the series for a decade, told the BBC.Ian McCue, a producer, examined the newly discovered film.MattelThe episode was pieced together from multiple film stripsMattelThe five-minute episode was pieced together from multiple 35-millimeter film strips. The picture and sound were cleaned up, and newly composed music was added.“I think there’s a sort of a lovely charm and innocence about it, and I think even as a pilot, as a test piece, it still has that lovely, classic, timeless story to it, and the voices, everything is just so delightful,” Mr. McCue said.For the uninitiated, Thomas is a cheerful blue locomotive with an expressive face who first appeared in British children’s books by the Rev. W. Awdry. The character and his fellow locomotives, like Percy (green) and James (red), rose to new levels of popularity when they were animated for the popular program, which premiered in 1984.The show became a favorite of children and parents alike, many of whom were drawn to its relaxed rhythms. “Children live these days in a fast-paced world, but I don’t think children really change,” the producer Britt Allcroft, who brought the characters to television, said in a 1995 BBC documentary. “They need in their lives gentleness, comfort.”Clips of the show were repackaged for a PBS show, “Shining Time Station,” starting in 1989. Toys, movies and a theme park followed, and humble Thomas became a billion-dollar business.Mr. Starr was the original narrator of the series. George Carlin, Alec Baldwin, Pierce Brosnan and others followed.Ringo Starr, fourth from left, was the original narrator of “Thomas & Friends.”MattelA vast majority of the many characters were originally male — and, apparently, white. More recently, the show made efforts to diversify, adding new engines like Yong Bao of China and Ashima of India.Loyal fans of the series of all ages were thrilled by news that the pilot episode had been found, expressing eagerness to see the footage and amazement that it had been lost for so long. Enthusiasts on Reddit posted words like “finally,” “I’m so happy” and “let’s go!” punctuated by other words that Thomas and his friends would never utter.Once the restored episode was out, the reactions veered to softer sentiments. As one fan wrote, “Feels like being a kid again.”Thomas, cheerful as always.Mattel More

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      in Music

      Rare Beatles Audition Tape Surfaces in a Vancouver Record Shop

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      The recording appears to be from the band’s 1962 audition for Decca Records, which notably rejected the group.The tape sat unremarkably on a shelf behind the counter, collecting dust for five, maybe 10 years — so much time that Rob Frith says he lost track.Frith, 69, could not seem to recall how it had found its way to Neptoon Records, his store in Vancouver, British Columbia, which in its 44 years has become a repository for tens of thousands of vinyl records and other musical relics.The label on the cardboard box said it was a Beatles demo tape, but, having heard enough bootleg recordings over the decades, Frith was skeptical until he enlisted a disc jockey friend, Larry Hennessey, to load it onto his vintage tape player a few weeks ago.It was just before midnight on March 11 when they pushed play on the mystery tape. From the opening guitar riff and the intonation of a 21-year-old John Lennon, Frith said he could not believe his ears as he listened to the Beatles performing a cover of the Motown hit “Money (That’s What I Want).”“Right away, we’re all kind of looking at each other,” Frith said. “It seems like the Beatles are in the room. That’s how clear it is.”Frith said the tape appeared to be a professionally edited recording of the Beatles’ New Year’s Day 1962 audition for Decca Records in London, a session that notably ended with the band’s rejection.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Beatles Movies Cast Revealed, Including Paul Mescal and Barry Keoghan

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      The director Sam Mendes announced the stars of his four-film series, each told from the perspective of a different Beatle, set to be released in 2028. There has been no shortage of movies about the Beatles. But the director Sam Mendes is embarking on a project that stands apart for its ambition — four films, each from a different band member’s perspective — and now we know who will be playing the Fab Four.The films will star Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr, according to Mr. Mendes’s production company.The four films, which will tell the story of one of the world’s most influential and adored bands, will be released together in April 2028, “creating the first bingeable theatrical experience,” the company wrote. In announcing the films last year, Mr. Mendes, the British director best known for films like “American Beauty” (1999) and “Revolutionary Road” (2008), said he was “honored to be telling the story of the greatest rock band of all time, and excited to challenge the notion of what constitutes a trip to the movies.”He announced the cast at the CinemaCon convention in Las Vegas on Monday, according to The Hollywood Reporter. While the Beatles have been big-screen subjects before — including in Danny Boyle’s “Yesterday” (2019) and Sam Taylor-Johnson’s “Nowhere Boy” (2009) — this is the first time that the members of the band and their estates have granted full life story and music rights for a scripted film, according to Sony Pictures.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      The Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’ Film Will Stream After 54 Years on Disney+

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      Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s unloved — or misinterpreted? — 1970 documentary, the source for Peter Jackson’s “Get Back,” will stream on Disney+.In 2021, the director Peter Jackson’s sprawling and vibrant Beatles docuseries, “The Beatles: Get Back,” streamed on Disney+ to nearly universal acclaim. The three-part epic, which ran nearly eight hours, captured the drama and frenzy as John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr recorded, over the pressure-filled month of January 1969, what would become the last album that the Beatles released, “Let It Be.”As fans were well aware, Jackson’s series was culled from nearly 60 hours of behind-the-scenes footage originally shot by the director Michael Lindsay-Hogg for “Let It Be,” his little-seen, though often dismissed, 1970 documentary about those recording sessions.After its initial theatrical run, Lindsay-Hogg’s film largely disappeared for more than a half-century with the exception of low-quality VHS versions and bootlegs. Fans tend to remember it as an intriguing historical document capturing the late-stage creative flights of a seismic musical force, but also as a divorce proceeding of sorts, with stark moments of internal discord as the band hurtled toward a nasty split.By that view, “Get Back,” with its abundant moments of jokey banter and on-set clowning, was seen by some as an overdue corrective to “Let It Be.”Little surprise but Lindsay-Hogg, 83, has a very different view. The acclaimed director had a hand in inventing the music video, with his promotional films for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the mid-1960s, and went on to win plaudits for the 1980s British mini-series “Brideshead Revisited.” He has fought for a half-century for “Let It Be” to get a second look and, in his mind, a fair shake.On May 8, he will get his wish, when “Let It Be,” meticulously restored by Jackson’s production team, begins streaming on Disney+ in collaboration with Apple Corps, the company that oversees the Beatles creative and business interests. Lindsay-Hogg spoke to The New York Times about the culmination of a long crusade. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Peter Brown, One of the Beatles’ Closest Confidants, Tells All (Again)

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      At 87, the dapper insider is releasing a new book of interviews conducted in 1980 and 1981 with the band and people nearest to it.Peter Brown stood in his spacious Central Park West apartment, pointing first at the dining table and then through the window to the park outside, with Strawberry Fields just to the right.“John sat at that table looking through here,” Brown said, “and he couldn’t take his eyes off the park.”That’s John as in Lennon. And the story of the former Beatle coveting this living-room view in 1971 — and how Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, eventually got their own place one block down, at the Dakota — is just one of Brown’s countless nuggets of Fab Four lore. In the 1960s he was an assistant to Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, and then an officer at Apple Corps, the band’s company. A key figure in the Beatles’ secretive inner circle, Brown kept a red telephone on his desk whose number was known only to the four members.And it was Brown who, in 1969, informed Lennon that he and Ono could quickly and quietly wed in a small British territory on the edge of the Mediterranean, a piece of advice immortalized in “The Ballad of John and Yoko”: “Peter Brown called to say, ‘You can make it OK/You can get married in Gibraltar, near Spain.’”Next week, Brown and the writer Steven Gaines are releasing a book, “All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words,” made up of interviews they conducted in 1980 and 1981 with the band and people close to it, including business representatives, lawyers, wives and ex-wives — the raw material that Brown and Gaines used for their earlier narrative biography of the band, “The Love You Make: An Insider’s Story of the Beatles,” published in 1983.Now 87, Brown is a polarizing figure in Beatles history. He was a witness to some of the band’s most important moments and was a trusted keeper of its secrets. “The only people left are Paul and Ringo and me,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Sam Mendes to Direct Four Beatles Films

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      The Oscar-winning filmmaker Sam Mendes was given full rights to the band’s music and their life stories for the unusual quartet of films, planned for 2027.The British director Sam Mendes has signed on to direct not one but four biopics about the Beatles, each telling the story of the Fab Four from a different member’s point of view.Apple Corps, the guardian of the Beatles’ musical interests, and Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and the families of John Lennon and George Harrison have granted full life story and music rights for the scripted films — a first — which will be financed and released by Sony Pictures Entertainment. The films are planned for release in 2027.“I’m honored to be telling the story of the greatest rock band of all time, and excited to challenge the notion of what constitutes a trip to the movies,” Mendes said in a statement on Tuesday. The announcement teased that the films would be released in an “innovative and groundbreaking” manner, but did not offer details.In recent years Mendes, the Oscar-winning director of “American Beauty,” has helped refresh the James Bond franchise with “Skyfall” and told the story of two British lance corporals in World War I in “1917.” As a theater director, he showed an ability to work with complicated biographical material over a long stretch of time with “The Lehman Trilogy,” a saga about the rise and fall of Lehman Brothers that earned him a Tony Award.Biopics about pop stars have grown popular in recent years: “Bob Marley: One Love” was on track to earn an estimated $33.2 million last weekend, following on the success of films including “Elvis” in 2022 and “Bohemian Rhapsody” in 2018.The Beatles have shown strength with movie audiences since they starred in “A Hard Day’s Night” in 1964, playing versions of themselves. Their fans continue to show an appetite for expansive projects: Peter Jackson’s documentary series “The Beatles: Get Back,” an over-seven-hour project, was released to much acclaim in 2021 on Disney+. More

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      in Music

      Paul McCartney Talks About His Beatles Photos Coming to the Brooklyn Museum

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      Sixty years after the Beatles appeared live on “Ed Sullivan,” McCartney reflects on his photos capturing those halcyon days. The Brooklyn Museum will exhibit them, and some will be for sale later.They are now a collector’s trove — Paul McCartney’s own photos, shot 60 years ago, when the Beatles took Europe and America by storm: images of screaming fans (one carrying a live monkey); a girl in a yellow bikini; airport workers playing air guitar, and unguarded moments grabbed from trains, planes and automobiles.McCartney, now 81, doesn’t like to sit still and reminisce about the past, so he chatted while driving home from his recording studio in Sussex, England. ‘‘My American friends call these small, one-way lanes ‘gun barrels,’ ’’ he said, warning his interviewer that at any moment the signal might die (it did). In the end, it took two days to complete a coherent conversation about the breakthrough period when the Beatles went viral, captured in the traveling exhibition ‘‘Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-1964: Eyes of the Storm,’’ which features 250 of his shots. Currently it’s at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va., and comes to the Brooklyn Museum May 3-August 18. (Don’t be surprised if the artist shows up for the opening.)It was McCartney’s archivist, Sarah Brown, who found 1,000 photographs the musician had taken over 12 weeks — from Dec. 7, 1963, to Feb. 21, 1964, — in the artist’s library.“I thought the photos were lost,’’ he said. ‘‘In the ’60s it was pretty easy. Often doors were left open. We’d invite fans in.” Even the recording studio wasn’t a safe space. “I was taking my daughter Mary to the British Library to show her where to research for her exams, and in one display case I saw the lyric sheet for ‘Yesterday,’” he said. A sticky fingered biographer had swiped the original from their studio.Rosie Broadley, a senior curator at the National Portrait Gallery in London, where the show was inaugurated, said, “His photographs show us what it was like to look through his eyes while the Beatles conquered the world.’’McCartney won an art prize at school and practiced photography with his brother, Mike (who later became a professional photographer). He graduated to a 35 mm SLR Pentax camera when the Beatles hit it big.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Beatles’ ‘Now and Then,’ Billed as ‘Last Song,’ Due Nov. 2

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      “Now and Then,” an unfinished composition from the late 1970s, was completed using technology that separated John Lennon’s vocal from a piano track.“Now and Then,” a recently finished recording from the late 1970s that is being billed as the “last song” by the Beatles, will be released on Nov. 2, more than half a century after the group broke up, thanks to advancements in audio technology, the band’s remaining members announced Thursday.The track — along with two other songs, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love,” that were released in the mid-1990s — was initially recorded by John Lennon as a demo with piano and vocals at his home in Manhattan’s Dakota building not long before he was killed in 1980.After receiving those recordings from Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, in 1994, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr worked on the tracks, but found that the home recording of “Now and Then” could not be properly mixed with the tools of the time.Last year, according to the announcement, McCartney and Starr worked to complete the song, using the same audio technology — WingNut Films’ MAL — that the director Peter Jackson used to isolate instruments, vocals and chatter for his 2021 documentary series “The Beatles: Get Back.”“There it was, John’s voice, crystal clear,” McCartney said of “Now and Then” in a statement on Thursday. “It’s quite emotional. And we all play on it, it’s a genuine Beatles recording. In 2023 to still be working on Beatles music, and about to release a new song the public haven’t heard, I think it’s an exciting thing.”Starr added: “It was the closest we’ll ever come to having him back in the room, so it was very emotional for all of us. It was like John was there, you know. It’s far out.”McCartney previously caused confusion and consternation among purist Beatles fans earlier this year when he said that they had used “A.I.” technology to finish a final Lennon track. “We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this A.I., so then we could mix the record, as you would normally do,” he said at the time.But rather than any artificially created sounds meant to reproduce Lennon’s voice or playing, the official announcement makes clear, the technology was used to preserve “the clarity and integrity of his original vocal performance by separating it from the piano.” The same technology was used for last year’s rerelease of the 1966 album “Revolver,” which included a new mix sourced directly from the four-track master tape recordings.“Now and Then,” which will be preceded by a 12-minute making-of documentary the day before its release and a music video the day after, includes “electric and acoustic guitar recorded in 1995 by George, Ringo’s new drum part, and bass, guitar and piano from Paul, which matches John’s original playing,” according to the announcement. McCartney also added a slide guitar solo inspired by Harrison, as well as backing vocals with Starr in the chorus.The track will also feature a string arrangement by Giles Martin, the son of the former Beatles producer George Martin, who died in 2016, along with McCartney and the composer Ben Foster, plus backing vocals from three other Beatles songs — “Here, There and Everywhere,” “Eleanor Rigby” and “Because” — as a nod to the Beatles’ stage show and album, “Love.”The release of “Now and Then” will be paired with the Beatles’ 1962 debut single “Love Me Do” as a double A-side single with an original cover by the artist Ed Ruscha. The song will also be included in the expanded reissue of the Beatles’ greatest hits collections, “1962-1966” (known as “The Red Album”) and “1967-1970” (“The Blue Album”), due out Nov. 10. More