With The Beatles, there is no objective answer regarding their best album. Each record means something different in the eyes of the beholder, including to those within the Fab Four who were responsible for crafting musical history with the releases.
By their own admission, The Beatles didn’t come out of the gates fully formed, and their early albums, such as Please Please Me and With The Beatles, didn’t represent the band they later became. During that period, their performances in The Cavern were in recent memory, and they still relied on material from other artists.
While hits like ‘Love Me Do’ helped spark Beatlemania, the Fab Four’s relentless evolution was the reason the group managed to keep the momentum going for almost a decade. It would have been easy for The Beatles to have continued to stick to a prize-winning formula, but it wasn’t in their nature to be risk-averse.
Instead, they expanded their horizons and allowed this to infiltrate their artistry. For example, John Lennon became besotted with Bob Dylan’s lyrical mastery, which led to him adopting a more storytelling-heavy approach to his songwriting.
Meanwhile, Paul McCartney was equally inspired by the otherworldly melodic brilliance of The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, which shaped the sound of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Additionally, George Harrison looked further afield and found his spiritual connection to India elevating his musicality.
Although Ringo Starr was never the member of The Beatles that spurred the band on creatively, he was the glue that kept it all together. As the years went on and the Fab Four began to drift apart ideologically, Starr would crucially assist his bandmates as they attempted to enter new musical territory.
He may have never been the songwriter who was coming to sessions full of concepts for material, but Starr’s importance is impossible to understate. Like fans of The Beatles, he has his opinions on their best material and a favourite album by the Fab Four. Although Starr has spent much more of his life as a solo artist or the leader of the All-Starr Band rather than in The Beatles, he understands their work supersedes anything he’s created since.
Since the Beatles split in 1970, Starr has gone on to forge a prolific solo career. At the beginning of the 1990s, the former Beatles drummer created Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band, a supergroup with an ever-changing lineup but consistently fronted by Starr.
The band, who play a mix of Starr’s solo material and old Beatles hits, continue to tour today. With a revolving door of members who make up the group on a tour-by-tour basis, the band rarely conduct wide-ranging interviews. However, they did sit down with Rock Cellar Magazine in 2012, where Starr and his colleagues named their favourite album by The Beatles.
Steve Lukather, who is still the current guitarist of the All-Starr band but is arguably best known as the sole continuous founding member of the rock band Toto, named Meet The Beatles. In his reasoning, he described it as a “life changer” and praised “the sound as otherworldly”.
Drummer Gregg Bissonnette chose ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ for similarly sentimental reasons. Meanwhile, Mark Rivera, the acclaimed saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist best known for his work with Billy Joel, went with his head over his heart by picking Revolver due to the work of engineer Geoff Emerick.
Now, it’s time for the opinion that matters most, as Ringo revealed: “For me, that would be Abbey Road. That one is my favourite because I just love all those bits and pieces that weren’t full songs that John and Paul had been working on and pulled all together — ‘Mean Mr. Mustard,’ ‘Polythene Pam,’ and ‘She Came in Through the Bathroom Window.’”
Surprisingly, Starr was the only member of The Beatles who believed that Abbey Road was their best work. Harrison once picked out Rubber Soul, Lennon chose The White Album, and McCartney opted for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
All four of the aforementioned records signify a different chapter in their story, but for Ringo, nothing could compete with Abbey Road for the sheer absurdity of the interludes. While it contained hits such as ‘Come Together’, ‘Something’, and ‘Here Comes The Sun’, Starr preferred the nonsensical, whimsical tracks that sat beside them on the LP.
No other band of The Beatles’ stature would have contemplated releasing such an eclectic record. However, they were only interested in pleasing themselves by this point in their career. Starr has always had a predisposition towards novelty tracks, so his feelings towards Abbey Road make perfect sense, even if the songs mentioned don’t capture the height of the Fab Four’s musical excellence.
