For as long as rock and roll has been around, a lot of people forget how much fun it used to be. Sure, there have been many subgenres that have come and gone since then, but listening back to the last few years of rock and roll, things have taken a far more serious turn, from various strains of metal rearing their heads to grunge turning every song into an emotional outlet for people who were hurting inside. During the genre’s inception, though, this was the kind of stuff that you were supposed to dance to, and Ringo Starr thought it was nearly impossible not to move your body to ‘Get Back’.

At the same time, Starr is the main reason why all of those Beatles songs had that signature jump to them in the first place. No matter how many iconic tunes John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote together, it didn’t mean a thing unless Starr’s signature groove didn’t lock everything in, especially when playing a lot of their covers of tunes like ‘Long Tall Sally’ and ‘Rock and Roll Music’.

Even when they began to stretch out, Starr still could lock into a tempo that fit the song no matter how strange. No one really realises that a track like ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ is in two completely different time signatures in the verse and chorus, but as long as Starr is giving us those three tom-tom hits between them, no one would notice.

But that doesn’t mean that there weren’t some moments where things got a little too heated. For all of the massive experiments that went into The White Album, the groove wasn’t a priority in a song like ‘Julia’, and it takes a certain kind of person to find a pulse or even attempt to dance along to ‘Revolution 9’.

So when the Fab Four decided to strip things back, ‘Get Back’ was the best way for them to return to what made them that scrappy bar band. And while we know now that it was birthed out of thin air when McCartney was mucking about on his bass, Starr thought the finished product could get anyone on their feet.

After years of messing around with the construct of a rock song, Starr thought that ‘Get Back’ was the archetype dance song that they were so good at in the days of The Cavern, saying, “Paul takes the lead vocal, and you can say it’s a lovely little toe-tapper. If you can sit down when this one is on, then you’re a stronger man than I am.”

And outside of McCartney’s melody, the main reason why it works is how Starr plays the drums. While not necessarily a military march or anything, those insistent triplet rhythms that he puts into his hi-hat strikes are the engine of the group, almost getting the listener to move involuntarily once it kicks off.

More than anything, this feels like the one moment of levity in between the months when The Beatles began to fall apart. The Get Back documentary already highlighted the good times that happened behind the scenes, but its namesake track is still a good indication of why the band got so many people on their feet back in the early 1960s.