Sir Ringo Starr “always wanted” a different singing voice.
The 84-year-old musician found international fame as the drummer for the Beatles in the 1960s alongside the late John Lennon, George Harrison, and Sir Paul McCartney and while he can “hold a tune”, he found that everything “worked out” for them all because of the songwriting talent within the band.
He told The Sunday Times: “Well, I always wanted to be someone else. Like Jerry Lee [Lewis] or someone! I mean, I can hold a tune, as long as it’s in my key.
“And it just worked out with the Beatles because John and Paul were great writers.
“That’s what made us. And I’d get one song. And a couple of them were really good, you know, ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’ and ‘Yellow Submarine’. “They’re still huge and I still do them on tour. They wrote me a lot of really nice songs.”
The ‘Sentimental Journey’ hitmaker has just released his 20th studio album ‘Look Up’, and as he and his band ‘Ringo Starr and Friends’ continue to tour, he admitted that it is still “fun” to him but often tends to perform the classics on the road rather than playing newer tracks for his fans.
He said: “The band sounds great. We have a fun time and we just do it.
“In the late Nineties, I would put in, like, two or three from the new album, and you could feel the room empty. It happens to everybody.
“I was with [Sir Elton John’s] mother at Wembley Stadium. He came on and said, ‘I’m only going to do the new album.’ Me and his mother left after three tracks because we didn’t know them.”