PERSON: Ringo Starr

Musician

Sir Richard Starkey (born 7 July 1940), known as Ringo Starr, is an English musician and actor who achieved international fame as the drummer for the Beatles. Starr occasionally sang lead vocals with the group, usually for one song on each album, including “Yellow Submarine” and “With a Little Help from My Friends”. He also wrote and sang the Beatles songs “Don’t Pass Me By” and “Octopus’s Garden,” and is credited as a co-writer of four others. As of 2025, Starr is the longest-living member of the band.

Starr’s playing style, which emphasised feel over technical virtuosity, influenced many drummers to reconsider their playing from a compositional perspective. He also influenced various modern drumming techniques, such as the matched grip, tuning the drums lower, and using muffling devices on tonal rings. In his opinion, his finest recorded performance was on the Beatles’ “Rain”. In 1999, he was inducted into the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame. In 2011, Rolling Stone readers named him the fifth-greatest drummer of all time. He was inducted twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as a Beatle in 1988 and as a solo artist in 2015, and appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 2018 New Year Honours for services to music.

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