Word: ringo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...remember Ringo. He was the comical one in the Beatles, lovable but expendable. He hitched a ride on the Lennon-McCartney express. Perhaps you believed he'd been knighted like Sir Paul. Maybe you assumed he'd retired. In fact, almost everything you think you know about Ringo is wrong, except that he's endearing. Lean and boisterous in tight pants, T shirt, sneakers and funky sunglasses, he could be mistaken for a 50-something in the first throes of an affair with a younger woman. It is true that Ringo is enraptured by a younger woman...
...Ringo also has a house in Los Angeles, takes holidays in the tropics, and occasionally - and with evident reluctance - visits his spread in the Surrey countryside, south of London. He'll be there later this month. "I'm going to England for Christmas with the kids," he says. "It's damp and it's cold and it's dark. I love the sun and the warmth, and that's how I choose to spend my life...
...Liverpool, pinioned by the icy winds blowing in from the Mersey Estuary, the city's prodigal son will launch a year-long festival marking its selection as one of the two European Capitals of Culture for 2008 (the other one, Stavanger in Norway, is even colder). It will be Ringo's first rooftop performance since the Beatles' final gig atop London's Apple Studios in January 1969. That day, enveloped in a scarlet coat and insulated by his thick mane of hair, he looked cold - and the moptop has long since been supplanted by a close-cropped style that will...
...Provided Ringo survives the opening ceremony, he'll headline at a concert the next evening featuring fellow mainstays of the city's music scene: the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, No Fakin' DJs, Echo and the Bunnymen, Pete Wylie, Ian Broudie, Shack, the Christians and the Wombats. That motley list tells the real story. Something about Liverpool, a chemical reaction between the irrepressible locals and the diverse influences that have slipped ashore in the city's port, spurs creativity. High culture and low, from staid to avant-garde - it's all come out of Merseyside. But nothing else has ever equaled...
...thing it says on that tin is "baked beans." Ringo never liked fancy foreign food, and in 1967 went off with fellow Beatles to see the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India, carrying with him a suitcase full of baked beans. He left the ashram when he'd eaten the last can. He grew up in poverty. ("I was so poor," jokes Ringo, "that I had to hop to school. We only had one shoe.") He hasn't been back to Merseyside since his stepdad's funeral 11 years ago. Ask Ringo if he's English and he answers...