The Beatles had a great deal of magic to them, and that magic arose from the peculiar chemistry between four people. Remove even one of them, and it just couldn’t persist. Ringo Starr knew that, and that’s perhaps what made his decision to leave the band in 1968 all the more striking.
The group had lost manager Brian Epstein the year before, his death from an overdose accelerating a feeling of being adrift. Numerous projects – the Magical Mystery Tour filma trip to India – would help to plug that gap, but a sense of inertia had set in.
During the sessions for what would become The White Album, Ringo Starr decided that he had simply had enough. Walking out of the band, he informed John Lennon he was leaving before going on holiday to Sardinia.
“I went to see John [Lennon]who had been living in my apartment in Montagu Square with Yoko [Ono] since he moved out of Kenwood,” Starr recalled, “I said, ‘I’m leaving the group because I’m not playing well and I feel unloved and out of it, and you three are really close.’”
He would tell the Anthology film makers: “I had definitely left. I couldn’t take it anymore. There was no magic and the relationships were terrible. I knew we were all in a messed-up stage. It wasn’t just me; the whole thing was going down.”
The holiday refreshed him, however – Ringo Starr wrote ‘Abbey Road’ classic ‘Octopus’s Garden’ while in the Mediterranean, and the band struggled to move on without his percussive nous.
Returning to a hero’s welcome, The Beatles adorned his drum kit with flowers – but his return couldn’t fully patch up the band’s emerging fissures.
Related: White OUT – The Beatles’ White Album At 50
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