In a new interview with BBC 6 Music, The Beatles drummer Ringo Starr confirmed that Abbey Road, the band’s universally acclaimed eleventh studio album, was not meant to be their last as a group.
So the narrative has gone for years, tensions were high among the members of the band in 1969. They convened for one “final” time to record Abbey Road before going their separate ways. While Let It Be would be released the following year, making it their last official release, most of the recording for that album was done prior to the Abbey Road sessions.
As NME notes, “Until recently, it was thought that the band went into recording the album knowing it would be their last until a tape, uncovered by Beatles expert Mark Lewisohn, revealed that the band were discussing a follow-up album.”
The tape, uncovered by Lewisohn and publicized by The Guardian, was recorded on September 8th, 1969 by Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison for the benefit of Starr, who was in the hospital at the time. It captures a conversation between the band’s members regarding how they would break down the songwriting duties for a new record (four songs each from Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison alongside two from Starr) and captures some of the still-present tensions between the four men at that time. You can read a full breakdown of the tape here.
“It’s a revelation,” Lewisohn told The Guardian when the tape was uncovered last month. “The books have always told us that they knew Abbey Road was their last album and they wanted to go out on an artistic high. But no – they’re discussing the next album. And you think that John is the one who wanted to break them up but, when you hear this, he isn’t. Doesn’t that rewrite pretty much everything we thought we knew?”
Starr confirmed this notion in his BBC 6 Music interview. “We did do Abbey Road and we was like, ‘Okay that’s pretty good…but none of us said, ‘OK, that’s the last time we’ll ever play together. Nobody said that. I never felt that. … We’d made this record, and then we would go off and do whatever we wanted to do. And then Paul would call us and say, ‘Hey, you want to go in the studio lads?’ and we’d do another one. So it was not the end—because in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make. So I never felt it was in stone.”
That call from Paul never came, as the various members became wrapped up in their newer solo projects. Any possibility of a new Beatles album ended in 1980, when John Lennon was assassinated in New York.
Ringo Starr also recently released a new lyric video for “Grow Old With Me”, which appears on his forthcoming album, What’s My Name. The song was written with the late John Lennon, and the recording features Joe Walsh on guitar and Paul McCartney on bass. The album is set to be released on October 25th.
Ringo Starr – “Grow Old With Me” [Official Lyric Video]
[Video: ringostarr]
[H/T BBC 6 Music]