RINGO IS PLANNING TO START WORKING ON A NEW ALBUM IN JANUARY AND POSSIBLY ANOTHER ALL STARR TOUR

Ringo and Paul are touring North America this fall and in one case – Toronto – arrive in town mere days apart. (Macca’s at the Air Canada Centre Oct. 17 and Ringo and his All-Starr Band are at Massey Hall Oct. 20)
 

But don’t expect them to appear on each other’s stages, says Ringo, whose trek includes seven Canadian cities in October promoting his 2015 album, Postcards from Paradise, which includes him recording with his All-Starr bandmates (the same lineup that has been touring with him since 2012) on a disc for the first time.

“I wouldn’t think so,” said Ringo with a chuckle.

“I was with (Paul recently) in England actually and he’s going on tour and I said, ‘Well, where are you going? I’m doing this,’” recalled Ringo, down the line from his L.A. home recently.

“And he’s like ahead of me. He put his tour together unbeknownst to me. I put mine together for the autumn unbeknownst to him and here we are. I mean, that’s CLOSE to being psychic.”

Previously, Starr has rehearsed, then launched his All-Starr Band summer tours in Ontario at either Casino Rama or Fallsview Casino.

This time they rehearsed in the U.S. for the fall theatre jaunt, which doesn’t mean he doesn’t still love his neighbours to the north.

“Beautiful audiences in Canada,” said Starr. “It’s an awesome tour. We’re doing mainly theatres ‘cause you never know what the weather’s going to be like. And they promised me I’ll get out of Canada before the snow comes.”

In addition to the tour, Ringo – who is planning to start working on a new album in January and possibly another All Starr jaunt – has also just re-released his photo book, Photograph, which first came out an E-book, then a special limited edition, and now in a new hard copy version, due to new photos he stumbled upon in an old trunk.

He will also auction off more than 800 items, many Beatles-related, in early December.

“Some of it was emotional but the end result was positive,” said Starr, who was also inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist earlier this year by Paul.

Emotional?

“We closed down two of our major homes. We live in L.A. now and we’ve got a lot of paintings that we don’t have any space for them here ... So we’re getting rid of pictures where we have to emotionally say, ‘Well, I’ll keep that one and that one. No, no. We’ll get rid of that one.’ You know you have to gone through everything. That can be emotional.”

Ringo says the photo discovery was “just like far out ‘cause stuff has been in storage for so long and in different countries. You know I thought I lost half of my gear anyway. Surprise, surprise. It all came back. And this box of photographs came back – negatives – hundreds of them and I thought, ‘Well let’s put it to some good use.’ ... You know, incredible photos. It’s sort of an autobiography in some ways.”

All four of the Beatles were given cameras, but Ringo says him, John, Paul and George weren’t thinking like over-documenting kids with cellphones of today.

 

“We were just thinking, ‘Hey, we were given cameras, let’s take photos.’ And I had an 8mm camera. I wish I could find the reels from that. We were touring just Europe, but mainly England and Ireland then when I had this 8mm. God knows where the reels of tape are. Maybe we’ll find them, get lucky, I don’t know. But so far we haven’t. But it was just like we were sitting in the car, looking for something to do. ... You know the downtime the Beatles had – in hotel rooms. We always had holiday shots because we always went on holiday together. We shared rooms, we shared a car, and we went on holiday together. We were always with each other so I think that comes across in the book and that’s how beautiful it was.”

Ringo Starr’s 2015 Canadian tour dates:

Oct 20 Massey Hall Toronto

Oct 21 St Denis Theatre Montreal