Ringo Starr has confirmed that the Beatles album, Abbey Road, which recently hit Number 1 again, was not meant to be the group’s last in a new interview.
It was always believed that the band went into Abbey Road knowing that it would be their last album, but on a secret tape recently uncovered by Beatles expert Mark Lewisohn, the band were discussing a follow-up album and never intended for Abbey Road to be their last.
In a new interview with BBC 6 Music, Starr has now confirmed this was the case and that the band wanted to go on recording well into the 1970s.
Ringo Starr said: “We did do Abbey Road and we were 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.”
“It’s a revelation,” Lewisohn told The Guardian about the tape. “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.
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“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 also opened up about working once more with Paul McCartney, after the two recently teamed up on Starr’s latest album, What’s My Name. The two worked together on a cover of John Lennon’s song, ‘Grow Old With Me.’
“It’s the best. I love playing with him…We played a lot together in ‘that band’ and he’s still in the most melodic player. He’s still incredible, for me, I feel the emotion when [he] plays.”
Starr added: “I had no idea about this song…I bumped into Jack this year and he says, ‘Did you ever hear the cassette?’ I said, ‘What cassette?’ He said, ‘Of John doing the songs! Doing the demos in Bermuda!’”
Starr added: “I love the song. It’s very romantic and so it’s probably, I’m guessing, written for John and Yoko.”
