Hold me up, somebody - the Vertical Man himself is on the line, and he's greeting me with a cheery "Hullo!", in that unmistakable Liverpudlian accent of his. OK, in The World's Greatest Pop Group, Ringo Starr was only the drummer, and his solo work wasn't half as interesting as Lennon's, McCartney's or Harrison's, but he was still a Beatle, and in my book, that makes him part of a rare, exclusive and utterly Fab rock 'n' roll royalty. So yeah, I'll take the call. What do you ask a 58-year-old ex-Beatle who has smoked pot in Buckingham Palace, brought baked beans along on his trip to India to visit the Maharishi, and loaned his voice to a smiling, animated locomotive named Thomas? Er, how's life, Ringo?
"Wonderful," answers Ringo Starr in his thick, tank-engine brogue. "I'm in great health and I've never felt better. I'm enjoying life and just having a great time." Starr's ebullient attitude can be attributed to the good kicking which he gave to his booze habit 10 years ago, when he and his wife, actress Barbara Bach, checked into a clinic in Tucson, Arizona. Dumping the drink also helped put Ringo back in the saddle, (i.e. back on the drumstool), and since 1989 the singer, actor and voice-over artist has been touring extensively with an everchanging line-up collectively known as The All-Starr Band. The first incarnation, in 1989, comprised Dr John, Billy Preston, Joe Walsh, Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Nils Lofgren, Jim Keltner and Clarence Clemons, and subsequent line-ups have featured Dave Edmunds, Todd Rundgren, Randy Bachman, John Entwistle, and Ringo's own tub-thumping offspring, Zak Starkey.
Starr is coming to The Point on August 20th, the first time in 35 years a Beatle has performed in Ireland, and he's bringing another bunch of rock 'n' roll survivors with him, including Gary Brooker, Jack Bruce, Peter Frampton, Simon Kirke and Mark Rivera. "The main requirement for being in The All-Starr Band," says Ringo, only half-jokingly, "is that you must have had a recognisable hit from the 1960s, the 1970s or the 1980s. You'll see when we come over to play in Ireland - Gary Brooker does Whiter Shade of Pale, which I think is one of the greatest songs from the 1960s. I've always loved that song. And Jack Bruce does White Room, and I'll be doing things such as Photo- graph and With A Little Help From My Friends."
Ringo has just released a new album, Vertical Man, his first in eight years, and he has recruited another all-star assemblage to help him in the studio, including Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Brian Wilson, Alanis Morissette Scott Weiland, Steven Tyler and Ozzy Osborne. Despite such heavyweight presence, it would be fair to surmise that Vertical Man won't exactly knock Sgt. Pepper off the top of the all-time classics list. Indeed, it'll hardly even challenge Paul McCartney's most recent, half-baked effort, Flaming Pie, but what it will do is project Ringo's larger-than-life persona through such irritatingly catchy ditties as La De Da, One and What In The . . . World. If you thought Back Off Boogaloo was a bit whimsical, wait'll you start whistling along to the positively cheesy fare on offer here.
However, mindful of the ease with which a phone can be hung up, I steer clear of the obvious criticisms and inanely ask Ringo about his "musical vision". "I'm not really looking for a sound," he replies. "I have my sound, and there's no point in trying to change it. I co-wrote 11 of the 13 songs - it's great when it's your own album, 'cos you get to direct the writing and the playing, although the musicians are so good they don't really need directing. It's a pop record, plain and simple. It's not a dance record, or a techno record. It just reflects what I like to do, which is to get up and play some good, old-fashioned pop songs."
You can't get more old-fashioned than Ringo's cover of Dobie Gray's Drift Away, or his re-interpretation of The Beatles' Love Me Do (he never actually played on the Beatles' original). And you can't get more simplistic than the album's flagship ditty, La De Da. What's the deep and meaningful message behind that one, then, Ringo?
"La De Da is about when things aren't going your way, and you can't do anything about it, so you just have to say `la de da'. There's no use in being angry about it, because that won't change the situation, so there's nothing else for it but to just go `la de da'."
So there you have it, folks, the answer to our problems in three tiny syllables. Thirty years ago you had to go through the whole `turn off your mind, relax and float downstream' rigmarole, but in the compact, user-friendly 1990s, all you have to say is `la de da'. So, Ringo, have you come up against any situations recently which required a swift dose of `la de da'?
"Oh, yes, I've been up against things which are out of my control. Just recently on the album, we recorded a track with Steven Tyler singing one of the verses, and then Aerosmith's people called and said I had to take Steve off the track. There was panic, people running around going, what'll we do? I just said `la de da'. We solved the problem - we got Tom Petty to sing in Steve's place, and the song is still great. I even thanked Steve later, I said, `you've shown me the importance of `la de da'."
Indeed. Moving swiftly away from all this `la de da' malarkey, what was it like working with Paul and George on the Anthology series? Did it dredge up a lot of old memories for you, and how did it feel to relive the whole Beatles experience? "The Anthology brought the three of us closer together because we were all suddenly hanging out together, which we hadn't been doing for a long time. We were spending quite a lot of hours together working on the project, and it brought up a whole lot of things from the past which we all worked out between us. I think it was good for us to work through these things. It's great, because we were interviewed separately for the Anthology, and we all saw things from that time either very differently or exactly the same. There was no in-between - either our memories completely coincided or they were completely at odds."
More recently, the Beatles camp has been visited by tragedy with the untimely death of Linda McCartney, following her long struggle with cancer.
"Linda's death affected Barbara and I very deeply," says Ringo, candidly. "Barbara and I both loved Linda very much - she was just a great, great friend to us. But you have to carry on. Life deals these things to you and you have to just pick yourself up and go on. My uncle died last week, and he was my favourite uncle and I was very upset, even though he was in his 80s and so it wasn't entirely unexpected. Linda, though, was still young, and she was taken away from us too soon and too quickly."
Have you spoken much to Paul since Linda's death? He appears to be taking it hard.
"Paul is very sad, of course, and he will have to grieve for as long as it takes to grieve, but I'm sure he will be able to carry on. He's lost his best friend and his constant companion, and that's hard for anybody. But I can't tell you how Paul is feeling - you'll have to ask him yourself."
The title of Ringo's album, Vertical Man, comes from a quote which Ringo came across in a book belonging to his step-daughter, Francesca: "Let's hear it for the vertical man, there's always so much praise for the horizontal one". Having come close to being permanently horizontal more than once, Ringo is enjoying the feeling of being alive and standing.
"I love my life right now, I love my wife and I love my kids. Life is really good and I'm savouring every minute of it, especially since I stopped drinking. I felt I was living in a fog for a long time, but now I feel the fog has lifted. I'm playing now more than I've ever played before - when you're in that fog you don't even feel like lifting a finger. Everything goes downhill, and my career nearly went down the drain. I'd stopped making records, and I'd stopped putting any effort into my life. Now I feel great and I feel I'm on this huge roll. I've got lots of energy and enthusiasm, and I just want to go out there and use it. I still feel like I'm 24, but then I look in the mirror and I see this old codger looking back at me. But at least he's a contented old codger."