One can only admire Tom Doyle's ability to keep Ringo front and center throughout Ringo: A Fab Life, even during the biography's Beatle-centric first half. For someone like me who has read a lot of Beatles books but had never before read a Ringo one, this makes Ringo: A Fab Life read somewhat like a Beatles history full of gaping holes. The music is barely mentioned until 1966, when Ringo has his breakout moments behind the mic with "Yellow Submarine" and behind the kit with "Rain" and "Tomorrow Never Knows". That's not a gripe, though. It's actually to Doyle's credit that he's able to hold himself back from going over well-trodden ground because it doesn't really directly expand Ringo's personal story.
A bigger issue is Doyle's tendency to meander around the narrative by flitting between typical chronological storytelling and topical chapters. Doing so makes some of Ringo's major moments seem inadequately covered, at least initially. The author breezes right past his movie-star-making turns in A Hard Day's Night and Help! when covering The Beatles' mid-period, only to catch up with them in cinema-centric chapter placed at the point in the story when Ringo is about to make Candy in 1968.
This makes for a bit of a choppy read, though not as choppy as Doyle's even more mercurial Kate Bush bio Running Up That Hill. Still there are some pretty odd choices, as when he provides complete synopses of Ringo's scenes in Peter Jackson's Get Back series, and more bizarrely, the "comedy" Caveman. Sure, that was the movie on which Ringo met wife-to-be Barbara Bach, but it's also dumb as shit and doesn't deserve its awful plot rehashed with such care.
If you can acclimate to the writer's unconventional approach, you will find that he ultimately does a good job of telling Ringo's tale. And one of his big pluses is that he has actually interviewed Ringo, as well as such other key contributors as Paul McCartney, George Martin, Yoko Ono, Sean Lennon, Zak Starkey, and Klaus Voorman.
I also greatly appreciated the tone of Ringo: A Fab Life. He may have been seen as "the goofy Beatle," but Ringo had his share of dark times, from his sickly childhood to his glum attempt to muddle through The Beatles argumentative break up to his most unpleasant discovery that pal George Harrison had been having an affair with his wife, Maureen, through to his serious issues with drink and drugs, which according to some admittedly disreputable tabloids, involved domestic violence. Yet through it all Doyle somehow manages to maintain a light tone, so it never really becomes a downbeat read like Graeme Thomson's biography of crabby George Harrison. Even the chapter on Ringo and Barbara Bach's alcoholism ends on an upbeat yet sincere note. It's a rare pleasure to read a biography of someone who's had a life like the one Ringo has had, which wasn't always fab, and still come away from it liking the subject.
