Ringo Starr – Crooked Boy Review

You could be mistaken for thinking Ringo Starr had released another album after promising to never again do so. Bleary-eyed and stood around holding a raffle ticket on a grim Record Store Day, waiting in line for a Pulp record which had failed to be reprinted beforehand, it was hard not to notice the lack of sales for Starr’s Crooked Boy. There it sat. Twelve inches of thick, black vinyl wrapped in film and slapped with a price of £27.99. A bit of a stretch for four songs from the worst of The Beatles. A man whose discography includes a Christmas-themed album. The drummer whose best solo endeavour was the trivial yet hilariously fun No No Song. Yet there it is. £27.99. Just give it a few days and out comes this track on streaming. They wonder why Spotify is so popular. 

Make no mistake it is not popular because of Starr but because spending any cash on this release would be a grave error, especially during a cost-of-living crisis. People have been shot for lesser crimes. Keeping on the trend of his previous post-Covid EP releases, Starr is spreading his faux peace and love through four new tracks he couldn’t be bothered to write himself. It doesn’t make much of a difference. Starr is an affable person and comes across as knowledgeable in interviews, yet this candour and character evaporates on Crooked Boy. Linda Perry writes these four tracks and Starr feels removed from the creative process. All he needs to do is lay down a solid vocal performance in writing he can trust. He does so and as a result, gets February Sky out of it – likely his best track in well over a decade.

Starr came worryingly close to becoming a Cliff Richard-type figure with his shaky vocals and clangs of pop-like rhythm but some harsher guitar work from The Strokes alumni Nick Valensi brings real strength. Warbling and lucked-out notions on Adeline are a deflated attempt at kicking on with those peace and love moments. His hope to save the world with the beats of optimism weighs on the shoulders of Starr too much. He cannot mount a return to the cause and fails to beat back the reality of the world. Crooked Boy serves as disconnected music for those without struggle beyond what they see in the news cycle backed by an intense and shocking collection of strong guitar work.

Yet excitement bleeds through Crooked Boy as it did on Rewind Forward. Starr turns himself from EP peddler to a protest boy with flawed years worthy of shaping his current outlook. Where Crooked Boy so often misses the mark its third track, Gonna Need Someone is a pang of enjoyably light rock work. Starr is no longer afraid of peddling his time in The Beatles. A few of the instrumentals throughout Crooked Boy sound vaguely like the split earfuls of the Fab Four’s mixing. Flickers of Octopuses’ Garden and all those other Starr contributions slowly filter through the last track, and Crooked Boy feels more complete than the rest of his recent works.

Starr digs deep for this one. At least he would have had Perry not written out these autobiographical sounds. Crooked Boy feels cheap in that regard. Starr sings observations made by others. He cannot make these himself and this is his greatest failure as a legacy act. If it can, he has done well to hide it with overly jolly, Microsoft PowerPoint effect-filled videos. The “love and peace” addition to the title track feels like a rewrite made at gunpoint. No matter how hard he tries to conjure up these tones of sincerity he botches them. Starr breaks them down into unremarkable pangs of floaty, fruity music. Still, Crooked Boy has pieces worth snapping off, however brief they may be.

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