The Beatles went on tours around the UK when they first made their breakthrough. The Fab Four squeezed into a small car and drove around Blighty to play their music to the growing fanbase that would create Beatlemania. However, it was Ringo Starr who was the final member of the band to join the group. He was also the last person the rest of the team wanted to sleep with in hotels around the country.
Ringo Starr had bizarre sleeping habits
Starr was recruited into The Beatles in August 1962 after they dropped their first drummer from the band, Pete Best. While he gelled with the band musically and personally quickly, he was still an outsider joining the tight-knit threesome of pals John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison.
As a result, when the band hit the road to play in venues around England, the topic of sleeping arrangements quickly came up.
Starr recently looked back on those early days, saying[ via Express]:
“Well, the big relationship of course with our writers John and Paul. Things that went on, when I joined the band, we only ever had two rooms, in hotels, we were all in the same car, we had two rooms. We were always getting to know each other.”
So when the band were forced to split up into pairs, nobody initially volunteered to spend their nights with Starr. Eventually, Starr found himself a companion in one half of The Beatles’ primary songwriting duo:
He said:
“Paul was the only one who’d sleep with me.”
It has come to light that Harrison and Lennon were not too sure about sleeping with Starr because they didn’t know what his sleeping habits were like. Starr claimed they said:
“Oh, we don’t know if he farts or whatever.”
“Anyway,” Starr recalled. “So Paul kept it together.”
They became bunkmates while on tour and spent countless nights together when the hotel rooms were divided between the four members. Starr and McCartney no doubt became extremely close because of these sleeping arrangements, but their strong friendship did not always last.
