Rory And The Hurricanes

Written by: Richard Starkey, David A Stewart
Recorded: 2014–2015
Producer: Ringo Starr

Released: 31 March 2015

Available on:
Postcards From Paradise

Personnel

Ringo Starr: vocals, drums
David A Stewart: guitar
Michael Bradford: bass guitar
Jason Borger: keyboards
Double Treble: vocals

‘Rory And The Hurricanes’ is the opening song on Ringo Starr’s 18th solo studio album, 2015’s Postcards From Paradise.

Co-written by Starr and David A Stewart, it followed a trilogy of songs about Liverpool on the previous three albums: ‘Liverpool 8’, ‘The Other Side Of Liverpool’, and ‘In Liverpool’.

It’s absolutely one of those song biographies. It was written with Dave Stewart again. If you look back down of the tracks on my past few records, Dave and I call them ‘the Liverpool songs.’ Those songs are like memories I have, and the song ‘Rory And The Hurricanes’ is another member of that band. We clubbed up and bought us enough gas to get to London. With the lyrics, it’s literal, really. ‘We woke up early heading for the M1, 200 miles to London…’ We did live on bread and jam. We did have butter for the first day but we ran out of that. (laughs) That’s all we had. We all slept on the floor. We went to this dance and no girl there would dance with any one of us because of our accent. There was such a divide then. We’ve all been turned down by record labels. Elvis was turned down and the Beatles were turned down by record labels. Someone at a label said, ‘What’s your name? … Beatles from Liverpool? They’ll never make it.’ This was an executive with a record label. Shows you what he knew. (laughs) So anyway, here we are, and I’m still doing it.

‘Rory And The Hurricanes’ narrows its scope to Starr’s pre-Beatles band Rory and the Hurricanes, fronted by Rory Storm (Alan Ernest Caldwell). The Hurricanes were one of Liverpool’s most popular beat groups, and played in Hamburg alongside The Beatles on many occasions.

It’s instead of an autobiography. I’ve been invited to write it by several publishing houses but I don’t feel they’re interested in my autobiography – they’re only interested in the eight years I was in The Beatles. So for some reason it came to me, starting with ‘Liverpool 8’, I’m going to write snippets of my life on each album. One track on each is dedicated to memories of the past, incidents of the past.