Ringo Starr on Born to Boogie

As told to Andrew Tyler, Disc Magazine,
9 December 1972
“Bolan struts, man, and I like that about him a lot.
A lot of people, when they first meet him, can be put off because his attitude is very bobby. He comes in telling you. He doesn’t ask much, he tells a lot and I love that about him. He comes in with an acetate saying ‘300,000 in five days, number one in two weeks’… and it was just fantastic for me that this guy with so much confidence could just come striding in.”

Having heard that Bolan was having his Wembley concerts filmed, Ringo contacted him:
“’Look, I’m a film company, why don’t we do it together… you up there and I’ll film you and we’ll go all along together.’ I had him round to the editing suite and I’d say ‘Look, this is what we’re doing; what do you say?’ Some of the shots he didn’t like cos it’s him up there and he has to take care of himself as well. “I was getting pretty bored with what was going on at the time and he was the first one, whatever anybody says, to get the kids back out of their seats, jumping and screaming about. That was what happened when I was doing it. Whatever happens, he was the one who started the ball rolling again, and it’s always nicer to associate yourself with the first. “There I was just gawking [at Wembley], cos I loved him up there. He’s exciting and just to see all those people dressed like him again… I mean, it’s the same trip… It’s great, I also love Bowie and all the showbands. It’s getting back to showbiz, as we read someone saying in your paper this week.

“About 80% [of the movie] is the Wembley show, and 20% are like vignettes, little sketches of things we wrote on the spot and just performed. We just said ‘We’ll go out with the camera… get us a car and some other props and work them on the day.’
“Every pop concert is now being filmed and the problem with that is you can never create the atmosphere in the cinema that you do at the concert. With this film I wanted to take it away from that and that’s why we put in the sketches. One is a musical, one is Marc and I sitting in the back of a car singing a three-liner he wrote on the day and another is where we try to do that well-known phrase ‘some people like to rock, some people like to roll’ which we both found on the day was impossible. We kept cracking up so badly. It was a real crack-up… not forced or anything so it looks nice and I put it in.

When I’m performing it’s really hard to shoot yourself but there isn’t a shot in there that we didn’t talk about and set up first. What we tried to do was incorporate a few more facets of Marc Bolan that people haven’t seen, like him saying his poetry, both of us doing these sketches and the music and, of course, the reaction to the music from the crowd.”

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