Ringo Starr

Ringo Starr (born Richard Starkey, 1940, in Liverpool) drummed on every era-defining Beatles record and, sixty years on, became half of the duo that finished the band’s story with a machine-learning assist. “Now and Then,” released in November 2023, was built from a 1970s John Lennon cassette demo that had defeated the surviving Beatles in the 1990s because Lennon’s voice could not be separated from his piano.

Lifting John off a cassette

The breakthrough came from MAL, the audio-separation technology Peter Jackson’s team developed for the Get Back documentary, which isolated Lennon’s vocal cleanly enough for Paul McCartney and Starr to complete the track. “They lifted John’s voice off a cassette, for God’s sake — off a cassette!” Starr told Music Week in December 2024. “And it was like John was suddenly in town.” The result became the Beatles’ first UK number one since 1969 and won the 2025 Grammy for Best Rock Performance.

When rumors spread that the song faked Lennon’s voice with generative AI, Starr pushed back hard, telling Rolling Stone in June 2023 that the Beatles would “never” artificially recreate John’s vocals — the AI only extracted what Lennon actually sang.

His verdict on the technology is two-sided and characteristically plain: the good side is how the Beatles used it; the frightening side is voice cloning. Feed AI any five of his songs, he says, and “it knows my every vocal move… They can have me sing anything and it will sound like me.” For now, he notes, “nobody’s really stolen anything yet.”