F irst and foremost I am a drummer. After that, I'm other things... But I didn't play drums to make money. I played drums because I loved them... My soul is that of a drummer... It came to where I had to make a decision - I was going to be a drummer. Everything else goes now. I play drums. It was a conscious moment in my life when I said the rest of things were getting in the way. I didn't do it to be come rich and famous, I did it because it was the love of my life.

Ringo: 'I do get emotional when I think back about those times. My make-up is emotional. I'm an emotional human being. I'm very sensitive and it took me till I was forty-eight to realize that was the problem! We were honest with each other and we were honest about the music. The music was positive. It was positive in love. They did write - we all wrote - about other things, but the basic Beatles message was Love.

I don't talk about myself in the third person, and I laugh at people who do.

I am truly grateful. I'm a grateful human being.

I never studied anything, really. I didn't study the drums. I joined bands and made all the mistakes onstage.

I'm always good for starting a bit of a tune and the first verse, but after that I just can never go anywhere. It takes me years, that's why I'm so slow.

With God's help, I've not had a drink in nine and a half years. That's my whole story right there. And because of that, I'm doing this. I'm making records, I'm touring. I was so involved in just getting brain damaged, I wasn't doing anything. I had great ideas, many notebooks filled with notes, some of them I can read and some of them I just can't read, but I really didn't do anything constructive, it was all just good ideas. Now I'm trying to lead a constructive life a day at a time.