Ringo Starr, quite possibly still going around warning everyone with ‘peace and love’, is opening and closing his mouth again, letting words tumble out and reminding everyone that he once provided the voice for Thomas The Tank Engine and friends.

He’s also nattering about his famous chum, Sir Paul McCartney.

Apparently, the 10th best drummer in The Beatles (after John Lennon, Sir Macca, George Harrison, George Martin, Billy Preston, Pete Best, Stuart Sutcliffe, Yoko Ono, Astrid Kirchherr and that arhythmic dripping tap in studio 2 of Abbey Road) is still in close contact with the only useful living member of the Fab Four.

Of course, you’d expect Ringo (real name Ringles Starrguitar) to still be in contact with a bloke he’s know since he was a whippersnapper. This isn’t news is it?

The news is, that they have no plans to work together any time soon… which is barely newsworthy in itself because Paul McCartney has a perfectly able drummer as it is.

Ringo told BBC Radio 2 presenter Steve Wright (who currently looks like a melted waxwork of David Gest):

“He surprised me when I was playing Radio City Music Hall, and he got up and he played ‘Birthday’, which I played with him because I wanted the opportunity to ply with him again, and he’s on the last record, he’s not on this one.

“We do hang out a bit but we’re not in each other’s pockets, and if the opportunity is real, I’ve played on a couple of his records, he’s played on mine.”

“We never sit there and say, ‘oh yeah we’ll put it together’, I’ll do ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Hey Jude’, he’ll do ‘Octopus’s Garden’.”

While that may read duller than ditch water, you should go back and read it out loud in your best Ringo Starr impression because EVERYONE is able to do a Ringo impression and it is NEVER not funny.

Elsewhere, there have been rumours that the living Beatles are to reunite and play at the opening of the 2012 Olympic Games in London this summer. Ringo’s not having it.

“There was talk about The Olympics last year, but I’m not here, I’m booked to tour America. I don’t know if he’s going to do it, but I’m off.”

He hates England, doesn’t he?

Since John and George died, there’s been something of a tussle over who can be the funniest remaining Beatle. Paul McCartney is just too wacky to be properly funny, so that means, by default, Ringo gets the crown, right?

Well, sadly for Ringo, he seems to be suffering from an onset on dementia.

Of course, our Ring’ became something of a laughing stock when he warned us all with ‘peace and love’ not to send him any more gifts (how can anyone top those paintings Marge Simpson did of him?). Then he went and vaguely slagged off Liverpool. He’s priceless isn’t he? Well, now he’s slagging Paul McCartney off. Next, we assume he’ll be pissing on Lennon’s grave.

First of all, Ringo is claiming that The Beatles were lucky to have him as their drummer. And he’s right to say that as he was the best man on Merseyside to man the drumstool at the time (and, contrary to popular belief, remained a really great drummer throughout the Beatles’ career).

He says:

‘Within Liverpool, I was a lot more well know than them. Rory and the Hurricanes (Starr’s former band) were big shots in the city. We had the suits. That was our claim to fame. The Beatles were lucky to get me. It wasn’t just that I was a big shot; I was a cool drummer.’

All well and good, right? Everyone knows Ringo was better than Pete Best. But what’s all this about Macca?

Well, Ringo is still touring with his (pretty awful) All Starr Band. He keeps asking Paul to join them but alas, as one of the greatest living songwriters on the planet, he’s always busy.

This obviously sticks in Starr’s craw.

‘Every time I ask him to tour with the All Starrs, he says he is too busy.’

Then, Ringo goes a bit mental.

‘We’re as close as we want to be. We’re the only two remaining Beatles, although he likes to think he’s the only one. I actually think it’s people on the outside who perceive Paul as thinking he’s the only member left, when actually it’s me. I am the last remaining Beatle.’

Paul is dead man, miss him, miss him…

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Ah! Ringo Starr! Currently the fourth most intelligent Beatle. Yes. We realise two of them are dead. Even the ghost of Lennon wouldn’t be so daft as to warn people with peace and love about sending him shit to the afterlife.

Yet this isn’t a bad thing. It’s because Ringo Starr is so insultingly stupid that he’s so great. In The Beatles Anthology series, all the best one-liners were his. He swore like nobody’s business and showed off a variety of spectacularly dismal waistcoats and mullets. What a guy!

However, we would like to see his house knocked down please because he’s an ungrateful swine.

Like slagging people’s mums, never knock somewhere you don’t live. It doesn’t matter if you once resided there, you can’t slate somewhere if people still call it their home. This is especially the case if you’re in Liverpool.

Liverpool is a tough city and those that live there will fiercely defend it to any naysayers. In private, they’ll slag it off ’til the cows come home, but they’re allowed because they’re scousers, plastic or otherwise.

So when Ringo Starr kinda shrugged his shoulders on the Jonathan Ross show and pretty much said Liverpool was a bag of gash, there was uproar in Merseyside.

How dare he?! He soon buggered off to America or the Home Counties or whichever glitzy craphole he lives in now! How dare he have the front to sneer at the place that helped to propel him to stardom?!

He’s thick, y’dummies! Of all the Fabs, he was the one most likely to say “Liverpool? Too wet, too cold and full of scrubbers, said Thomas”, right?

So he won’t give a monkeys that his birthplace is getting demolished will he? Sod him if he does. It’ll serve him right for sneering one off down that long, famous snout of his.

9 Madryn Street, in Dingle, is probably going to get hauled down and redeveloped which has seen fans who presumably don’t live in the area, and thereby, don’t need a place to live in Liverpool, campaigning to save the building. Yeah! That’s what Liverpool needs! Sod people living under a roof! We want a Ringo Museum where we can look at a 1950s kitchen while a man sings ‘It Don’t Come Easy’ down the stairs while wearing half a parsnip on his nose!

Council leader Joe Anderson says:

“The community in that area have been waiting for 11 years to have these houses demolished and believe they have waited long enough”

Chairman of the campaign to Save Madryn Street, Philip Coppell, disagrees and says:

“Number 9 is a priceless tourist resource that the city would be mad to destroy.”

Of course it is Philip. And people really love his ‘Goodnight Vienna’ LP just as much as they enjoyed listening to She Loves You and Ticket To Ride.

That said, this is pretty cool.

Oh forget that!

Sod it. Pull it down. hecklerspray will help if you want.

You hire the skip and we’ll bring the lump hammers.

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It’s 2010! The start of a brand new year, a time when everything ahead of you is ripe with possibility. How wonderful.

Except it won’t be. We hate to break this to you, but 2010 is going to be crap. Just like 2009 was crap, just like 2008 was crap, just like every stinking year since the stupid year that you weren’t asked to be born was crap.

Why are we so certain that 2010 will be a great big stinking turd of galactic proportions? Glad you asked – we’ve assembled the ten most dreadful, unavoidable handfuls of crap that’ll be flung at you before the year is out. Don’t say we didn’t warn you…

10 – TV: The end of Lost

Lost’s final season starts soon. This is crap mainly because Lost is good – and a world without Lost is obviously worse than a world with Lost – but it’s also crap because the writers might balls it all up by revealing that Locke is Jack’s dad, and that Desmond is really an alien and that it was all only dream. If any of these things happen, 2010 will be the crappest year in history.

9 – EVENT: The World Cup

Yes, look, England have got the easiest group and we’re going to win and blah blah blah. Except England won’t win. England will do what they always do against apparently weak opposition – they’ll complacently swan into the first match, go 2-0 down, end up clawing back a draw, repeat this for the rest of the group matches get knocked out in the quarter finals and come back to see that The Sun has superimposed their heads onto a photo of some cows.  It’ll be crap.

8 – ALBUM: Jamie Foxx, Body

Great, thanks, just what we need – an album by a 42-year-old man who thinks he’s cooler, funnier and more attractive than he actually is. An album by the bloke from The Soloist. An album by the twonk who hijacked a memorial service for Michael Jackson to show everyone how well he can moonwalk. An album with a lead single called Speak French that sounds like someone has taped down the ‘pervert’ button on a 1980s Casio keyboard. No. Crap.

7 – FILM: Footloose

Remember Footloose? Remember how you only liked it ironically and would never ever watch it of your own accord? Well, they’re doing a remake. Worse, they’re doing a remake with the bloke from Gossip Girl. Worse, there’s probably going to be a titting electroclash remix of that awful Kenny Loggins song. Ugh.

6 – TV: FlashForward

Now, FlashForward makes the list for one simple reason: the first episode was awesome, but the further FlashForward gets away from the pilot, the worse it becomes. FlashForward isn’t returning until March, and that’s an awful long way from the pilot. We’ve got a horrible feeling that, by March, FlashForward is going to be all William Shakespeare shouting “BECAUSE I WAS LOADED, OK?” and none of the stuff about the 20 million dead people. Heroes 2.0, basically. Crap.

5 – FILM: Saw VII

Why? Why? Didn’t you run out of exciting ways to kill people about four films ago? What’s this one going to be about? Jigsaw slowly beating a man to death with a rolled-up copy of Bella? Making a man eat ice cream so quickly that he gets brainfreeze and dies? Chinese-burning a man to death? Honestly Jigsaw, just shoot people. Shoot them in the head. Your poxy films wouldn’t be so bloody unbearable if you just did shot people in the head.

4 – FILM: The Chronicles Of Narnia: Voyage Of The Dawn Treader

Oh really? You’re really going to make all the Narnia movies, even though The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe is literally the only one that people like? The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader hasn’t got any witches OR wardrobes in it, plus all the adorable child actors from the first film are all about 35 years old by now. Plus it’s about a boat. Plus if they keep making Narnia films, we’ll eventually have to put up with The Horse And His Boy, a story about a horse. And a boy. Crap crap crappity crap.

3 – TV: Dancing On Ice

Oh for God’s sake. Another bunch of awful bastards who Celebrity Big Brother didn’t want. Another load of tedious Torvill & Dean routines. Another endless, soul-draining reality TV show that takes up too much of your weekend and only gives you the mind-scarring sight of Bobby Davro in a horrible leotard in return. Crap. Unless someone accidentally slices open an artery with one of their skates, in which case we reserve the right to upgrade Dancing On Ice to ‘awesome’.

2 – FILM: Eclipse

No. Just no. It isn’t even the one where Robert Pattinson chews off Kristen Stewart’s mimsy. Crapula.

1 – ALBUM: Ringo Starr, Y Not

Although Ringo Starr’s last album Liverpool 8 was a work of supreme cack-handed cockery, we feel certain in predicting that Ringo Starr’s new album Y Not will be the absolute worst thing to happen across the entire duration of 2010. Why? Because the album’s press release begins like this:

Throughout recorded history, great artists across the universe have dared to ask “Why?” On January 12, 2010, one brave man named Ringo finally boldly declares the ultimate answer — Y Not.

And also because if we hear Ringo Starr say “peace and love” one more lousy time, we’re going to make a voodoo doll that looks exactly like him and kick the shit out of it. Honestly, he’s such a cock.

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Fancy playing the drums as badly as Ringo Starr?

Well, now you can, thanks to a new video game which allows you to sing, strum and drum along to your favourite Beatles tracks – and Octopus’s Garden.

The Beatles: Rock Band was officially launched by Sir Paul McCartney and Starr at the start of E3 in Los Angeles and will be released in September.

They were even joined by Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison, the wives of the dead half of the Fab Four, John Lennon and George Harrison.

Macca said: “It’s a fun idea which broadens the appeal of The Beatles. I like people having the opportunity to get to know the music from the inside out.”

For those of you who have never played Rock Band or Guitar Hero, it is basically a game where you and your mates can pretend you are actually musically gifted by hitting buttons on plastic guitars and drums.

The Beatles: Rockband

Ever modest, Starr announced: “The game is good and we were great.” ‘Were’ being the important word there.

McCartney showed just how much he was involved in the making of the game, by adding: “Whoever would have thought we would have ended up as androids?”

Mind you, having seen the game played on stage, it does look pretty good. Thankfully, Yoko did not feel the need to have a go.

The remaining Beatles’ surprise appearance came at the start of a formidable line-up for the Xbox 360.

Trailers for Left 4 Dead 2, Crackdown 2, Forza 3, Final Fantasy XIII, Splinter Cell: Conviction, Joyride and Halo 3 ODST, among others, all looked pretty impressive, but the star of the show for us was Modern Warfare 2, which is due to be released on October 11 and simply looks brilliant.

Even more exciting was the news that Metal Gear Solid is coming to the Xbox. However, there is no release date for Metal Gear Solid: Rising.

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There’s nothing more we love then seeing a band reunite so they can relive former glories.

Of course, it would be cynical of us to see it as a money making money opportunity, but what do we know? Perhaps in fifty years time, the current writing staff of hecklerspray will get together in a grotty boozer to relive the past.

Plenty of bands such as Led Zeppelin, Take That and – despite no one wanting them – Crowded House have reformed for gigs and spanking new material. Now one of the world’s finest bands have come back together, just minus a couple of key band members.

The Beatles were comprised of George, John, Ringo and Paul. Sadly, George died in hospital and John got a psycho Japanese lady on his case as well as being shot in New York. Taking these two core ingredients away is kind of like baking a yummy loaf of bread without yeast and flour. It results in a dull, lifeless and overhyped product. Something like Razorlight, Kasabian or The Enemy.

With half of The Beatles gone, it still didn’t deter nutjob fans from gathering in New York of all places for a special charity show for the David Lynch foundation. With the band being formally out of action, we have since known Paul McCartney as the man who took on crazy pegleg vegan Heather Mills in a divorce settlement. This all comes whilst Ringo Starr continues his transformation into a miserable bastard who refuses to sign autographs and stars in appallingly bad insurance adverts.

However, it may be worth crediting the two performers with knowing more about the wider world then we actually thought they would. During the gig, Paul McCartney also dedicated the song Blackbird to US president Barack Obama. So what does this mean? Well using military technology from the 1940s, we can deduce the following:

A) Paul and Ringo have magic powers which they are slowly going to unleash on the world. Their next big performance is to paint every building brown to show their support to PM Gordon Brown.

B) They are supporting Barack Obama because he’s, um, black like a blackbird.

C) They wanted to look popular in America, just like Monty Python, pork scratchings and ocean blue paint.

For Beatles nerds, it would have been ace seeing their heroes performing briefly together on the same stage. Let’s face it, we know that the full band line up is going to be pretty hard to sustain.

That’s unless John Lennon has been pulling a massive joke on us all along! Ho ho ho, the cheeky Scouse scamp.

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As we all know, Ringo Starr has too much to do these days to justify pointless crap like being nice to his own fans.

However, some crazy old idiots got upset at Ringo Starr’s recent request for his fans to stop sending him stuff, so he’s decided to clarify his confusing little outburst. You see, Ringo Starr only wants you to stop sending him stuff because it hurts the environment and objects he signs only end up being hawked on eBay anyway.

Ringo’s quick decision to clear up the mess he made should be applauded – now we know that he doesn’t hate his fans, just the fans who like buying his autographs on the internet. And now we can also be sure that it really was Ringo Starr in that video earlier this week, rather than the melted underpowered robot of a kestrel in sunglasses that we assumed we were watching.

Ringo Starr might just be having the worst year of his life. Firstly Ringo Starr released a song to commemorate Liverpool’s status as the European city of culture, but the problems with it were twofold – firstly the song actually sounded like it was slagging Liverpool off a bit, and secondly he sung it in the style of a sad wounded ox.

To make matters worse, Ringo Starr then decided to promote the song by storming off an American TV show, telling Jonathan Ross that he didn’t really like Liverpool anyway and just generally infuriating people enough to behead topiary representations of him.

But Ringo’s worst moment came this week when, for reasons that we don’t even think he knows himself, he decided to post a video on his website asking fans to stop sending him fanmail all the bloody time.

At the time, Ringo’s justification for this was that he had “too much to do” to reply to fanmail. Oh really Ringo? You’re a 68-year-old millionaire who hits things for a living. What could you possibly have to do, apart from wait for the nice Meals On Wheels lady to bring you some more toad in the hole? You’re not trying to write the long-awaited follow-up to Octopus’s Garden, are you? Are you? Because, if you are, you really don’t need to. Really.

However, possibly because he was spooked by the hip young whippersnapper giving him hell on Sky News on Tuesday night, Ringo Starr has decided to hone his argument a little bit more. Rolling Stone reports:

The ban on fan mail was “in direct response to an inordinate amount of items which have recently appeared for sale on e-bay, and to those that repeatedly send cards and items to be signed.” Starr also felt all the mail was “a waste of paper and we all should be mindful of our carbon footprint… Please read this in a mellow way. Peace and love, Ringo.”

Thank goodness Ringo Starr reminded us to read the statement in a mellow way. Up until that point we were shouting it furiously in a dense Hungarian accent, so it hardly made any sense to us.

Anyway, let’s hope that this new statement clears up all the misconceptions about Ringo Starr’s original video. We’re sure that it hasn’t affected his real fans’ opinions of him at all, because we get the feeling that Ringo Starr’s fans are either dead or too stupid to work out that computers aren’t just sealed-shut microwaves.

And we say that with peace and love, which we think means you’re not allowed to get shitty about it.

Ringo Starr feels the music. It flows through him like water over the Canadian side of the jagged Niagara Falls. Also it flows through him just like it did through that kid in August Rush.

Ringo is a translator, reaching up into the heavens, jotting what he finds there for all of humanity to hear. His mind is a seed from which entire musical forests spring forth. He possibly has the most vital job that has ever been.

That’s why it’s essential that everyone finally leave him alone once and for all, and for Pete’s sake stop sending him stamped envelopes pleading for things like autographs and 40-year-old rusty Beatles memorabilia. He’s far too busy to respond, he’s fed up.

He’s basically said as much on a new video his website is hosting. No really, he has.

If you’re a fan, Ringo Starr has nothing against you. Sure, sometimes he thinks of you and all the ways you impede on his time, but really he doesn’t completely hate you.

Yet.

But if you don’t stop acting so dumb really, really soon, he probably will hate you. And you don’t want that. Seriously, imagine him writing a song with the same melody as Octopus’s Garden, but all the lyrics are about maggots eating your flesh as it falls to the floor after you spring a trap he ingeniously set to splash you all over with Drano, Lime-Away and broken glass from your Mama’s back door.

Like we said – you don’t want that.

Keep that in mind – especially now that he’s given fair warning. According to the online version of the Sydney Morning Herald:

“Former Beatle Ringo Starr has posted a bizarre video of “peace and love” on his website saying he has had enough of fan mail and people seeking autographs. The Fab Four drummer’s 44-second rant pleaded for fans to leave him alone and said he doesn’t have time to sort through his mail box anymore. “This is a serious message. I want to tell you please, after the 20th of October do not send fan mail to any address you have. Nothing will be signed. If that has a date on the envelope it’s gonna be tossed, I’m warning you with peace and love,” he said in the video titled Sorry, No More Signing Stuff.”

From what we heard the last straw was when he received a fake leg in the mail with a Sharpie and a request to make the calf-signature out to one H. Mills. Well we can relate to that completely. So far we have an entire attic full of Heather Mills hobble-wear, and apparently she keeps thinking that maybe we’ll sign the next one if she can just get it to us via an overnight shipper with a reliable package-tracking service.

Sorry Mills, after what you did to all those innocent baby seals, no can do.

For the record, we really don’t remember what she did to those little white seals – we just seem to recall her name loosely associated with them.

Watch Ringo’s weird video right here:

Think back – what were you doing at noon yesterday? Chances are it didn’t involve shouting “peace and love” into the sky at the behest of a rubbish old man.

Which is a shame, because that’s what Ringo Starr wanted to happen. Yesterday, you see, was Ringo Starr‘s 68th birthday, and he wanted to use the occasion to initiate an annual Peace And Love Day, where at the stroke of noon everyone would stop what they were doing and… yeah, you get the idea.

As you’ve probably noticed, Ringo Starr’s Peace And Love Day pretty much fell flat on its arse without question, causing Ringo Starr to scale down his plans a little. Next year Ringo Starr will initiate a Nurse, I Think I’ve Just Wet Myself Again day where, at the stroke of noon, Ringo Starr and Ringo Starr alone will shout that very phrase at one of his care workers. For the fifteenth time that day.

It’d be quite easy to feel sorry for Ringo Starr if he didn’t seem like such a git, wouldn’t it? All the other Beatles are just streaking past him in terms of legacy. Paul McCartney is an award-winning classical composer, John Lennon will be remembered forever thanks to the giant tower of light beamed into space in his name – but Ringo? He’s the man who got his head chopped off because not even people from Liverpool like him very much.

But we should at least credit Ringo Starr with having the wherewithal to try and correct that. Yesterday was Ringo Starr’s 68th birthday and, modest man that he is, Ringo didn’t ask for material gifts from his fans.

Instead Ringo requested something far more humble – that every man, woman and child on the face of God’s green Earth raised their mouths to the sky at the stroke of noon and shouted “Peace and Love!” as loudly as possibly no matter what they were doing, so that subconsciously they’d think about Ringo Starr, remember he has an album out, go and buy the album and give Ringo the royalties needed to buy all the material gifts for himself that he’s clearly too modest to ask for. The Chicago Tribune reports:

“It’s a fantasy, and it’s a dream I have,” Starr said Monday, “that one minute, one day, one month, one year, everyone will go peace and love.” … He got it Monday from about 300 fans who lined an entire city block to sing “Happy Birthday” to the ex-Beatles drummer and flash peace signs in the air. “What a great birthday gift!” said Starr, surrounded by television cameras. “If you could pan around, you could see Chicago is full of peace and lovers.”

Well, one city block was full of about 300 peace and lovers, which works out at about 1/10,000th of Chicago’s population. Multiply that by all the cities in America and all the countries in the world and, well, it’s not exactly impressive, is it?

But then again, getting everyone to shout “Peace and Love!” into the air probably isn’t the best way to actually accomplish peace and love, is it? If you could achieve anything you wanted by shouting it out loud then Konnie Huq would be sitting on our knee right now and we’d have a proper job.

Let’s just hope that Ringo Starr’s stupid idea passes quickly and this silly game of Beatle one-upmanship can be put to bed. Honestly, first John Lennon wants a Peace Day, then Ringo Starr wants a Peace And Love day. The only logical conclusion to this sort of madness is Paul McCartney requesting a Peace And Love And Snuggles day, and we can all agree that’s just a step too bloody far.

No. Ringo Starr, the only thing you’ll be remembered for is this. It’s no more than you deserve.

Note to self: Never, ever say anything bad about people from Liverpool.

Because if you do end up saying something bad about people from Liverpool, people from Liverpool will literally cut your head off. It’s true – they’ve just cut Ringo Starr‘s head off.

Alright, at this point we should probably point out that it was only the topiary head of a topiary Ringo Starr that was chopped off, thanks to some vaguely anti-Liverpool comments Ringo made in January. But it’s still a shock, because the topiary Ringo Starr was about five or six times better at singing and drumming than the flesh and blood one.

Ringo Starr has always been the second-class Beatle – just look at the treatment he gets. John Lennon, for example, was shot in the back four times by a maniac, while George Harrison was stabbed in the chest several times by a maniac who believed he was on a mission from God. But Ringo Starr?

Ringo Starr has been aggressively pruned by what we can assume to be a fairly overenthusiastic horticulturalist. Hardly matches up, does it? The New York Times reports on the shock topiary Ringo Starr beheading:

A vandal chopped off the head of Ringo Starr from a life-size topiary of that former Beatle over the weekend in Liverpool, England, above, while leaving his band mates untouched, The Liverpool Daily Post reported. The attack occurred a few weeks after the topiary figures, created by the Italian sculptor Franco Covill, were unveiled at the South Parkway train station. “This is a huge disappointment for us,” said an unidentified spokesman for Merseytravel. “Public art is important, and the topiary was put there to bring a bit of life and soul to the public-transport network.”

It’s thought that the Ringo beheading was a direct result of some comments he made about the city back in January. You see, Liverpool is the European City Of Culture this year, and Ringo Starr was chosen to open the celebrations. After all, along with Dereck Acorah, Tom O’Connor from Crosswits and one of Atomic Kitten, Ringo Starr is probably one of history’s most famous Liverpudlians.

Not content with just opening a ceremony, Ringo Starr also wrote a special song for the occasion, entitled Liverpool 8. Probably the worst song that’s ever been written, Liverpool 8 was all about how Ringo Starr wanted to stay in Liverpool but he couldn’t because he was famous and Liverpool was a bit of a shithole but it doesn’t matter because he got famous so everyone should be proud of him. Thematically you could call it a bit confused.

So Ringo Starr went on TV and told everyone that he wouldn’t ever live in Liverpool again because there was nothing he missed about it at all, just to make it completely clear. And now he’s had his head cut off for it, French revolution-style.

If anything, this should serve as a warning to Ringo Starr to have more respect for his hometown, because the people there are easily upset by everything. First Richard And Judy left them, and now Ringo Starr too? How are they supposed to cope with such a succession of bodyblows?

So be warned, Ringo. This time they just got your topiary head, but next time it’ll be your hubcaps.

Read more:

Ringo Loses Leafy Head – NYT

Yes, we know we've already used the video to Ringo Starr's new single Liverpool 8 in another post, but it's so awful we've become obsessed with it. Actually obsessed, like that bloke from Zodiac.

Seriously, just watch Liverpool 8. It's so completely, utterly, unspeakably terrible that we're not even sure a human being could be responsible for it, let alone Ringo Starr. Everything about Liverpool 8 is horrific, from the tune to the vocals to the preposterously banal lyrics. Liverpool 8 is so bad that past civilisations would have put Ringo Starr to death for making it.

You get a sense of just how woeful Liverpool 8's going to be from the moment that Ringo blathers "I was a sailor first/ I sailed the sea," just to clarify what sailors actually do for those who maybe thought they varnished fossils for a living.

And then it gets worse. Liverpool 8, you see, is basically The History Of The Beatles By Ringo Starr. And what insights do we get from one of the two remaining people on Earth with first-hand experience of what it was like to be in the biggest band in history? "We were number one/ Man it was fun," that's what. So that's that cleared up for eternity, then.

Liverpool 8 might make Octopus's Garden look like Dostoevsky, but once you've listened to it 20 times in a row just to get a handle on precisely how moronic it is, something odd happens. Liverpool 8 stops being horrible and becomes… well, not good – we aren't idiots – but touching.

It's like listening to a song by Forrest Gump looking back on his life – yes, it's so simplistic that a six-year-old would be kept back a few years at school for writing it, but the knowledge that Ringo Starr probably spent months coming up with the line "The red lights were on/ with George and Paul and my friend John", coupled with the unintentionally plaintive way he sings it, makes it all a little bit heartbreaking.

Then you realise that Liverpool 8's main sentiment is "Hey Liverpool, I fucked you over but look at me! I'm Ringo Starr! Woo-hooo!" and it dawns on you that Ringo Starr is probably a bit of a dick.

But, hey, fun while it lasted, right?

You wouldn't want to be Ringo Starr at the moment.

OK, it goes without saying that you wouldn't really want to be Ringo Starr at any moment, unless you're into being recovering Scouse alcoholics who hit things for a living and sing songs about boning 16-year-olds.

But, seriously, you wouldn't want to be Ringo Starr right now. He's stropped off Live With Regis & Kelly right before he was supposed to appear, you see.

Ringo Starr hasn't had the best of years. He's watched Paul McCartney sign a clever new record deal and get lauded as a visionary. He's seen John Lennon get commemorated in a monolithic tower of light that will outlast us all. And he's seen George Harrison get crowned as the fourth-richest dead man alive. And what about Ringo?

Well, Ringo Starr was lucky enough to open Liverpool's tenure as European capital of culture last week, but that couldn't have backfired more spectacularly. Yes, Ringo Starr may have called his new album Liverpool8 and, yes, Ringo Starr may have told the thousands of fans watching him that he was going to move back to Liverpool.

But thanks to a subsequent TV appearance where he basically just went "Pffft – live in Liverpool? Fuck off, have you actually been there? It's shit, and I'm Ringo Starr. I'm Ringo fucking Starr!" he's just about the most hated man in Merseyside at the moment.

And things aren't going particularly well for Ringo in America at the moment. Yesterday Ringo was set to appear on Live With Kelly And Regis to perform his song Liverpool 8, but the song didn't fit with the show's strict 'two and a half minute performances only' policy. And then it all kicked off. The New York Daily News reports:

When he did a run-through yesterday morning, the song took nearly five minutes. "Live" producer Michael Gelman was willing to go 2 minutes and 45 seconds. Starr's camp said it couldn't be cut, and he was gone. "They refused to keep the performance and the interview commitment," said the spokeswoman. "We offered to cut back our chat time and asked them to fade or go to commercial," Starr's spokeswoman told The Associated Press. "They were not willing to do that and Ringo was not willing to cut it further, so without a compromise we were not able to stay. Ringo left saying, 'God bless and goodbye. We still love Regis.'"

It's clear that Ringo Starr obviously took the cutback request as a personal affront because if, say, Paul McCartney phoned up Regis tomorrow and asked to perform all of the Sgt Pepper album on the show, they'd agree immediately. But because it's boring old Ringo Starr he has to live by the same rules as everyone else.

Having said that, it was wrong of Live With Kelly And Regis to ask Ringo Starr to limit his performance to 150 seconds. They should have tried to limit it to zero seconds because – shitting Christ – the song's horrific.

It's like Ringo asked a sensory-deprived toddler to write down the history of The Beatles and then just wailed them in the first tune that popped into his head. Frankly we're wondering if Ringo Starr would be better protesting by never appearing in public ever again. Look…

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Ringo Starr bolts from 'Regis' gig – New York Daily News