Universities do not usually chase people. If you want the hood and the scroll, you show up in the hall, you sit through the speeches, you shake the hand.
On the seventh of July the University of Liverpool made an exception, packed the whole ceremony into hand luggage and flew it to California.
Ringo Starr turned 86 that day. He was born in Liverpool in 1940, in the Dingle, in a house that was not sending anybody to a university, honorary or otherwise. Eighty-six years later his hometown university came to him and made him an Honorary Doctor of Music at a private ceremony in Beverly Hills.
Chancellor Wendy Beetlestone presented it. “It is a great privilege to recognise Ringo, whose influential musical work has helped shape Liverpool’s identity and global reputation,” she said.
His answer had exactly the shape you’d expect from him.
“I want to thank the University of Liverpool for this Honorary Degree and for coming all the way to LA to bestow it. I’m really honoured.”
And then, because the man cannot resist a joke that also happens to be sincere: “don’t be afraid to follow your dreams, or take that right turn and see where it goes…. it could lead to an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Liverpool.”
He was knighted in 2018 for services to music. He has now been Sir Richard Starkey for eight years and a doctor of music for two weeks.
Noon
The doctorate was the morning. The birthday itself belongs to something else entirely, and it has for nineteen years running.
On the seventh of July 2008, Ringo stood outside a Hard Rock Cafe in Chicago handing out cupcakes and asked people to do one small thing: at noon, wherever you are, say “peace and love” out loud. That was it. No fundraiser attached, no wristband, no sign-up.
It should have lasted one summer. It’s now an annual fixture, on every continent that has a clock, and this year was the nineteenth time.
The 2026 gathering was at Beverly Gardens Park in Beverly Hills, at the base of his own “Peace & Love” sculpture, and it was livestreamed so that anybody who wanted in could count down with the crowd. At exactly twelve noon Pacific, every person there said the two words at once.
Who was standing there
The guest list reads like a photo album rather than a red carpet.
His wife Barbara Bach. Her sister Marjorie Bach, who is married to Joe Walsh, which makes the Bach sisters one of the more quietly remarkable double acts in rock history. His son Zak Starkey, a drummer in his own right and a man who grew up around the kit. Ed Begley Jr. T Bone Burnett. Steve Lukather. Molly Tuttle. Diane Warren, who has written more of the songs you’ve cried to in a car than almost anyone alive.
And a children’s chorus from Adopt the Arts, which puts arts programs back into public elementary schools, standing in front of the sculpture singing to an 86-year-old man on his birthday.
Twelve songs got played. “Octopus’s Garden.” “Drive My Car.” “Don’t Pass Me By.” “Act Naturally.” “Birthday,” which at that point stops being a Beatles song and becomes a party doing exactly what the title says.
Forty-five years with the same person
Ringo and Barbara Bach married in 1981. That’s forty-five years this year.
They met on a film set in 1980, and by every public account they have been within arm’s reach of each other ever since. She is at the peace and love events. She is in the photographs. There is no long saga to summarize here, which in a rock marriage of that vintage is itself the remarkable part.
Forty-five years married. Nineteen years of asking strangers to say two words at noon. Eighty-six years old. The man is nothing if not consistent.
Why the small thing outlasted the big one
Here is what’s easy to miss about the noon tradition, and it’s the reason it survived when a hundred flashier celebrity campaigns didn’t.
He asked for nothing.
No money. No pledge. No account to follow, no hashtag to prove you did it, no photo required. Just say it out loud at twelve. If you’re on a bus, say it on the bus. If you’re alone in a kitchen, say it in the kitchen. That’s the entire ask, and it costs a person exactly nothing except the small social risk of being the one who says something kind in a room that wasn’t expecting it.
That’s why it kept going for nineteen years. It never had anything to collapse.
And it fits the man. The drummer was always the one in the band who didn’t need to be the story. He kept the time. He kept the thing upright while three louder people did what they did. Then he spent his post-Beatles decades doing the same trick in a different register: showing up, playing, staying married, being reliably, almost stubbornly pleasant in an industry that rewards the opposite.
Now his hometown has flown a doctorate across an ocean and a continent to hand him in person, and a chorus of schoolkids sang “Birthday” at him in a park, and the man’s advice to anybody listening was that you should take the turn that looks wrong and see where it goes.
He would know. A kid from the Dingle took one in 1962, when a band asked him to sit in on drums.
Did you catch it at noon this year, or did the day go by before you remembered?
