Ringo Starr briefly left The Beatles during the tense recording of the White Album in 1968, believing he was playing poorly and had become an outsider to the other three members. The episode matters because it exposed the group’s deteriorating relationships well before its eventual break-up, while also showing that the sense of isolation was shared rather than unique to Starr.

After telling John Lennon and Paul McCartney that he felt excluded, Starr found that each believed the other members were closer without them. He went on holiday to Sardinia, where an experience involving calamari helped inspire ‘Octopus’s Garden’; the band then invited him back with a telegram praising his drumming and decorated his kit with flowers. Starr later concluded that the group as a whole was in a troubled period, rather than the problem being “just” him.