For such a famously proud city, it’s hard not to boggle at Liverpool’s susceptibility to flattery. Five years ago, when informed by a Benelux-based delegation of rimless-spectacle-wearing Eurocrats that it was to be made European Capital of Culture in 2008, the city’s reaction bordered on hysteria. But really, whose footsteps are we following in here? The European Capital of Culture for 2007 was Sibiu (along with Luxembourg). That’s Sibiu in Romania, which apparently boasts two theatres and an orchestra.

All of which may be worth bearing in mind tonight when the festivities kick off in earnest with a “once in a lifetime cast” featuring relics such as Pete Wylie, the Farm and, bless, poor old Ringo Starr. As the council bulldozers prepare to move in on his Toxteth birthplace, it’s amazing that Ringo deigned to return the call. In fact, the first song on his new album Liverpool 8 is an appropriately mawkish piece of autobiography: “When I look back, it sure was cool/For those four boys from Liverpool.”

God, you’d have to be deranged to go into a new Ringo Starr album expecting a masterpiece, but there are precedents for an affable Ringo album: Sentimental Journey, in 1970 and Ringo, his commercial peak, in 1973. There’s nothing wrong with the codgers-together ploditudes of Liverpool 8 that not actually releasing them wouldn’t put right. Just because it was fun to make, it doesn’t follow that you might enjoy listening to it.

On Give It a Try and Tuff Love the Ringo randomiser spews out sunny truisms: “In your heart/That’s where you gotta start.” On Love Is, the Beatley mellotrons are presumably there to tug at the heartstrings, but leave you unmoved precisely because you know that that’s what they’re there to do.

Thankfully, it isn’t a total washout. A moreishly corny Spanish vignette called Pasodobles and an agnostic campfire come-on to the grim reaper called R U Ready are worth 158 of anyone’s iTunes pence.

If the rest of Liverpool 8 had made similarly good use of its singer’s easy charm, it would have been a breeze. But listening to the Beatle for whom Paul McCartney wrote With a Little Help From My Friends, it all seems ironic. The Ringo of our mind’s eye remains inextricably intertwined with that Sgt Pepper vocal turn, but on the basis of Liverpool 8, he’d be better off making an album with his enemies.

(Parlophone)

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