Ringo Starr

Seven of his ten planets sit in fixed signs, with two mutable and only one cardinal. Fire and earth take four each, with a single planet in air and a single one in water. The Moon, Mercury, Mars and Pluto fill nine degrees of Leo, and Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus fourteen degrees of Taurus. Venus was the only retrograde planet, on the last degree of Gemini. The record says Starr is the drummer whose feel behind The Beatles is far harder to copy than it sounds, and that he joined the band in 1962 and has led his own touring group since the disbandment.

Seven planets in fixed signs is the fact to take from this chart, and in a drummer it is almost too convenient. Fixed is the mode that holds a position and does not move off it, which is a fair description of keeping time, and a record whose only claim about the playing is a feel that is hard to copy is a record about holding something steady. The reading and the trade line up. The caution is that seven fixed planets would read exactly the same way in an accountant.

Mars sits conjunct Pluto at under three fifths of a degree, the closest contact here, and that is overwhelming force: immense stamina and drive, a capacity for total commitment, and intensity other people find hard to be near. Stamina is the clause with evidence behind it, in somebody the record still has touring after six decades. Both planets sit in the Leo group with the Moon and Mercury, so need, speech, drive and force are all inside nine degrees of one sign, which is a crowded arrangement for a man the record describes mostly by what he does underneath other people's songs.

The Moon sits square Jupiter at under two thirds of a degree, emotional overreach: promising more than can be delivered, and comfort-seeking on a scale that becomes a problem, and square Saturn at a degree and a half, need meeting refusal. Those two press on the same Moon from opposite directions, and its sign is certain at eleven degrees of Leo. Uranus came back to its Taurus birth degree on 4 April 2025, at eighty four. That return comes once in a life or not at all, and what it asks is whether there is anything left to be besides who the arrangements have made you, which for a record naming one band and then everything after it is a pointed question.