Ringo Starr’s Maori Greeting

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30480, 30 June 1964, Page 2

Ringo Starr’s Maori Greeting

[From the London Correspondent of "The Press'”) “Mind you,” she said judicially, “you have to admit that Ringo’s got the right sort of nose for it.” The speaker was Cilla Black, Britain’s sensational new singing star, and she was examining a photograph published in a London news-‘ paper of the Beatle, Ringo Starr, rubbing noses with a Maori girl. Miss Black shares the same management as the Beatles. They are friends of long standing. John and Paul wrote a song for her. “It’s a lovely nose is Ringo’s,” she said, “but . . . that picture has fair knocked me over.” We were chatting this evening in Miss Black’s dressingroom—currently occupied by

Priscilla Maria Veronica White, to give Cilla her prope- name—at London’s famous Palladium.

She can hardly wait for the Beatles to arrive back to hear all about their Australian and New Zealand tours. These are countries she herself would love to visit, countries indeed which she is quite determined to visit.

“I think of places such as New Zealand a lot,” she said. “I think it’s absolutely fabulous here (at the Palladium) but one day I want to see the world. “When I think of New Zealand, I think of sheep, and lamb chops, and warmth, and great open spaces—like Texas, lots of countryside which I love. My only trip abroad has been to Parish—and then only for a day. “The Beatles, are very straightforward. They will tell me exactly what they think of a place. They’ll tell m whether I’ll like it, and what I must look out for. “People write to me from Australia and New Zealand,

and I’m pretty sure I have relatives out there,” she said. Cilla Black is from the Merseyside also. She is tall, slender, red-beaded, was 21 a few weeks ago. She has a wonderful sense of fun, and with all the cheerfulness in the world sprays autographs like a fountain upon those who throng the stage-door entrance to the Palladium. Theatre hands and fellow artists, most appreciably older, greet her with exaggerated bows and shouts of “make way for the star”, which had her this evening, I noticed, dissolving in tears of laughter. When she smiles, and she does this readily, you have no option but to forgive her for the haunting refrains that keep running round millions of brains, enchanting ballads such as “Anyone Who Had a Heart” and "You’re My World’,’ for example. Into these two top-of-the-chart numbers she injects an extraordinary degree of emotion and this, combined with

her quite remarkable vocal powers, explains why on television, radio and in theatre sh<s is making Beatle-like progress towards world recognition.