Ringo Starr has appeared on the U.K. Official Singles Downloads chart on his own for the first time after Paul McCartney’s single "Home to Us" debuted at No. 42 this week, with Starr officially credited on the track.
McCartney chose "Home to Us" as the second single from The Boys of Dungeon Lane, and the song also opened at No. 45 on the Official Singles Sales chart. The downloads placement marks a milestone: Starr had previously logged 16 hits on the downloads chart only as one-quarter of the Beatles, while the Beatles themselves scored a No. 1 in the fall of 2023 with "Now and Then." For McCartney, the new single became his tenth bestseller on the Official Singles Downloads chart.
The song’s appearance on the sales chart also counts for Starr individually: "Home to Us" is his fifth solo hit on the Official Singles Sales chart. It arrives after McCartney’s recent momentum — another track from his set, "Days We Left Behind," climbed to No. 17 earlier in spring 2026 — and it pushed McCartney onto the downloads list for the eleventh time this run.
McCartney explained in a Los Angeles listening event in April 2026 how the recording came together. He said Starr had come by the studio run by producer Andrew Watt and played a bit of drums. McCartney asked Watt to dig up the unused drum material, was taken by what he heard and decided to build a full track around it, aiming to give Starr the version he might have expected. The song was written with Starr in mind; on the record McCartney and Starr trade verses about their Liverpool childhoods, calling back to the early days before the Beatles when they met while Starr was drumming for Rory and the Hurricanes on the Liverpool ballroom circuit.
Those Liverpool roots are stitched through the song: Starr hails from The Dingle, and McCartney told listeners he wanted to complete a circle by shaping the track from Starr’s drum idea and sending it back to him. The record also features backing vocals from Chrissie Hynde and Sharleen Spliteri.
There is a tautness to the story. The credit on the single and the vocal trade make this feel like a homecoming for Starr, but the chart milestone arrived because McCartney elected to spotlight material that began as a brief drum contribution rather than a full solo release conceived and performed end to end by Starr himself. In other words, Starr’s first solo entry on the downloads chart came via a McCartney-led construction that started with a snippet of his playing.
That friction underlines how intertwined their careers remain: the two men met long before Beatle fame, Starr replaced Pete Best after the band was signed, and they have collaborated elsewhere — on songs such as "Walk With You," "Grow Old With Me" and the coda to "Beautiful Night," as well as on the Beatles’ recent reunion work. But this chart moment is singular. Even after decades of hits as part of the Beatles, Starr has only now appeared on the downloads chart under his own name.
Given the facts in hand, the decisive conclusion is straightforward: Paul McCartney used a piece of Ringo Starr’s drumming as the seed for a song written expressly for him, and by crediting Starr on the finished single he has given him a solo chart milestone he had not previously achieved; that is the news, and it changes how Starr’s later-career discography will be read.
