By CATHERINE MAYER/MONACO

Photograph for TIME by Pål C. Hansen

A word of advice for Barbara Bach: if the American-born actress is wondering about a Christmas present for her husband, she could do worse than buy him a thick pair of long johns. He’ll need them where he’s going. Not because he has become enfeebled by age or excess, far from it: at 67, Richard Starkey, a.k.a. Ringo Starr, the oldest member of the Beatles and ­ despite a notorious bout of overindulgence ­ one of the band’s two survivors, seems unstoppable. His musical output is prodigious. Next month, Ringo releases his 16th solo studio album of songs written and sung by him, and underpinned by his unmistakable drumming. And he’s also halfway through writing a musical, The Hole in the Fence, a meditation on childhood, with former Eurythmic Dave Stewart.

You remember Ringo. He was the comical one in the Beatles, lovable but expendable. He hitched a ride on the Lennon-McCartney express. Perhaps you believed he’d been knighted like Sir Paul. Maybe you assumed he’d retired. In fact, almost everything you think you know about Ringo is wrong, except that he’s endearing. Lean and boisterous in tight pants, T shirt, sneakers and funky sunglasses, he could be mistaken for a 50-something in the first throes of an affair with a younger woman. It is true that Ringo is enraptured by a younger woman, but he’s not trying to roll back the years to please his lady. His relationship with his 60-year-old wife, a former Bond girl, has been going strong since they met on a film set in 1980. The dark lenses are prescription, reveals his friend, the musician Keith Allison, but in other respects Ringo is simply dressing like the rock star he is, a charming and pampered idol who has rarely endured a cloudy day since alighting in tax exile in the principality of Monaco in 1976.

Ringo also has a house in Los Angeles, takes holidays in the tropics, and occasionally ­ and with evident reluctance ­ visits his spread in the Surrey countryside, south of London. He’ll be there later this month. “I’m going to England for Christmas with the kids,” he says. “It’s damp and it’s cold and it’s dark. I love the sun and the warmth, and that’s how I choose to spend my life.”

Surrey will seem balmy in comparison with his subsequent destination. On the evening of Jan. 11, on a rooftop in Liverpool, pinioned by the icy winds blowing in from the Mersey Estuary, the city’s prodigal son will launch a year-long festival marking its selection as one of the two European Capitals of Culture for 2008 (the other one, Stavanger in Norway, is even colder). It will be Ringo’s first rooftop performance since the Beatles’ final gig atop London’s Apple Studios in January 1969. That day, enveloped in a scarlet coat and insulated by his thick mane of hair, he looked cold ­ and the moptop has long since been supplanted by a close-cropped style that will afford zero protection against a wintry Liverpool night.

Provided Ringo survives the opening ceremony, he’ll headline at a concert the next evening featuring fellow mainstays of the city’s music scene: the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, No Fakin’ DJs, Echo and the Bunnymen, Pete Wylie, Ian Broudie, Shack, the Christians and the Wombats. That motley list tells the real story. Something about Liverpool, a chemical reaction between the irrepressible locals and the diverse influences that have slipped ashore in the city’s port, spurs creativity. High culture and low, from staid to avant-garde ­ it’s all come out of Merseyside. But nothing else has ever equaled the Beatles. Ringo and Paul McCartney (who will play there in June) are Liverpool’s greatest living cultural ambassadors, and Ringo in particular is seen as the embodiment of the city’s down-to-earth persona. “Ringo is exactly as he says on the tin,” says musician and activist Bob Geldof.

One thing it says on that tin is “baked beans.” Ringo never liked fancy foreign food, and in 1967 went off with fellow Beatles to see the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India, carrying with him a suitcase full of baked beans. He left the ashram when he’d eaten the last can. He grew up in poverty. (”I was so poor,” jokes Ringo, “that I had to hop to school. We only had one shoe.”) He hasn’t been back to Merseyside since his stepdad’s funeral 11 years ago. Ask Ringo if he’s English and he answers, “No. I’m world.” If there’s a football match, he’ll root for England or his real passion, Liverpool FC; otherwise, he says, “I feel more American sometimes than most Americans.” His accent, unlike the man himself, still pays dues to his homeland, but also owes a few of its cadences to California. Yet Ringo sees himself as a typical Liverpudlian at least in one respect. “I bring humor to the fore,” he says. “It’s a defense. Give me an opening and I’m in. When I was a kid, you went to the pub and people would have some sort of quick retort to what you said. A lot of it would put you down, but it would also bring you up.”

“He’s still got that bittersweet humor and is sharp as a razor,” says Stewart, who co-wrote and co-produced Ringo’s forthcoming solo album. Called Liverpool 8, after the postal code of the neighborhood where Ringo grew up, its title track chronicles his escape from the city in jaunty couplets (”I always followed my heart/ But I never missed a beat”).