Pete Best, the drummer most famous for getting fired from The Beatles before the group shot to international fame, has retired. The news was announced by his brother Roag Best, who wrote on Twitter/X, “Well what an absolutely wonderful ride we’ve had. However, everything comes to pass.” (All Things Must Pass would’ve been too on the nose, we suppose.) “My brother Pete Best has announced today he is retiring from personal appearances and performing with the group. His daughter has informed me it’s due to personal circumstances.” Best (whose handle on the platform is “BeatlesPeteBest”) confirmed the news with a repost, adding, “I had a blast. Thank you.”
Best was an original member of The Beatles, and his family was closely entwined with the group. His mother, Mona Best, owned the Casbah Coffee House where the band played many of its early gigs—the band members even helped her decorate the space—and she became a pseudo-manager for them in their early days. (She shared a son, Roag, with The Beatles’ longtime road manager Neil Aspinall.) But when the band fired Pete in the early 1960s in favor of Ringo Starr, he ended up quitting the music biz for decades, instead becoming a civil servant in their hometown of Liverpool. It wasn’t until the late ’80s that he returned to the stage, eventually becoming the frontman of The Pete Best Band. According to his website, his group “captures the sound of the Beatles in their formative years – the early years for many ‘was’ The Beatles.”
A scheduled concert at the Liverpool Beatles Museum has been canceled, but the Bests remain closely tied to The Beatles’ legacy. They run the Liverpool Beatles Museum, for example, and recently converted the Casbah Coffee Club into a Beatles-themed Airbnb. (“I was born in the McCartney suite and presented to John, Paul and George, who were here that night, they’d played the Cavern. So some of the first people I ever saw in the world were the Beatles,” Roag told The Guardian last year.) Pete’s original drumming for The Beatles was featured on the Anthology compilation in the ’90s; most recently, he contributed footage from his own collection to Peter Jackson’s “Now And Then,” the video accompanying The Beatles’ last-ever song.