WHEN Ringo Starr puts together his touring band, he can pretty much have his pick of any musician in the world. Who wouldn’t want to share a stage with one of the Beatles?

His All-Starr Band is billed as a line-up where “everybody on stage is a star in their own right”. At each show, Ringo performs solo and Beatles songs, and then each band member will take turns performing two hits from their own career.

But there’s one person in his address book who he’s never managed to recruit – Sir Paul McCartney.

“I ask Paul every time we put a band together. I promise him two numbers like everybody else,” says Ringo, breaking into a mischievous grin. “He always seems to be busy at the time. He doesn’t turn me down, he’s just always busy.

“I used to ask George Harrison, too, but he’d say (here Ringo goes into a George impression) ‘Ringo, you’d have to give me all the money’.”

Dressed in black skinny jeans, a T-shirt, jacket and trainers, it’s hard to believe Ringo was 70 last year.

He’s coming to the Empire tomorrow as part of the Ringo Starr and His All Starr Band tour, which features Rick Derringer, Richard Page, Edgar Winter, Gary Wright Wally Palmer and Gregg Bissonette.

“This is the 12th band I’ve put together,” he says. “When we’ve finished this tour, I might put another band together. But you can’t get better than this line-up, I’m telling you.”

He’s returning to the Empire, the venue he played with The Beatles on December 7, 1963. On that day, they filmed two shows for the BBC – Juke Box Jury and a live concert special called It's The Beatles.

It will be his first performance in the city since his comments on the Jonathan Ross show in which he said there was “nothing” he missed about Liverpool.

I ask him if he’s looking forward to coming back to Liverpool, and, in a repeat of the question Jonathan Ross asked him in 2008, if there’s anything he misses about his home town.

“There’s lots I miss, of course,” he says. “I did that joke with Jonathan Ross and I’m still paying for it, it seems.

“There were three people from Wirral who complained.” He laughs, but it seems forced.