Neil Aspinall (left) talks to two uncontested Beatles. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Robert Whitaker
And so Neil Aspinall, the man who did more to keep the Beatles alive than anyone - especially the Beatles themselves - is dead. His place in history is posthumously as insecure as it was in life. On hearing the news of his death, the BBC acclaimed him as the Beatles' "guru". By teatime he had been downgraded to "ally". In truth, he was a kind of quill-free Boswell: first a van driver, than an assistant and latterly Apple's gatekeeper and curator. Nobody quite understood what he did, so the term "fifth Beatle" seemed reasonable shorthand.
Unfortunately for Aspinall, he's not the only fifth Beatle. In fact, there's so many of the blighters that even the Polyphonic Spree might regard the so-called Fab Four as ludicrously overmanned. History tells us there was one actual fifth Beatle: Stuart Sutcliffe who played extremely basic bass and bailed out as early as 1961. For all the romance attached to his death a year later, Sutcliffe's was always a badly played bit part. That should be end of this tale. Pete Best would be defenestrated in favour of Ringo Starr, but the Beatles were a foursome from the moment Sutcliffe stayed in Hamburg until the day they imploded.
Yet, this notion of a fifth Beatle persists. God knows why. It doesn't happen with other groups: there was no xth Rolling Stone (Ian Stewart was just a hired musician), no fifth Sex Pistol and no fifth Coldplay. Unlike the works of William Shakespeare or Hole, there is no dispute as to who really did what. We agree that John and Paul wrote the bulk of the songs and the others chipped in as and when.
Perhaps the Beatles did too much too quickly for it to be accepted there were only four of them. Perhaps, and there's real logic to this, there's been a media necessity to cast the Beatles net as wide as possible: "We can't get to Paul, but hey, here's Klaus Voorman who designed the Revolver sleeve and if we call him the fifth Beatle, it's a bit like having an actual Beatle." Oh no it isn't.
Who might this fifth Beatle be? Aspinall was never an equal, but what about producer George Martin? But he was an enabler, not an innovator and collaborator. Derek Taylor, their PR? He was merely a fire-fighter, although his cheeky suggestion of "London" as the fifth Beatle is not without merit. Manager Brian Epstein? Emotionally yes, but when they needed anything beyond organising tours he was out of his depth and was marginalised before his death in 1967.
In short, there wasn't a fifth Beatle.
