The death of Neil Aspinall, the Beatles erstwhile roadie, assistant and confidant, raises a perennial question for fans of the Fab Four: who really was the Fifth Beatle? I have seen the soubriquet attached to no fewer than 13 people, and I was only six years old when the band split up.

Of the pretenders, the most outrageous has to be Jimmy Tarbuck. Tarby once told me during an interview on a golf course in the Algarve that he was the Fifth Beatle, on the basis, it seemed, that he was about the same age and also came from Liverpool. Tarby was wearing a Pringle sweater at the time.

George Best was often referred to as the fifth Beatle, but surely not only purists would demand at least some connection to the business of making music as opposed to simply having long hair and drinking a lot?

Moving closer to the band's orbit, we come to Mal Evans, a roadie, shot dead after a misunderstanding with the LAPD in 1976. Like Aspinall, Evans has a decent claim. We can put them both in the outer-outer circle of contenders, a group in which we might, if we were being charitable, also place Yoko Ono and Linda McCartney.

Arriving at four musicians who actually shared stage or studio time with the classic line-up: Billy Preston played keyboards at the fag end of things, notably during the rooftop appearance in London. Good effort, Billy, but on balance, too little, too late. Similarly, at the other end of the band's life came three drummers: Pete Best, notoriously the unluckiest man in showbiz, binned on the skins in favour of Ringo shortly before the 1962 lift-off; Jimmy Nichols, sit-in for Ringo when the latter was in hospital; and Andy White, session man on Love Me Do and reportedly the owner of New Jersey licence plate 5THBEATLE.

We're now down to the Big Three. Lowest on the podium is Stu Sutcliffe, who looked great and was a huge influence on the band's early style but couldn't play bass very well. In silver medal position comes Brian Epstein, who discovered the combo and kept the lads on the straight and narrow as best he could until, like Sutcliffe, dying tragically young.

(Indeed, with around half the people on this list, not to mention half the actual band, expiring before their time, the curse of the Fifth Beatle bears investigation.)

And the winner? Well, when I saw the headline on Tuesday “Macca weeps for Fifth Beatle” I assumed, with all due respect to Neil Aspinall, that it was the producer George Martin who had bought the farm. Indeed, never mind fifth, you could make a case for Martin being promoted to Third Beatle, behind Paul and John, obviously, yet ahead of George in fourth, and thus meaning that the surprise Fifth Beatle is actually Ringo Starr.

Not that this would make it any less of an outrage, as per this newspaper's settled and solemn editorial policy, that Ringo is yet to be knighted.

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