Smash hit

Aided by Mal Evans (who was mistakenly shot dead by the LA police in 1976), he was a part of the close, almost telepathic circle by which the group kept its sanity amid a whirlwind. This was caught in Alun Owen’s screenplay for A Hard Day’s Night in which the pair were — loosely — portrayed by Norman Rossington and John Junkin. The film brought Aspinall into contact with the English production head of United Artists, Bod Ornstein, whose daughter Suzy he married in 1968.

“I always look forward to tours,” said Aspinall, “but when I’m on them, they’re a drag.” At one point, such was the pace of this life, his weight went down to eight stone (33kg).

Many have pronounced upon the course that the Beatles took after the death of Brian Epstein in 1967, but the group’s dissolution cannot be attributed to any one thing. Certainly, none of the group relished sitting in a boardroom when they could be in a recording studio, and the freeloading atmosphere of Apple left them vulnerable to offers of help from such people as Allen Klein.

It was an endlessly prolonged stage in the story, with lawsuits from every direction year after year. For every moment when the members of the group were drawn together, as on the Ringo album, there were others when their ready wit could turn into petulance. Amid all this, Aspinall, who had survived Klein’s purging of the Apple headquarters, became — for lack of any more formal term — the firm’s managing director. He missed one of its most famous moments, the rooftop concert, because he was in hospital to have his tonsils removed.

Throughout the Seventies and Eighties, he worked to rebuild the Beatles’ empire, often a matter of upping the paltry royalties they had been given early on, when it had never been anticipated by anybody that the group would last, let alone so far beyond its break-up. All the while, along with various reissues of the group’s output, and a dispute with Apple Computer about the use of the name, he nurtured the production of a documentary series which, in the early Seventies, had been given the working title of The Long and Winding Road. The continuing disputes, and the group’s other work, meant that this was continually delayed, which was perhaps as well, for, 25 years after the break-up, enough time had gone by for them to feel easier looking back and releasing material originally set aside. (Unlike Bob Dylan, they did not discard masterpieces, although their version of Leave My Kitten Alone is terrific and Child of Nature — the original incarnation of Jealous Guy — is more than a curiosity).

Under Aspinall’s guidance, in the mid-Nineties, there came together a series of six CDs and a coffee-table book, along with a television series — all bearing the disinterested title of Anthology — which netted the group millions around the world, a small proportion of which went Pete Best’s way for the tracks on which he drummed. Aspinall himself reminisced (with a hat to disguise his baldness) during the series which was expanded for video and DVD release — but, alas, lost to posterity is the glorious moment in the first advert break, when, splendidly lugubrious, the original drummer appeared to endorse Carling, “probably the Pete Best lager in the world”.

Whether Aspinall knew that this good-natured subversion of the enterprise was in the offing, he did not say. Well-nigh unique among those around the Beatles, he never spoke out but kept the trust of them all and when, in April last year, he announced that he would be leaving Apple, this was a simple statement of fact. Some speculated that this was in fact owing to disagreements about the way in which the Beatles work was reissued. In fact, the group and its estates had approved the steady rate at which Aspinall set about it, and after more than four decades, he was mindful of a heart problem which made a little more leisure a wise option.

He understood the Beatles as well as anybody: “We did all enjoy one another’s company and we always had a laugh. That was one of the big things right through everything, even today — we enjoy a laugh.” As such, he never minded their invariable habit of calling him Nell.

He is survived by his wife, Suzy, and five children.

Neil Aspinall, business manager for the Beatles, was born on October 13, 1942. He died after a brief illness on March 24, 2008, aged 65