The Fifth Beatle....

....is one of the enduring figures of popular mythology. Like the second assassin, Mick Jagger's Mars Bar, and Jim Morrison's cock, the Zelig-like figure bashing a tambourine, arranging a photo call, or procuring a strumpet for Paul, is a figure without whom the landscape of the Sixties would not be complete.

Nobody talks about the fourth Bee Gee, or the third Everly Brother, but since the Beatles split up nearly forty years ago, there have been numerous people connected with the band, however tenuously, who have either elected themselves, or been nominated for the title of Fifth Beatle.

And lo, this week, two more candidates emerge. Step forward PR shark Max Clifford, and the enviably prolific journalist, novelist, and biographer Hunter Davies.

The two have been sparring entertainingly in the letters page of The Guardian over their involvement - or more specifically Max's, Hunter's is not in dispute - in the early days of the Fab Four.

It started with a profile of Clifford in The Guardian of February 21st. Interviewer Stephen Moss noted a 1962 photo in Clifford's office, showing the young PR man with the Beatles and George Martin. Clifford told Moss how he was working in the EMI press office as a 19-year-old when the company signed the lovable mop tops, and went into a well-rehearsed anecdote (he told it to me in a radio interview five years ago) about the EMI marketing director telling him: "Don't waste too much time on this lot, son. They've got no chance."

Clifford left it at that in the interview, but the implication that he, Clifford, had somehow ignored his boss’s reservations, and ploughed on with his plan to propel the boys to chart domination in Britain, a successful invasion of the United States, two modish films for the cinema, several groundbreaking albums, and eventual acrimonious break-up - and had possibly tried to dissuade them from recording Maxwell’s Silver Hammer into the bargain - was too much for official mop top biographer Davies.

During his 18 months spent with the Beatles in the 1960s researching his encyclopaedic tome, wrote Davies in a letter to the Guardian, Clifford’s name did not come up once. Davies doubted Clifford played any part at all in the Beatles' story. The well-known collector of memorabilia – as featured in Guardian Weekend – added that the name of Clifford is also conspicuous by its absence from the “500 Beatles books, and 2,000 magazines, programmes and articles about the Beatles” lovingly preserved in the Davies attic.

Back came Clifford saying the anecdote was not meant to imply anything other than that “I was very lucky to be in the right place at the right time.” He went on generously to ascribe the Beatles’ worldwide success to the talent of the boys themselves and the management nous of Brian Epstein, and less generously to hope “Hunter Davies’s biographies are more accurate than his references to me, and trust that he enjoys and benefits from the publicity he has achieved by misrepresenting me.”

Putting aside the doubtful publicity benefits of having a letter published in The Guardian, let me try and build a bridge over these troubled waters (wrong act, I know, but right era).

First of all, Hunter, cut the boy a bit of slack. Max is in the PR business, where spin and flim-flam are more or less built into the job description. Nor is he the only person to try and derive a little reflected glory from the Fab Four.

Murray the K, a New York disc jockey, was, I believe the first to call himself the Fifth Beatle, when he interviewed the band a few times during their 1964 tour of America. George apparently used the term sarcastically, because Murray (or do I call him "the K?") was shadowing the band all over the city, and the boys couldn't shake him off.

Not that the egregious disc spinner is the most unlikely Fifth Beatle. Robert Crampton of The Times tells a story about interviewing Jimmy Tarbuck on a golf course in the Algarve, when the terminally unfunny comic and occasional Fighting Talk host ("worst host ever," as Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons would say) claimed that he (that's Tarby, not Crampton) was the Fifth Beatle on the very solid grounds that he came from Liverpool, was about the same age as the Fabs, and had a mop top of his own.

George Best was also once called the Fifth Beatle based on nothing more than the fact he shared with the boys a taste for whisky and Coke and shagging a lot of women, and a newspaper headline, reading "El Beatle," printed when Manchester United returned from a European triumph and Georgie emerged from the plane wearing a sombrero.

The whole Fifth Beatle conversation was revived last year with the death of Neil Aspinall, the former roadie and assistant who was with the boys throughout their career and remained with Apple Corps until 2007.

In terms of longevity, and a Zelig-like ability to be there - and yet not be there - every step of the way, from the leather jackets and DAs of the Merseybeat scene to the exploiting-the-back-catalogue era of the new Millennium, Aspinall is a good call. He saw everything, and took the secrets with him to the grave. If anybody knew where the bodies were buried it was Aspinall, and he never told.

Musically, though, the true Fifth Beatle has to be George Martin, possibly the greatest record producer of all time, given the technology he was working with. This, remember is the man who not only produced Revolver but also I'm Walking Backwards For Christmas by The Goons.
And let us not forget the late Norman "Hurricane" Smith, recording engineer on all the Beatles albums up to Rubber Soul, and later hitmaker himself on "Don't Let It Die" and "Oh Babe, What Would You Say?"

There were also Fifth Beatles actually in the band; the tragic figure of Stu Sutcliffe, of course, who with his girlfriend Astrid can lay claim to have invented the look of the band in the early '60s, Pete Best, drummer and custodian of garage in which to practise, Pete Shotton, member of the Quarrymen, Jimmy Nicol, who toured with the band when Ringo had his tonsils out, Billy Preston on "Get Back," Tony Sheridan from Hamburg days, Eric Clapton, who played guitar on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," and helped George greatly, although he didn't tell him to nick "He's So Fine" from The Chiffons. There will be others I have omitted.

And let us not forget Brian Epstein, the visionary without whom..... They are making a film about Brian, and it would be nice to think it could be as rich, and redolent of its era, as David Peace's Brian Clough book. But if the history of Beatles projects is anything to go by, I do not hold out a lot of hope. One word: Backbeat.

Oh, and before we leave the subject of Fifth Beatles, I read a travel feature a couple of months ago about Portugal in which the writer wrote of the holidays he had spent in his property there with at least one member of the Fab Four. The piece was illustrated with a picture of the writer together with Paul McCartney. The writer was Hunter Davies. Hunter's biog of the boys, by the way, is a fantastic read, as is his book about Spurs.

The thing about the Beatles was that they were the most photographed and interviewed band ever, before or since. No band nowadays would ever let you get as close to them as the Beatles did. All sorts of people have pictures of themselves with the band.

A photographer friend of mine from the Sheffield Star took loads backstage at the Sheffield Gaumont or Odeon when the boys played there, and I dare say similar things happened at theatres up and down the country and all over the world, during the brief period the boys were touring. Every person in every picture probably has a story to tell. Some will be embellished, but that is to be expected.

I like to think Max's anecdote goes on to find him outside the studio where the Beatles are recording Love Me Do. He turns to the marketing director, and says: "You're wrong, you know. These boys have got something. They may be raw now, but with the right PR, they could go all the way to the top."

The camera closes in on Max, and we go into a montage sequence, but instead of shots of the Beatles' triumphs, we get newspaper headlines, and shots of Max with Freddie Starr, Rebecca Loos, and that bird David Mellor was shagging, until his ultimate triumph; selling the story of the 13-year-old kid who has fathered a baby, and choreographing coverage of Jade Goody's terminal illness.

You can understand why the guy might want to claim just the merest suggestion of a whiff of the glory of She Loves You.