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Welcome to Nothing Is Real, a podcast about the Beatles.

Everybody thinks they know the Beatles, but how much do we really know?

My name is Jason Carty.

My name is Stephen Corkroft.

And we're live on tape from Dublin and Belfast.

Today we're going to answer that most contentious of Beatle questions.

Who was the fifth beetle?

We're going to answer it conclusively once and for all.

No, we're not really.

This is one of these conversations that never ends.

We're going to look into the question in detail, and you can maybe make up your mind for yourself. But it's a difficult one to answer, isn't it, Stephen, who was the true Fifth Beetle?

It is. I mean, everyone sort of instinctively has a name that pops into their head. Your name won't be the same as my name. And once you start to delve into it, there are

dozens of candidates. Yes. And so what we've kind of been thinking about is that, you know,

maybe in the future we need to look at, you know, sixth, seventh and eight Beatles. There's a whole

ecosystem of people around the Beatles who each are worthy of discussion and looking at their

role in the story. But today we're going to look at, in particular, people

who played with the Beatles as Fifth Beatles. And maybe towards the end, we're going to look at the

Brian Epstein, George Martin, access of things as well. But this notion of a Fifth Beetle, at the start,

you know, by the end of 63, I think it's Tony Barrow and with the Beatles who comes up with

fabulous foursome, the Fab Four, this notion is that there's four of them.

But then I think the fifth beetle term comes when they get to the US, and it's Murray the

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