Welcome to Nothing's 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.

We have often touched upon the conversation of who is the true fifth beetle.

But the reality is there might only really be one man.

And that is the person we are going to be talking about today, Mr. Stuart Sutcliffe, who is a fascinating figure who casts a long shadow over everything we know about the Beatles through to this day and the big question of the what

if and the what could have been. So he was an official member of the band there for a short time.

I like the fact that he was the only member of the band that left voluntarily

and on good terms. He's the only member who left who would have been welcomed back, is my theory.

I think that's probably correct. He would have been welcomed back by most of the band.

Well, we shall get to that exciting point. And I'm sure, obviously, everybody listening to us

knows that, you know, the overall

arc of Stewart's story, that he was a member of the band. He left the band and he passed

away in Hamburg in 1962. But it is part of the Beatles, you know, mythos, his existence.

We don't really, he's almost like,

I think of like the singer Nick Drake. He's one of these characters who we don't really have

any permanent reminders exactly of what he was like. He's very spectral. Yes, he appears in

photographs. You know, he is photographed a lot because of Astrid Kiersher and his connection there.

There are no sound recordings of Stuart Sucliff. So we don't know what he sounded like. We don't know,

you know, he's sighing with the Beatles. Nothing is recorded. And yeah, you look at him in those photographs and he is this spectral presence.

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