Fifth Beatle only Beatle at own funeral

Given that he was so central to guiding their business for so many years, how touching that, erm, neither Ringo nor Macca appear to have gone to Neil Aspinall's funeral.

Yoko and, erm, Stella McCartney managed to make it to Twickenham.

Beatlesobit: Neil Aspinall

One of several people lauded with the honorific 'Fifth Beatle', Neil Aspinall has died.

Although an occasional instrumentalist on Beatles tracks, his real contribution to the band has been as chief executive of Apple Corps, leading the company from 1970 through to 2007 and doing as much to keep the Beatles legend stoked and shining - and earning - as any of the band.

Although a schoolfriend of McCartney and Harrison, Aspinall came into the band's ambit when another one of the Fifth Beatles, Pete Best, asked him to do some driving. Aspinall - as an accountant - worked out quickly that road-managing the band would make more than the day job, and quickly became a fixture in the band's machine. He nearly quit in solidarity when Pete Best was canned; Best persuaded him to say.

His appointment at the head of the Apple operation almost faltered when George Martin suggested his background would leave him struggling to deal with the upper-classes in charge of EMI; that wasn't so much of a problem but his lack of business skills did see him condemned in the Sunday Times in 1995 as 'merrily leading [The Beatles] to the brink of chaos and bankruptcy". However, Aspinall's plan - to try and maintain the band as a quality brand rather than a piggybank - appeared to pay off when the Anthology series appeared; a band who had largely kept aloof from the compilation market managed to make a bunch of offcuts (and a dreadful 'new' track in Free As A Bird) seem like an event. It sold in bucketloads.

Although once a wide-ranging business empirette, for most of its life Apple has relied on Beatles records and legal battles with Apple Computer and EMI.

Neil Aspinall was 66; it's believed his death was related to lung cancer.