From me (37) to you

“I got the idea for the show when Tony Sheridan (who collaborated with The Beatles in the early days) died last year. A lot of obits started, ‘The man known as the fifth Beatle…’ and I began thinking, ‘How many fifth Beatles can there have been. They can’t all be fifth? You can only have one at fifth and the rest have to be six, seventh and eighth’,” says father-of-two Benn.

“I thought I must have been about 28th, but it turns out I’m 37th,” he jokes.

His touring show – which follows a critically successful run at Edinburgh last year – comes in two sections. The first half tells the tales of the “secondary Beatles”, the helpers and hangers-on at the time, like Pete Best, Brian Epstein and George Martin… and performers who turned up on records, like Billy Preston and Eric Clapton.

“The second part is the successors who have come along to The Beatles and start pretending to the crowd that they are the new Beatles.

So the numbers in the 20s and upwards are them. I’m not making any kind of direct claim, but I do have all kinds of weird little connections to The Beatles and the further you go into it the weirder they get,” says Benn.

The final part of the show involves a fiveminute anecdote involving his girlfriend, who became his wife, himself and a snake and his last involvement with a member of the band who changed music history.

Benn has honed his award-winning comedic talent on BBC Radio’s The Now show, It’s Been A Bad Week, Mitch Benn’s Crimes Against Music and The Mitch Benn Music Show, plus regular TV appearances using his ability to create comedy rock songs.

He tours with his band The Distractions, has released seven studio albums and had his first book, the sci-fi fiction Terra, published last year.

BENN admits that he could easily have developed a hatred for John, Paul, George and Ringo “because I’ve never been allowed to forget that I come from a generation that just missed them. Anybody born in the 1970s and 1980s only ever heard about how great the 1960s were. It was this amazing time that you just missed. You were almost made to feel guilty because you turned up late.

Certainly in Liverpool, when I was born, the city was in the direst of states. It’s much better now,” he says.

“The city was haunted by this period when it was, briefly, the hippest place in the world,”

adds Been, who deals with his own Scouseness during his act, which is touring to Durham and Newcastle.

“I actually started in comedy up in Edinburgh, when I left for university at the age of 18, and then moved down to London. So, Liverpool has never really been my home town as a comedian. I think I sound identifiably Scouse, but it’s a long time since I left and I was a bit middle-class to start with,” Benn says.

While the city is proud of its birthplace of The Beatles’ reputation, he says, Benn is not sure Liverpool wants to be doomed to dine out on the band forever.

“There’s a staunchly post-industrial working class pride in Liverpool which is not entirely sure about the way the city centre is slowly becoming a Beatles’ theme-park. Every year something gets named the Lennon-this or the McCartney-that… and why wouldn’t you,” he says.

He feels sympathy for McCartney. “He’s the cheery one that’s not dead, while Lennon is the angry one who is. It’s easy to canonise Lennon.

I’ve got a section in the show about bad Beatles’ movies. Not the ones they made about themselves, but the later ones, where they’re trying to turn Lennon into a cross between James Dean and Michaelangelo. To the people who knew him, he was just a bad-tempered bastard when he was a teenager,” says Benn.

He points out that the bad temper didn’t stop Lennon becoming, through a bizarre chain of coincidence, the most naturally-gifted songwriter who ever walked the Earth.

“That’s with the possible exception of Paul McCartney who, lo and behold, finished up in the same band. The odds against that are incredible,” he says.

Benn already has form for poking fun at Lennon, particularly over the massive hit Imagine. “Yes, he’s singing Imagine no possessions, but he’s singing it playing a white Steinway, in the drawing room of his 72-acre estate in Berkshire,” he laughs.

The 37th Beatle is affectionate, but not reverent about his subject because “even at the band’s most sincere moments, there was this undercurrent of silliness about everything they did”.

“And that is also a Scouse thing. I think the most admirable quality of the British in general is our inability to take anything particularly seriously”.

Benn admits that the 37 was a fairly random number he came up with, but it works quite well with the length of the show.

“The total of 37 has to be a comically high number because if I’d gone for 12 I’d have been bigging myself up quite considerably. We do count people down in order of Beatledom, and anything over 40 didn’t allow time for the performance,” he says.

• Mitch Benn Is The 37th Beatle: March 7, Durham Gala Theatre, Box Office: galadurham.co.uk 0844-8542776 April 15, Newcastle, The Stand. Thestand.co.uk 0844-693-3336