The Beatles' 1966 US tour tour, the band returned to Shea Stadium in New York, where they performed to an audience of 45,000, compared with the 56,000 world record attendance they had achieved the previous year. After the 1966 tour, they would become a studio band and focused exclusively on record production. In March 1966, Maureen Cleave interviewed John Lennon and the rest of the Beatles as part of a "London Evening Standard" series on the theme "How Does a Beatle Live?" During the Lennon interview at Kenwood, Cleave noted Lennon's interest in Christianity and religions, to which he replied: Although the article went largely
Fifth Beatle the "fifth Beatle", but over the years he and producer George Martin have clearly been recognised as the inner circle members who most profoundly affected the band's career. In an interview in the 1990s describing Epstein's involvement in the band's rise to fame, Martin declared "He's the fifth Beatle, if there ever was one." McCartney summarized the importance of Epstein to the Beatles when he was interviewed in 1997 for a BBC documentary about Epstein. He stated: "If anyone was the fifth Beatle, it was Brian." In 2013 Epstein was the subject of a graphic novel entitled "The Fifth Beatle"