Who is ‘the fifth’ Beatle? How the covers band dropped the leather attire — and transformed to the Fab Four

All you need is luck — and maybe a stroke of fate.

That was the case in 1961 when one of Brian Epstein’s customers in the record department he managed at NEMS — his family store in Liverpool, England — asked for the single “My Bonnie” by The Beatles. It was, despite all his retail intel, the first moment that the Fab Four’s future manager had heard of the band.

Curious about the group that had recorded “My Bonnie” in Germany but turned out to be locals, Epstein saw The Beatles for the first time at Liverpool’s Cavern Club — where they played lunchtime concerts — on Nov. 9, 1961. The mind-blowing moment that would change his life — and pop music — is depicted in the new biopic “Midas Man,” which is streaming on Olyn.

“That day is the big bang,” Beatles historian Martin Lewis told The Post about Epstein’s culture-shifting discovery. “He had some kind of X-ray vision and X-ray hearing. He’s hearing it, and he’s looking at it, and he sees magic. These guys had something. It wasn’t just the music … it was the charisma, the presence, the energy. The Beatles had that life force.”

And Epstein gave The Beatles new life, proposing to manage them on the spot backstage despite having no previous experience. 

“He just instinctively, intuitively senses there’s something here, and there may be a mission for him,” said Lewis, who wrote the companion narrative for the 1998 re-publication of Epstein’s 1964 autobiography “A Cellarful of Noise.”