FEATURE:
Beatlemania Reaches Australia
IN THIS PHOTO: The Beatles with drummer Jimmie Nicol in Adelaide, Australia on 12th June, 1964/PHOTO CREDIT: The Vincent Vigil Collection
The Legendary Band’s Incredible 1964 Tour
_________
1964 was…
IN THIS PHOTO: Crowds mob the car carrying the Beatles from Adelaide airport to the city centre/PHOTO CREDIT: Keystone/Getty Images
a huge year for The Beatles. It was the one when they truly exploded. Having only released their debut album the year before (Please Please Me), they were thrust into the limelight fully so soon! It must have been head-spinning! Like nothing the music world had ever seen or has seen since. We all know about Beatlemania reaching America in February 1964. One would not imagine that Australia would latch onto The Beatles so quickly. Even so, when the band – John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Jimmie Nicol (Jimmie Nicol was a temporary member of The Beatles during their 1964 tour of Europe, Hong Kong and Australia) and George Harrison – reached the land down under in June 1964, they were met with hysteria and thousands of fans. As written here: “In June 1964, the world tour began. They went to Scandinavian, Holland, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand. Ringo missed part of the tour because he was in hospital with tonsillitis, but returned to play the gig in Melbourne, Australia, June 13, 1964”. It is clear that their music had truly reached the nation. Resonated and connected in a way possible no other artist had done in the country. I want to go into more detail about the dates they performed in Australia. First, in 2022, The Guardian wrote about The Beatles arriving in Adelaide for the Australian tour:
“When the Beatles arrived in Australia in 1964 for their first and only tour of the country, huge crowds greeted them everywhere they went. But one of the biggest turnouts was in Adelaide, where an estimated 350,000 people flocked to the city to catch a glimpse of them.
Adelaide wasn’t originally on the tour schedule, but local radio presenter Bob Francis petitioned to have it added, and 12,000 tickets were sold out in just over five hours for four shows, two each on 12 and 13 June.
The Beatles were the biggest band in the world and their songs were dominating the Australian charts with hits such as Can’t Buy Me Love (No 1 for six weeks in May and June 1964) and All My Loving, also previously a No 1.
It was one of the most intense outpourings of Beatlemania around the world, typified by the fans’ high-pitched screaming – although Ringo Starr was stuck in London with tonsillitis and was briefly replaced on drums by Jimmie Nicol until rejoining the band in Melbourne.
Thousands of people lined the Anzac highway from the airport to the town hall reception and then on to their hotel, all hoping to catch a glimpse of the band as they went past in convertibles.
Conservative Adelaide had never seen anything like it. In front of the town hall people swarmed around the cars, with the police having to lock arms to hold them back.
The Beatles went on to play Festival Hall in Melbourne and Sydney Stadium before flying to New Zealand to finish off the tour”.
The fact the band travelled all that way must have been strange in its own way. The boys from Liverpool in a country that was new to them. The Beatles' flight touched down at Sydney Airport just before 7:45am on Thursday, 11th June, 1964. The night after, they would perform in Adelaide. It was dizzying and a whirlwind for the band. Beatles Bible discusses that first date of the tour:
“An estimated 200,000 people lined the 10-mile route between Adelaide Airport and the city centre in the hope of seeing The Beatles’ motorcade. More than 30,000 surrounded the Town Hall, where they met the city’s mayor, James Campbell Irwin, along with council members and their families.
Nearly 250,000 people lined the Anzac Highway in Adelaide from the charming airport to the city centre. I told the writer Al Aronowitz all about it for the Saturday Evening Post a few weeks later. ‘It was like the Messiah come to Australia,’ I said, understating as best I could. ‘Cripples threw away their sticks and blind men leapt for joy,’ The only thing left for The Boys after this tour, I told him, would be a ‘healing tour’ of the world. It was like that. There were so many people of all ages and types reeling and a-rocking with joy that it felt as good as good can be. And if it felt good to the fans, it felt even better to us. I was called into The Beatles’ open car for the trip from the airport, and the journey was long and joyful and somehow humbling. You shoulda been there, John said on postcards later, and maybe some of you were. In the open car, George, now wide awake and full of delight, pointed in disbelief at the ribbons of people stretching as far behind and ahead as the eye could see. I had some difficulty in believing I was really here, a material witness to this unprecedented public love affair. How the hell, I wondered, do I come to be in Australia in a Victory Parade with the Most Famous People on Earth? Was this what I had always wanted?
Yes. Oh, yes. Definitely.
Derek Taylor
Fifty Years Adrift
We sat up on the back of our cars and all the people were out of their homes and hospitals, and then we went into the square. We got onto the Lord Mayor’s mantelpiece and waved at the whole crowd. It looked like something out of Dodge City, dirt roads and a Rock Ridge façade, or that’s what it seemed like to me. It was like ‘The Sheriff’s coming, ding, ding, ding.’ I’ve got photos, which I took from sitting up on the back of our car in the J. F. Kennedy position in the cavalcade.
George Harrison
Fifty Years Adrift, Derek Taylor
The Beatles were given toy koala bears. John Lennon told the reception, “Wherever we go, anywhere in the world, this reception which Adelaide has given us will stick in our memories.”
The group was shadowed by local DJ Bob Francis from 5AD, who interviewed them in a range of locations including the Town Hall balcony. Francis also booked the suite next to theirs at the Hotel South Australia, from where he gave listeners hourly updates.
Three hundred thousand people welcomed us to Adelaide. It was like a heroes’ welcome. George waved too. That was the kind of place where we would go to the town hall and they would all be there in the centre of the city. If it had happened suddenly, overnight, it might have gone to our heads; but we had come up bit by bit, so it didn’t (not too much). We were just very pleased that everyone had turned out.
We were still close enough to our Liverpool roots to know how it would feel, and what it would mean, if we had showed up in the middle of town to see a group; so we could feel it in their spirit. I think we quite enjoyed it all. It can get a bit wearing, but it certainly wasn’t then.
We came in from the airport – it was the same in Liverpool for the première of a A Hard Day’s Night, with the whole city centre full of people – and the crowds were lining the route and we were giving them the thumbs up. And then we went to the Adelaide town hall with the Lord Mayor there, and gave the thumbs up again. In Liverpool it was OK, because everyone understands the thumbs up – but in Australia it’s a dirty sign.
Paul McCartney
Anthology
Meanwhile, Ringo Starr, who had missed the early part of the tour due to illness, flew to Australia via San Francisco, Honolulu and Fiji, accompanied by Brian Epstein. Starr left his passport in London, delaying the first flight of the journey, but was eventually allowed to board the aeroplane without it.
The passport was eventually found and sent to London Airport, from where it was sent to San Francisco and reunited with its owner during the drummer’s stopover on 13 June.
Over 50,000 applications had been made for tickets to see The Beatles in Adelaide’s Centennial Hall, which had just 3,000 seats. The group played two sets on this day, and two more on the following day.
The compère was Alan Field, and the support acts were Sounds Incorporated, Johnny Devlin, Johnny Chester and The Phantoms.
The Beatles performed the same 10 songs at all their Adelaide shows: ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, ‘All My Loving’, ‘She Loves You’, ‘Till There Was You’, ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, ‘This Boy’, ‘Twist And Shout’, and ‘Long Tall Sally’.
I always remember the one gig in particular, I think it was in Melbourne [sic], doing the count-in to ‘She Loves You’, which was One, Two, dum be dum, ‘She Loves You’, with the down beat coming on ‘Loves’. I looked at Jimmie [Nicol] and said, ‘OK?’ and he said, ‘Yeah.’ Right, then… ‘One, Two’ and he froze and sort of had a quick brain-fade. Panicky, he lashed out and went ‘crash’ – and somehow the song got going.
George Harrison
Fifty Years Adrift, Derek Taylor
Brian Epstein sold the rights for one of the 12 June shows to be recorded for radio broadcast. It was titled Beatles Show and was transmitted on 15 June, with sponsorship from Surf detergent.
The Adelaide concerts were recorded for possible release as an album. I recall being driven to a studio to hear and approve the recording: to my uncritical ears, the tapes sounded all right and I gave them the provisional approval I’d been authorized to give. It was a weighty responsibility for someone so recently converted to popular music, and I was far too quickly and easily pleased. Whatever The Beatles sang was perfect to my ears. The Boys themselves later described the tapes as ‘crap’ (or one of its many synonyms) and they were never officially released, though no doubt they have turned up since as valued bootleg.
Derek Taylor
Fifty Years Adrift!”.
Even if the 1964 tour of Australia is notable for lacking Ringo Starr for the start of it, I wanted to mark sixty years of an important moment. The band has already cracked America and were beloved in their native U.K. It seemed perhaps inconceivable that they would be taken to heart so quickly in other nations. Especially in far-flung nations like Australia. You can read about The Beatles’ dates in Sydney. Noting how it was a connection to international culture and music for young listeners in 1964, it was also a moment of rebellion for Sydneysiders. This article from The Sydney Morning Herald in 2020 explained how The Beatles were a love language that bonded families. One that has truly stood the test of time. I would urge people to read the whole thing. However, I wanted to drop in the opening portions of the feature:
“By the time Paul McCartney sued his fellow Beatles, and their parent company Apple Corps, in London’s High Court of Justice on December 31, 1970 to dissolve the band, their relationship had taken on the emotional pallor of a family meal that’s gone south.
The insecurities, incandescent rage and jealousy that had crackled for years between the four men are well known: George Harrison and Ringo Starr felt stifled and unappreciated by McCartney and John Lennon, who allowed the first two only two or three songs of their own (sometimes less) on each album.
Lennon and McCartney, who had bonded over the early death of their mothers when each was a teenager, clashed over musical tastes: McCartney’s “granny” songs, Lennon’s primal screams. (McCartney dubbed The White Album “The Tension Album”.)
And let's not forget the big-ticket items: the stress of touring, so-called interfering girlfriends, drug addictions and violence. (Lennon once broke into McCartney’s house, after McCartney missed a recording session for Abbey Road, and damaged a painting.)
Far less known, though, is that in the 50 years since their official breakup – and the 40 since Lennon’s murder on December 8, 1980 – the four lads from Liverpool have been the glue that has bonded many Australian families, for better and occasionally for worse.
“It was always on,” says Nicolas McKenzie of The Beatles’ music in his childhood Sydney home. “Always.”
And it was often the band’s music to which he’d turn in order to help his father - the late, renowned journalist Mark Colvin - cope with his debilitating pain.
“So Dad was always the model father, he was so generous, he was so loving … but he would have these moments where he’d be like ‘I’m watching TV’ and you knew he was in absolute agony,” says McKenzie, 37, a musician and music journalist.
Colvin contracted a rare auto-immune condition while on assignment in Rwanda which led to two hip replacements and ongoing dialysis. “I would just read between the lines … and would go [listen to music]. I’d be like ‘I’m not going to bother him'.”
Colvin taught McKenzie how to identify which Beatles songs were written by which musician – Colvin was partial to the Lennon/McCartney song A Day In The Life – and told his son about his connection to Lennon’s darkness.
“He knew that Lennon was super damaged, but also knew just how brilliant he was and how everyone kind of loved him, and there was a little bit of that element of fear, he was dangerous, and I think that he actually thought that Lennon was very similar to his father,” says McKenzie.
Mark Colvin's father John was a senior figure in MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence service - “[he was] super sweet to us … he was super intelligent, but he could just kind of vanish".
In between vanishing acts, John Colvin had taken the young Mark to see The Beatles perform in London, where Mark grew up.
The Beatles toured Australia in 1964, enjoying their largest-ever fan gathering in Adelaide when around 300,000 people, nearly a third of the city’s population at the time, lined the 20-kilometre route between the town’s airport and the city centre to greet them. However the band abandoned live performance two years later.
Partly this was because wherever they went they could barely see anything outside of their hotel rooms; when they ventured out, they were stampeded. (“50 TEENAGERS HURT IN WILD CITY CRUSH” read the headline in The Age on June 15, 1964, about the 20,000 people who’d gathered outside the Southern Cross Hotel in Melbourne, some perched in trees.)
The Beatles 1964 Australia tour as remembered by those that were there. Video by Tom Compagnoni.
On the other side of the band’s hotel room walls, there was often a loneliness quite at odds with the teenage abandon Beatlemania had helped unleash.
“Bob, it’s John here, would you come have a drink with me?” Lennon said to Sydney disc jockey Bob Rogers one morning, who accompanied them on the 1964 tour for radio station 2SM.
“I went around to the room, he was there in bed with a bottle of red wine,” says Rogers, now 94. “So I had to sit in the bed with him, and drink the red wine, at seven o’clock in the morning.”
A year later, Lennon’s song Help! would be released. Years later Lennon would pick out the song as one of his favourites because it was “real”: “It was me singing ‘Help’, and I meant it.”
For Maree Trafford, thinking about the night she saw The Beatles at Sydney Stadium in Rushcutters Bay reminds her of that rare, shimmering moment in time when she was able to enjoy the comfort of a beloved cousin, not long before they were separated.
“I bawled all the way through, and Narelle screamed her lungs out and had a sore throat for a week,” says Trafford of her younger cousin, who was her “little sister, my best friend, everything, all in one”.
On 12th June, 1964, The Beatles performed their first date in Australia. It was a hugely important tour in a nation that was experiencing the first real taste of a Western musical juggernaut. I guess it was the same for the U.S. - even if Elvis Presley got their just before The Beatles. For Australia, it was a massive cultural moment! It is sad Ringo Starr did not get to experience all of it. In the year of Beatlemania around the world, their stop in Australia was pivotal. Throughout the tour, crowds sometimes topped six figures. The Beatles touching down in Australia in June 1964 was…
A huge moment for the country.