JUST BACKDATED ROCK BOOK OF THE YEAR

Since Just Backdated has become a repository for music book reviews I have decided to nominate a Rock Music Book of The Year and the first winner of this prestigious award is WHEN WE WAS FAB – Inside The Beatles Australasian Tour, 1964, by Andy Neill & Greg Armstrong, which I reviewed in July. 

        Regrettably, I was obliged to review the book from a pdf sent to me by Andy, whom I have known for years, and it wasn’t until November that I acquired an actual copy of the book, which was published by Woodslane Press, an Australian company, but is available through Amazon (at £28.95), though you may have to wait until stocks are replenished. As of today, Abe Books are offering it at £38.84, and although it was being sold by Waterstones at £39.99, it now appears to be out of stock there. 

        It’s worth every penny and the difficulty in obtaining it is a crying shame, for When We Was Fab has romped home an easy winner in my book of the year survey. It’s 306 large-format (30cm x 30cm) pages are packed with superbly researched text and hundreds of photographs, many in colour and previously unseen, alongside documents, press clippings and vintage memorabilia. A few can be seen below. 

            In their 20-year investigation to uncover anything relevant, Andy and Greg interviewed scores of people, from the tour’s promoters to many of the fans who saw the shows and waited expectantly on crowded pavements to watch John, Paul, George and Ringo (or stand-in drummer Jimmy Nichol) drive by. Insofar as it covers virtually every hour of The Beatles’ lives from 11 June, 1964, when they landed at Sydney, to 1 July, when they left Brisbane for London, the book ranks alongside Mark Lewisohn’s Beatle books for accurate, comprehensive reportage of what nowadays is regarded as the most intense explosion of Beatlemania anywhere in the world. 

        As I wrote in my review of the book in July, until now the only available reportage of this extraordinary tour has been Beatles Down Under by Glenn A. Baker, Australia’s foremost writer on pop music, a book I’ve owned for years and which is now quite collectable. Baker’s book was very much a fly-on-the-wall account and was fairly eye-opening insofar as when it was published in 1982 it offered hitherto unreported details of JPG&R’s off-stage activities that can best be described as less than saintly. Much of this is downplayed in When We Was Fab, not least because its authors believe those interviewed by Baker were exaggerating the Beatles’ sybaritic urges for effect. The truth is less scandalous but no less sensational, not least how the tour came about in the first place and was almost scuppered through a bureaucratic impasse, and the extent to which the four Beatles coped with the madness that surrounded them, mayhem that continued virtually uninterrupted for the duration of the visit. When The Beatles arrived in Adelaide, a staggering 300,000 fans and curious Australian adults lined the route from the airport to the centre of town to catch a glimpse of the world’s greatest ever pop group, the largest-ever crowd they attracted anywhere in the world. 

It’s all here in When We Was Fab, the chaos, the concerts, the airport scenes, the hotel receptions, the press conferences, the pope-like balcony appearances, the cast and crew, the experience of Jimmy Nichol, drafted in to replace bedridden Ringo at the start, the girls who managed to evade security, the whimsical response to all this madness from the Beatles themselves and even the few who threw eggs at them. In the words of Derek Taylor, their in-house PR who found himself in the midst of it all, “It was the longest-running story since World War II with the advantage that no one died.”