WHEN WE WAS FAB – Inside The Beatles Australasian Tour 1964, by Andy Neill & Greg Armstrong

Sixty years ago today, on July 2, 1964, The Beatles arrived home at London Airport – it became Heathrow in 1966 – at 11.10am having flown over 10,000 miles, all the way from Brisbane in Australia via Sydney, Djakarta, Singapore, Cairo and Frankfurt. They left behind them two shell-shocked nations that would never be quite the same whose teenagers had been part of a life-changing experience. “They welcomed us like liberators,” was the headline that Derek Taylor, Brian Epstein's PA and de facto PR on the tour, wrote from Adelaide for George Harrison's ghosted column for the Daily Express in London. “I’ve seen films of de Gaulle re-entering Paris after the recapture of France and the allies marching up Italy. Without wishing to draw comparisons, the expressions on the faces today were similar to the expressions on the faces of people freed from captivity.”

He wasn’t kidding. The Beatles tour of Australia and New Zealand during the second half of June 1964 saw the… “most hysterical scenes of mass adulation neither country had witnessed before, nor have they experienced since,” write Andy Neill and Greg Armstrong in the introduction to their forthcoming, utterly fab, 308-page large format book on the tour. “If the experience the four Beatles were sharing took on a surreal quality as their career skyrocketed, it was to become even more unimaginable when they arrived in Australia.

“None of the fan scenes displayed in Britain or the United States ever came close to the staggering display of affection that greeted the Beatles in Australia, particularly in Adelaide and Melbourne. To the Beatles utter disbelief, it appeared the entire population of these far-flung cities were turning out to catch a glimpse of the young men with ‘strange’ haircuts who played a new kind of pop music. In staid Adelaide fans camped out for 65 hours for concert tickets. When the Beatles arrived there two months later, a staggering 300,000 people lined the streets [to see them].”

The Adelaide Beatles motorcade arrives in King William Street and, below, fans on the street. 

(Photos by Vic Grimmett)

Until now the only available reportage of this extraordinary explosion of Beatlemania has been The 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. It’s very much a fly-on-the-wall account and was fairly eye-opening insofar as when it was published in 1982 it offered hitherto unmentionable details of JPG&R’s off-stage activities that can best 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 the extent to which the Beatles coped with the madness that surrounded them, and continued virtually uninterrupted for the duration of the visit. 

It’s all here, 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 Jimmie Nicol, drafted in to replace bedridden Ringo at the start, the girls who managed to evade security, the whimsical response to all this mayhem from the Beatles themselves and even the few nay-sayers who threw eggs at them. 

Neill, a New Zealander long based in the UK, and Armstrong, who lives in Melbourne, have spent almost 25 years putting their book together. They have gone to enormous lengths to cover every imaginable detail of this hectic tour, interviewing all those still living that were in any way connected with it, and researching every possible line of inquiry from contemporaneous reports in the Australasian press. It corrects hitherto unreliable accounts and is illustrated with hundreds of pictures, many previously unseen, and scans of relevant documents, press accounts and mementos from the period. It is the definitive account of a major highlight in the early career of the world’s greatest pop group and a key milestone in Australian popular culture.

“As a schoolboy in England, I’d been at the Coronation, standing among crowds of people by the roadside, but this was way beyond anything I’d ever seen,” says David Glyde, saxophone player with Sounds Incorporated who opened for the Beatles on the tour. “When we caught up with the Beatles they were just as incredulous as we were. ‘What’s going on in this place? Where have all these people come from?’”

When We Was Fab is published by Woodslane Press in Australia, and is available in the UK from most book outlets.