How THE BEATLES CAME ON TOUR TO AUSTRALIA NEARLY 50 YEARS AGO

IT was 50 years ago next month that The Beatles arrived in Australia for their first and only tour. 

Greeting their Australian fans ... The Beatles wave to unprecedented crowds outside the Southern Cross Hotel in Melbourne.

 

But how did the biggest band there ever was end up in our then far-flung corner of the globe at the very moment the whole world was embracing them?

According to the man who booked them, it was “luck” and “instinct”.

In July 1963, The Beatles were a rising rock band with a handful of hits under their belts, but already showing glimpses of the generation-defining, genre-smashing phenomenon they would become.

Driven by a pair of gifted songwriters in Paul McCartney and John Lennon, complemented by drummer Ringo Starr and the baby of the group, guitarist George Harrison, the Liverpool quartet was already a musical force to be reckoned with thanks to years honing their skills playing in German and English clubs.

Promoter Kenn Brodziak secured The Beatles for a bargain.

By contrast, Kenn Brodziak was an established Melbourne promoter with decades of experience mainly in the theatre world. Having begun his career as an actor, playwright and producer in the 1930s, by the late ‘50s he had branched out to the world of touring musicians, enticing acts such as legendary drummer Gene Krupka, Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Lonnie Donegan and the Dave Brubeck Quartet to make what was then a gruelling trip to distant Australia.

It was on a trip to London in mid-1963 that he first came across The Beatles, quite by chance after being given a list of five bands by an agent who wanted him to book them for an Australian tour. Brodziak didn’t want five but said he’d take one — and if that worked out well he’d book the others.

“The agent said, ‘which one would you like?’,” Brodziak said. “And I said ‘I’ll take The Beatles’. That was all there was to the story. I didn’t know anything about the group except that their name sounded familiar, I think because of their playing in Germany.”

On the strength of that, a verbal agreement was struck with Beatles manager Brian Epstein for a flat fee of 1500 pounds a week. It seemed like a reasonable deal all around, but the events that unfolded in the following months turned it into one of the shrewdest — and most lucrative — deals in Australian rock history.

By the end of the same year, The Beatles had notched up three UK No. 1 singles and their debut album, Please Please Me had been sitting atop the chart for 30 weeks. It was only knocked off by their second album, With The Beatles, which sold half a million copies a week after its release in November. Non-album single I Want To Hold Your Hand became the first British single to sell a million copies before its release and launched the band’s career in the US, becoming their first No. 1 there.

The nervous Beatles were greeted by 4000 screaming fans when they landed at the newly christened JFK airport in early 1964 and their now famous appearances on the top-rating Ed Sullivan show and gone a long way to making them household names.

Beatlemania had arrived as a global phenomenon and the world would never be the same.

Just prior to that, in December 1963, the contract for the Australian tour the following year was finally signed. Under the circumstances, Epstein’s insistence that the new fee would be 2500 pounds was entirely reasonable — he was being offered many times that by American promoters desperate to get the band back to capitalise on their new-found fame. There was a sweetener too — Adelaide had originally been left off the touring schedule but a petition signed by more than 80,000 fans meant four new shows were added, with the takings to go directly to the band’s management. The city would later show its gratitude when more than 300,000 people greeted the band, believed to be the biggest Beatles crowd ever assembled.

Loved by millions ... Paul McCartney playing the piano during The Beatles visit to Melbourne, at the Melbourne Town Hall during a State reception. Picture: Supplied Source: Supplied

So it was that The Beatles (with Jimmy Nicol subbing for a tonsillitis-stricken Ringo) arrived in Sydney on the morning of June 11, 1964, as the biggest band in the world. They were greeted, as they would be the entire tour, by thousands of fans and a gaggle of fascinated journalists, who they invariably proceeded to charm. Brodziak could already see that his investment was paying off in spades — just as The Beatles were fully aware of their new-found cachet.

Brodziak recalled in an interview years later: “One of the first things that George (Harrison) said when the band arrived in Sydney was, ‘You got us at the old price, didn’t you?’ I said ‘Yes’, but he didn’t seem to mind.”

Popular group ... The Beatles touring Adelaide in 1964. Source: News Corp Australia

Scenes of mayhem greeted the band wherever they went, from the mass turnout in Adelaide, to a crowd around their Melbourne hotel that brought the CBD grinding to a halt. Promoter Michael Gudinski was too young to be allowed to go to their sold-out shows a Festival Hall, but remembers well the impact the visit had on his hometown. In all his years of bringing some of the biggest acts in the world to Australia, he says he has still never seen anything like it.

“The screaming, the hair, the plastic Beatle wigs you could buy — everywhere they went it was an absolute phenomenon that hasn’t been seen to that extent ever again,” he says.

“Whether it was Bon Jovi in their heyday, Justin Bieber, Kiss, ABBA — there has never been anything like that Beatles period.”

Similarly unheard of in this day and age was not only that the original verbal contract was honoured, but also the punishing schedule for the band. In Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane — with a lightning side trip to New Zealand — the Beatles were playing two shows a night, at 6pm and 8pm, often on consecutive days.

Worthy memorabilia ... Julien's Auctions unveiled this “Beatles ’65” album signed by all four members of the band. Picture: Julien's Auctions Source: AP

“There is certainly not as much loyalty in the business as there used to be,” Gudinski laments, recalling a similar stroke of good fortune in his own promoting career, albeit on a much smaller scale.

“We had The Knack at the Bombay Rock with a queue a mile down the road and a lot of it is good luck and timing. It was the week that they had the No. 1 album and single in America and we were paying them $1500.

“If there was a contract in place, back in those days it was not unusual for that contract to be honoured. That’s where the business over the years really started to change around. It’s swung very much to the point where it’s in the artist’s favour now, whereas it had been way in the promoter’s favour.”

A Beatles scrapbook . licensed merchandise from 1964. Picture: Powerhouse Museum Source: Supplied

More memorabilia ... these cards were available at Australian service stations in 1964. Picture: Powerhouse Museum Source: Supplied

Even as early as their Australian dates, and despite their outward affability, The Beatles were beginning to tire of life on the road. Their unprecedented levels of fame meant they were practically prisoners in their hotels and the technology of the era was such that they could barely hear themselves play above the constant screams of their ecstatic, and mainly female, fans.

The band was given a mayoral reception at the Melbourne Town Hall and while they smiled and waved from the balcony to the 20, 0000 or so gathered outside, chances are they wished they were elsewhere. Lennon later revealed his hatred of such functions and being wheeled out to meet the great and the good in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 1971. “All that business was awful,” he said. “It was such a f---ing humiliation.”

Saluting fans ... The Beatles imitate a Nazi salute on the balcony of the Southern Cross Hotel in Melbourne. Source: News Corp Australia

Replacement drummer Nicol also revealed a dark side of the Fab Four, very different to their squeaky clean image, pointing out Paul’s “love of blonde women”, Lennon’s excessive drinking and claiming that contrary to his reputation as the quiet Beatle, George “was into sex and partying all night”.

“I thought I could drink and lay women with the best of them,” he said in a later interview, “until I caught up with those guys.”

It’s little wonder then, that The Beatles’ first Australian tour was also their last. The Beatlemania that had taken hold didn’t let up until the group disbanded six years later, meaning that picking them up for a song was truly a once in a lifetime opportunity. Aside from their famous rooftop concert in London in January 1969, The Beatles said goodbye to touring for good at a show in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park in August 1966.

Fans unite . the massive crowd outside Melbourne Town Hall when The Beatles arrived for their State reception. Source: News Corp Australia

By then they had just released their album Revolver, whose sonic innovation and psychedelic experimentation would open the doors to their finest achievements.

Without the rigours and distractions of life on the road, the band could devote more time to the studio resulting in the masterpiece trio of albums Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the White Album and Abbey Road.

Brodziak continued to have a successful career in Australia both with music tours — including John Farnham’s early career — and theatrical productions such as Godspell, A Chorus Line and Annie right up until his retirement in 1980. He was awarded an OBE in 1978 and died in 1999. Despite all his successes, The Beatles tour remained his towering achievement, something that initially irked him.

“It used to annoy me that people only knew me for bringing The Beatles here,” he said a year before his death. “Now I realise what a landmark moment that was. There will never be another group like them.”