Sydney filmmaker and former musician Greg Perano bought an old 8mm film that contained live footage from the legendary Sydney Stadium gigs for $11.
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Greg Perano with the lost Beatles film he discovered in a Sydney market.Credit: Hugh Stewart |
Greg Perano was such a huge Beatles fan that in June 1964 he climbed a hill in his home town of Picton, on New Zealand’s South Island, to hear them play. They were performing in Wellington, 100 kilometres away.
Half a century on, his luck changed. On a regular Saturday morning visit to a Surry Hills market, the one-time member of the band Hunters and Collectors, now a Sydney filmmaker, was drawn to a box of old 8mm films.
“Beatles,” read the label on one. Another was marked, “Sounds Incorporated. Johnny Devlin. Johnny Chester.” Those were the acts that opened for the Fab Four at Sydney Stadium, Rushcutters Bay, on that one and only tour of Australia and New Zealand, in June 1964.
“Eleven bucks,” the vendor said.
“Could it be?” Perano wondered.
Yes, it was. The spool contained live performance footage from Sydney Stadium that has remained unseen, as far as he can determine, for 60 years.
“This guy was really good at editing in camera, so the seven minutes we have takes us through the whole concert,” he says. “It has the Beatles walking onstage, then excerpts from a whole lot of songs, and then it’s them walking off at the end.
There’s moments where he’s standing on stage filming Ringo, and he’s right in front of Paul and George who look straight at him … so he had amazing access. He was obviously well-connected.
“It makes them look a bit like a punk rock band. The other footage you see out there [on YouTube] is very much like newsreel stuff, but here you see John Lennon looking at Paul, you see them working together up close. It’s fantastic.”
It’s kind of surreal, actually, to see the Beatles stroll onstage, plug in their own instruments, shake their mops and have what appears to be an authentically good time, in those few golden months when Beatlemania was fresh and exciting. Even George appears to enjoy himself as he stares down the camera at close range.
Standard 8 film being a silent medium, the lucky finder has no music copyright worries to contend with. But the contents of the other reels gave him pause. These were family films, beautifully shot and edited. They had to be returned.
The name on the box was an unusual one which he had little trouble tracking down.
The remarkable footage was captured by journalist Gil Wahlquist in 1964.
The late Gil Wahlquist, he discovered, had been a Sun-Herald journalist from 1958 until 1974. He wrote a music column under the title Downbeat, and later his own name. Filmmaking, alongside music, was one of his many passions.
“It was wonderful,” recalls his daughter Asa Wahlquist, who also spent years as a Fairfax journalist in the 1990s. “In the era when it was so hard to get hold of overseas records ... my Dad would get the new Beatles records ahead of the public release date. I would play them to my friends over the telephone. It was terribly exciting.”
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