MUSIC
When We Was Fab: Inside the Beatles Australasian Tour 1964
Andy Neill and Greg Armstrong, Woodslane Press, $69.99
Sixty years ago this week, an English pop group flew out of Australia, spent, never to return. Thirteen months later they’d stop performing altogether. Five more years and they’d split in high dudgeon. Today two members are dead. And yet here we are, still blinking into the past and asking: “What just happened?”
It’s the mania, not the Beatles, that fuels this proclaimed “last word on the subject”. Sure, the musicians are pictured, often multiple times, on nearly every one of its 300 glossy, LP-sized pages. Their pithy press conference banter and polite newsprint soundbites are faithfully transcribed. But they’re not here. Like their famously inaudible concerts, they’re obliterated by something beyond their doing and beyond all reason.
The clue to clearly obsessive chroniclers Andy Neill and Greg Armstrong’s intentions as curators is in the title. When We Was Fab was borrowed from George Harrison’s sentimental single of ’87, but here the “we” refers to the people of the southern British colonies emerging from the postwar cold. And blimey, cobber, we weren’t half funny.
To some of us, this pop group heralded the end of humanity: “a reversion to the corruptions, miseries and monstrosities of pagan civilisation before the Christian faith showed men and women how to be truly human and free”, one commentator wailed.
To others, it was just a nice little earner. “Two Dulwich Hill butchers found that humming Beatle tunes while wearing Beatle wigs ‘for a joke’ sold twice as many joints of meat to curious housewives,” the authors report from their Herculean survey of interminable newspaper fluff.
Thousands of fans waiting for the Fab Four to appear on the balcony of Melbourne Town Hall.Credit: The Age
It was certainly fast lucre rather than cultural significance that put the Beatles on the Australia/New Zealand radar. Chapter one celebrates an opportunistic allegiance of old blokes in suits – Sydney theatre promoter Kenn Brodziak, “logistics manager” Dick Lean, UK talent agent Cyril Berlin – exchanging letters about “such scenes of enthusiasm by the youngsters” as to indicate “all sorts of lucrative engagements”.
Brodziak famously “got us at the old price”, as Paul McCartney wasted no time reminding him on arrival. The Beatles’ rocket had taken off only months earlier. It’s to manager Brian Epstein’s eternal credit that he honoured a pre-mania arrangement, albeit with a slight premium to offset forfeited profits closer to home.
“I know you may think the [increase] is all rather naughty Cyril,” he writes. But his revised request for £2500 “per six-day week” seems jolly sporting for the 20 concerts (two per day) and maddening travel and promotional demands that were about to tear strips off his lads’ smartly tailored suits and astoundingly resilient nerves.
Such is the anticipation, and so many are the refuelling stops, that their Qantas flight doesn’t even land until page 110. Long before that, as fan and media momentum builds, the book’s coffee table format invites dipping and flipping as copious images, letters, charts and clippings of ads and articles steal attention from a dense narrative that even Beatlemaniac readers might find, well, overly detailed.
What coloured pyjamas did the boys buy on their Hong Kong stopover? Exactly where did everyone sit in the gleaming white open-topped Ford Galaxie convertible that drove them through the unequalled throng of Adelaide’s welcoming party? And what’s with this double-page spread about a dry-cleaning company competition?
History is no doubt well served by such painstaking research, but brochures from Beatle-blessed hotels, the names and ages of stand-in drummer Jimmie Nicol’s distant relatives in Arncliffe, and deep career dives into local radio bit-players, fan club and merch operators might weigh heavy on the less committed eyelid.
More bracing are big-picture indicators of the way we were, whether it’s the remarkably similar notes of casual racism struck by rival AM radio stations or sniggering references to “only the finest birds” being herded into hotel rooms for goodness knows what purposes. Not only were Nazi salutes legal in 1964, they were deemed hilarious when performed from the balcony of a Melbourne hotel. Fab or what?
On stage at Festival Hall in Melbourne, where the screaming drowned out the music...Credit: John Lamb
“None of the fan scenes displayed in Britain or America ever came close to the staggering display of affection that greeted the Beatles in Australia, especially in Adelaide and Melbourne,” the authors tell us, quietly proud of our culture-starved ancestors rising to embrace a new world that was getting better, apparently, all the time.
Whether there’s any headroom left for that affection to grow is debatable, as those first responders go the way of all fresh-faced pop fans, hounded to their graves by accusations of generational exceptionalism from grandchildren arguably less prone to hysteria, and with infinitely more false idols on offer. “One suspects that Western civilisation will survive the Beatles,” the Sydney Morning Herald editorial board calmly opined at the height of the storm. Give or take the interminably long tail of nostalgia, they were probably right.
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