Beatles’ 1964 Brisbane concert anniversary, as never-published Paul McCartney picture surfaces
These are the never-before-seen photographs of when Brisbane was overcome by Beatlemania during the Fab Four’s two-day visit. Can you spot your mum?
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He looks ubercool, even if the cigarette has become unfashionable, and the emergence from the limo is very much in keeping with the rock star shtick of the 1960s.
The photograph of Paul McCartney, taken in Brisbane during the Beatles 1964 tour and seven others of the band performing and elated crowds, have never been published – as far as we know.
It took veteran Courier-Mail photographer Adam Head to discover it.
When Head learned the 60th anniversary of the Beatles’ Brisbane visit was coming up he took a deep dive into our archives.
GALLERY: SEE ALL THE PICTURES FROM THE BEATLES’ VISIT TO BRISBANE
There, in the basement of the newspaper’s Bowen Hill office, literally thousands of images have sat for decades, neatly stored away in small brown envelopes in the form of negatives.
The old shooters used to call them “Five Fours’’ – the five-inch by four-inch negatives that mid 20th Century newspaper photographers were required to retain, package and store away.
As Head says, only the photographers’ best work was required to be archived.
But many shooters found that, after a massive event such as the Beatles arrival in Brisbane in June 1964, their best work didn’t make the paper because the competition to get a run was so intense.
Yet it was not as if space wasn’t made available.
The Courier Mail’s coverage of the two-day visit was so intensive the paper actually altered the position of the masthead on both June 29 and 30 1964 to give maximum, front page coverage to the historic event, spilling reports onto page three.
Reporter Bruce Wilson was dispatched to meet the members of the British supergroup and reported they were smaller in stature than he expected, but all “good blokes.’’
An egg throwing incident which happened on the night of the band’s arrival was also covered.
The Beatles did not appear to be upset about it, with McCartney saying it just seemed a bit pointless.
But John Lennon feared the egg throwers, who included the future Federal Member for Kennedy Bob Katter, would spark a trend:
“Every nit in the world will start throwing eggs for the next month or so until some other nit thinks up a better trick.’’
Brisbane gave the cultural phenomenon known as the Beatles an explosive welcome in 1964, which stunned even McCartney himself.
If all they needed was love, the Beatles wanted for nothing in the sunshine state in the winter of 1964, yet nothing could have possibly prepared them for the “Egg Man.’’
The Beatles were only four years old when they landed in Brisbane just after Midnight on June 29 1964 to be greeted by thousands of often hysterical fans at Brisbane Airport.
The group which had formed in 1960 in Liverpool had become not merely dominant in popular music across the developed world, sweeping aside the more Conservative idols of the 1950s such as Frank Sinatra.
They were also becoming emblematic of a political revolution sweeping the ranks of the baby boomers who were entering their teens awash with mum and dad’s money, and determined to question the values of the generation which had fought World War II.
As Queensland’s State Library now formally records in its archives, over 200 uniformed police lined the tarmac at Brisbane Airport in the early hours of June 29, with 20 detectives mingling in with the crowds all waiting in the morning darkness for the arrival.
Due to the swell of the well wishers, one of the restraining fences shielding the VIP area started bending while six young women were treated by ambulance workers _ two for “hysteria’’ and four more who had fainted in the crush.
That same night, June 29, the group began the first of four concerts at Festival Hall over two nights with several support bands including “Johnny Devlin and Sound Incorporated’’.
The Beatles played for the last 30 minutes of each 90 minute show and, as the Brisbane Telegraph reported on page six on the June 30 edition, the crowd was rhapsodic:
“The shrieks, the screams, the sobs bounced off the ceiling,’’ the journalist reported.
“The girls _ and boys _ threw their arms above their heads.
“They bounced up and down on chairs, they sank to their knees in the aisles.
“It was bedlam and judging by the upturned open-mouthed faces, it was pure bliss.
“It was the Beatles.’’
Paul McCartney had expected a more muted response given Brisbane was at the end of the group’s southern hemisphere tour which had taken in New Zealand as well as Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.
“We thought Brisbane might be a let down after the rest of the tour, a sort of anticlimax, but really, the audiences here were tremendous, as good as or better than any we ever faced,’’ McCartney said.
Yet not every Queenslander was saying Good Day Sunshine to the Liverpudlians.
It’s now regarded as a generally accepted fact that John Lennon wrote at least part of “The Walrus’’ (incorporating a mystical reference to the “Egg Man’’) after consuming LSD in the Summer of 1967.
Yet it may well be the case that the Federal Member for Kennedy, Bob Katter, played a subconscious role in the song’s composition, given Bob threw eggs not only at Lennon but the entire band during their Brisbane visit.
As Bob himself explains in his own unique, elongated manner, he was a young man in 1963 and there were only two eligible women in his home town of Cloncurry, each of whom had approximately 16 suitors each.
So he decided to expand his horizons and went to university in Brisbane hoping for romance, but was roundly rejected in a celebrated encounter with a “Miss Queensland’’ runner-up who he attempted to woo at a dance in front of around 500 people.
“She told me to ruck off, or perhaps duck off … I can’t quite remember the exact language she used but she definitely wanted me to go away and I was reduced to an absolute zero in the romance stakes in front of about 500 people,’’ he recalled this week.
So, bereft of female companionship, when a uni mate asked him to join in an egg throwing expedition at around 2am on the morning of June 29 1964 he decided he had nothing better to do with his time.
The boys pummelled the visitors with eggs as the Beatles drove by in the motorcade from the airport sparking an international incident which intensified the following day when a mate (who ended up a senior Catholic priest) brokered a peace mission between Bob, his mates and Beatles who were holed up in Lennon’s Hotel in central Brisbane,
With around 50000 screaming teenage girls on the street below, Bob walked into a hotel room and waffled on to the Beatles about how the egg throwing was, in fact, a serious intellectual protest against Beatlemania.
He even repeated the story to international media but, as the Autumn years ripen him, admits he was just putting a spin on the incident, sharpening his wits for his future profession.
“I think it was about then I decided I had what it takes to be a politician,’’ he recalls fondly.
As for his romantic fortunes – they improved dramatically.
“From that day on I had countless young women who kept coming up to me and asking:
“Did you really meet the Beatles?’’
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