Sixty years on, how McCartney and the Beatles rocked Sydney
June 18 marks Paul McCartney’s 82nd birthday. The last century was 64 years old and the Beatle just 22 when he celebrated with fans as the Fab Four rocked Sydney during their historic tour down under.
Confidential
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When the Beatles arrived in Sydney in 1964, the runway they landed on was only 10 years old, paved in 1954. Before that, the runways at Mascot were made of gravel.
That alone tells you how young and far-flung this city was when the biggest cultural phenomenon in the world exploded in its midst.
We look back now and see the 1960s almost as a neatly fully-formed decade – Beatlemania, Vietnam and “flower power” all culminating at Woodstock and the Summer of Love in 1969.
The suburbs of Sydney were very different.
In Australia, it is often joked, the 1960s didn’t arrive until the ’70s. Our Woodstock was the Sunbury Music Festival in 1973.
In 1964, there was only the faintest hint of the countercultures and civil rights movements emerging in the US – the Sydney Push being the only one that most, if any, could name.
Mainstream Australia was firmly conservative. Robert Menzies was well into his second decade as prime minister. Our currency was still the British pound and even the place where the Beatles landed was a cry for the Home Counties.
The area had been home to a racecourse that was rather presumptively named “Ascot” and when a new suburb was being formed, the local residents wanted to adopt the name. The postal authorities objected and so an “M” was randomly added.
Then the track was turned into the airport and so Mascot ended up with neither the name nor the racecourse it wanted. Such was Australia’s standing on the world stage.
Just five years earlier in 1959 the Hollywood star Ava Gardner was infamously forced to stay in Melbourne to film the apocalyptic classic On the Beach.
She is supposed to have remarked that Melbourne – where the pubs still closed at 6pm – was the perfect place to set a movie about the end of the world.
In fact, she never said it. The quote was invented tongue-in-cheek by a Sydney journalist.
And so, at 6.30am on June 11, 1964, the Beatles touched down into this contented, staid and beige global outpost. And it lit up like a tinderbox.
There were 1000 screaming fans at Mascot International Airport but, in a touching nod to the times, there was also a group of less-enthusiastic folks who had taken the time to attend with a banner reading “Go Home Bugs” from the “NSW Anti-Trash Society”.
Such charming details are catalogued for posterity by the State Library, including the bittersweet tale of a mother who threw her disabled six-year-old child to Paul McCartney, thinking the Beatles could “cure” him.
Sadly for the NSW Anti-Trash Society, its pleas went unheeded and, after a couple of sidesteps in Adelaide and Melbourne, the Beatles returned to Sydney 60 years ago today to perform six sold-out shows in three days.
These were at the ambitiously named Sydney Stadium at Rushcutters Bay. In fact it was more commonly known as “The Old Tin Shed”, a far more accurate description for a venue that was built to stage boxing matches.
It was said that the Beatles’ manager’s wife, Dawn, redecorated the backstage dressing rooms for the Fab Four in order to distract them from the stadium’s various quirks, such as the fact the revolving stage didn’t revolve. Instead, before it could even complete a single circuit, it had to be pushed back manually so the internal electrical cables didn’t rip out.
This masterpiece of modern engineering was demolished to make way for the Bondi Junction rail line in 1970.
Some might look back at this with the infamous Australian cultural cringe and yet the fact the Beatles were here at all was proof of our street-smarts and guile. Like many at The Old Tin Shed, we were punching above our weight.
A year earlier, the Melbourne promoter Kenn Brodziak had managed to commit the then-obscure group to an Australian tour for the princely sum of £1000 per week. By the time they arrived, the Beatles could command £25,000 – now more than $830,000 – for a single performance.
Not made of stone, Kenn generously upped his offer to £1500 a week.
And the Fab Four themselves were just as cobbled together as us – when they arrived they were the Fab Three, plus fill-in drummer Jimmy Nicol. By the time they took to the stage here, however, Ringo had recovered from the world’s most famous sore throat and we got the lot.
That first performance on June 18 was also McCartney’s birthday. The century was 64 but he was just 22.
The city, meanwhile, was being born again. In her book on the history of the Sydney Push, leading figure Anne Coombs names the pivotal moment Australia started to turn from the old to the new: “1964, the year the Beatles came…
SYDNEY GRAN: ‘I WAS CONVINCED I’D MARRY PAUL’
At 15, Sydney’s Barbara Holdsworth was convinced she would marry Paul McCartney.
So in love with the British heart-throb, the teenager scored tickets to two of The Beatles six shows at the now defunct Sydney Stadium in Rushcutters Bay.
Not all went to plan, however, as she won tickets to the first show on June 18, 1964.
“He (McCartney) had to see me if I was going to marry him so I raced down to the stage,” she said.
“I looked up, he smiled at me, I fainted, the ambulance people came in took me out to the ambulance and I missed the rest of the show. (I saw) the beginning of the first song. We had a connection, I was in love and I thought, now he has seen me, I am going to marry him, he had found his love. Alas, it didn’t happen.”
Instead of him falling for her, she had fallen — literally — for him.
Now 75 with two adult children and multiple grandchildren, Holdsworth recalls her bedroom walls being covered in Beatles posters.
She managed through a family friend to wrangle an autograph from the band too, and still has the ticket stubs from those concerts.
“Everything about my life was about The Beatles,” she said. “I was sure he would want to marry me.”
Iconic archival footage from that tour in shows Australian Beatlemania in full swing with thousands of fans flocking to Sydney airport and to their hotel, the Sheraton, for a glimpse of the fab four.
“I was going to the airport the day they arrived but I got so over excited I got hives all over me,” she laughed. “I was just one raging rash so I had to miss out.”
She attended the second concert with close girlfriend Sandy Jed.
“Barbara was besotted by Paul McCartney,” Jed said. “Paul was my favourite too but Barb really thought she was going to marry him. At one stage they were selling off bits of the sheets they slept in at the hotels and for some reason we were able to get a piece of the sheet.”
Holdsworth meanwhile likened Beatlemania to that of Taylor Swift’s recent Era’s tour.
“I think it is fabulous,” she said of the Swift mayhem. “It is harmless fun, just like the Beatles were. It just gave so much joy to everyone, and it didn’t hurt anyone.”
— Jonathon Moran, Chief Entertainment Writer
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