Photo essay: A look back at how the Beatles rocked Melbourne and their teenage fans went wild
FIFTY years ago this week, thousands of teenage girls flooded the streets of Melbourne as the Beatles rocked their world and reshaped this city.
Melbourne
Don't miss out on the headlines from Melbourne . Followed categories will be added to My News.
FIFTY years ago this week, thousands of teenage girls flooded the streets of Melbourne as the Beatles arrived in town. We revisit Mikey Cahill’s feature on the band that were bigger than Jesus who rocked Melbourne over four days in June 1964.
‘GEORGE HARRISON LOOKED RIGHT AT ME’
HOW THE BEATLES CHANGED MELBOURNE
MY DAD GOT ME TICKETS WHEN I WAS JUST 11
IN just four years, The Beatles went from being a small Liverpool band to “Bigger than Jesus”, receiving a frenzied welcome Down Under.
Granted, John Lennon didn’t utter those (in) famous words until August 1966, but in 1964, Australia was gripped with Beatles fever as the Fab Four arrived for a national tour of Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, facing one of the biggest welcomes the band would ever receive.
They stayed at Southern Cross Hotel in Melbourne, but it’s a wonder they got any sleep.
Herald Sun pop music writer at the time Scott Palmer was among many who braved the Exhibition Street crush, amidst the biggest throng the city had ever seen. The mop-tops looked suitably chuffed.
MELBOURNE, THEN AND NOW: MERGING AMAZING STREET SCENES
PHOTO ESSAY: EVERYDAY LIFE IN MELBOURNE IN THE 1930s
PHOTO ESSAY: 1940s, A CITY IN WAR TIME
PHOTO ESSAY: OLYMPICS, TV & MELBOURNE IN THE 1950s
“The entire Exhibition Street was absolutely jam-packed,” Palmer recalls.
“I couldn’t get up onto the balcony. There was just a tirade of screaming.
“It was like a bunfight. I don’t think the pop writers of that era knew it would be that big.
“The Festival Hall show was just noise, you didn’t hear much. They were wonderful boys. We did a press conference. They were sensational. They were so young and anxious to talk to everybody.
“After The Beatles I switched to sport, it was all a bit much.”
Australia’s frenzied reaction to The Beatles’ tour was such that John Lennon made jokes about hundreds of fans waiting in a bin.
Ringo Starr was getting his tonsils out (perhaps knowing how important his future career as the narrator on Thomas the Tank Engine would be) and fill-in drummer Jimmie Nicol played the Sydney and Adelaide shows before flying out of Essendon Airport.
While groupies like the eccentric Jenny Kee, only 17 at the time, slept with John Lennon, other fans weren’t quite as kee(n).
“In ‘64 I was 15. The Beatles were everything. My brother drove my girlfriend and I down from Ballarat and we went to the airport to wait for them,” says Joy Burns, Beatles fanatic.
“They got on a flat bed truck and drove past the screaming fans. There was a girl next to us and she said, ‘We’re all going to jump the fence when the truck drives past’.
“I watched her jump over the fence but we stayed put. My brother was on strict orders to drive us straight back. The other girls got up close so they could see their faces.”
“Paul McCartney was my favourite, he was the only handsome one. They were a healthy group. I remember my mum saying their long hair was disgusting, it was for girls not guys.
“There wasn’t anything dodgy about them. The Rolling Stones were the opposite,” says Burns. “I loved The Beatles’ folk song messages and their psychedelic music. The Beatles were one of the only bands I learnt all the words to.”
“My first date with my husband was to see The Beatles’ movie A Hard Day’s Night.”
The only way you could get people out is if they rolled the bloody bodies across the crowd.
Senior Herald Sun journalist Alan Howe was but a wee pup.
“I was only eight years old. They did two shows a day but they weren’t too tired. The shows only went for 27 minutes.
“Halfway through the last song John Lennon stopped playing because a bloke ran on stage and shook his hand. You’d get kicked out now.
“Only six people in the world can claim to be members of The Beatles. Years later I took Pete Best to the roof of Southern Cross Hotel and got a photographer to take a picture of him.
“Jimmie Nicol flew out from Essendon Airport. It’s unthinkable now a huge overseas act would get someone to fill in. They only paid 2000 pounds a night. Kenn Brodziak booked them, he’s no longer with us.”
“Of course, as you know, Molly Meldrum lost consciousness at the Festival Hall show.”
Chris De Krester, senior journalist at the Herald Sun, was just a punter then.
“When they came out on the Southern Cross balcony people went mad. They sheared the steel barriers apart, people were getting cut, the girls were fainting.
“The only way you could get people out is if they rolled the bloody bodies across the crowd.”
“Me and my mates climbed a roof across from the Southern Cross earlier in the day and we thought we had this prime place to watch it but the police caught us and told us to not go climbing on the rooves.
“The copper with his hobnailed boots stood on my toe and told me off,” De Krester says. “It was great stuff.”
Was bizarre shooting suicide pact or murder?
Two men walked into a Melbourne photography studio one afternoon in 1872 to pose with their pistols in a bizarre series of pictures. Hours later a gunshot rang out in nearby Treasury Gardens and their true intentions became clear.
Why Curtis Stone wants to come home
Curtis Stone is the Keilor East boy turned celebrity chef who now lives in a multimillion-dollar house in one of Los Angeles’ coolest suburbs. So how does he show his young kids how to be everyday Aussies?