Settle down, Swifties – the Beatles are still the biggest thing to hit Australia

It’s been three months since Taylor-mania swept the country, creating (we’re told) a cultural phenomenon comparable to the historic frenzy stirred by the Beatles when they landed here 60 years ago this month.

One breathless media outlet said Taylor Swift’s February shows brought to Australia a hysteria not seen since the Beatles. Even Beatlemania can’t beat Taylor Swift’s fan frenzy, declared another. And once you’ve fully absorbed this take on why Taylor Swift is bigger than the Beatles, be sure to check out how she has united the world.

Credit: Tom Compagnoni

There’s no denying Swift’s popularity, nor the fact her Eras Tour is the most financially lucrative in music history. What I am floating here by no means casts shade on the fact that many thousands of Aussie hearts were filled with joy by Swift’s impressive shows. But looking beyond the headlines and focusing on the Eras Tour’s Australian leg in isolation, it’s worth noting a few sober facts now that we’ve all, ahem, shaken off the excitement. (We’ll get to that Beatles comparison in a minute.)

Swift performed seven concerts in Sydney and Melbourne to a total of about 625,000 fans. Given the aforementioned hype, you could be forgiven for believing this was the biggest concert tour this country had ever seen. There’s only one problem with that – it wasn’t even the biggest tour of 2024, and we’re not yet halfway through it.

Touring Down Under at the same time as her compatriot, Pink played 20 stadium shows in Australia and New Zealand, selling close to a million tickets. The biggest Australasian tour by any female artist in history.

Ed Sheeran pulled off a similar feat in 2018, as did our homegrown heroes AC/DC in 2010. Both Australian tours played to more people than Swift did earlier this year.

The Beatles perform at Sydney Stadium on June 18, 1964.Credit: SMH Picture by J. Lipman

Even your dad’s favourite, Dire Straits, sold a million tickets for their Brothers in Arms Australian tour in 1986 (promoting the fifth biggest-selling album ever in Australia) and topped it off with a free-to-air broadcast of their 20th (yes, 20th) consecutive Sydney show.

To be fair, Swift could well have beaten all of those records had she put on more shows, with more than 4 million Australians reportedly attempting to get tickets when they went on sale last June. The Beatles, touring before stadium rock was invented (by them, in 1965), performed in much lower capacity venues to far fewer people overall. But that didn’t stop fans from taking to the streets, in their hundreds of thousands, to catch a glimpse of the Fab Four.

When the Beatles arrived in Adelaide in 1964, half the city’s population – about 350,000 people – turned out just to watch them wave from their motorcade. The streets from Adelaide Airport to the Town Hall were lined with fans. Many sat on tree branches for a better view. Police formed human chains to control the crowds, and many fans fainted and had to be carried away. It was the biggest fan gathering ever witnessed by the Beatles before or since. Think about it.

Melbourne saw similar scenes, with decoy cars and police escorts on horseback trying to manage the throng of humanity crammed into Exhibition Street outside their hotel. Fifty were hospitalised. A policeman on the scene described it as “the second battle of Flanders”. (I don’t recall hearing of a single traffic cone being toppled in honour of Taylor Swift’s visit.)

Amazingly, the genuine mania that the Beatles brought to Australia occurred before they became the culture-defining phenomenon they went on to be. For the remainder of the ’60s, the Beatles redefined popular music, not to mention songwriting in general, with hits so numerous, so all-pervasive and so imprinted on the collective human consciousness, it seems gratuitous to list any of them here, so I’ll let it be.

Equal to that was their impact on the very business of how music was made and marketed – from pioneering stadium rock to their revolutionary use of multi-track studio recording, plus their groundbreaking work in film that what would eventually become music videos. Their influence extended beyond music into fashion, social commentary and politics. They rode the wave of the cultural zeitgeist and became the most written-about and documented cultural figures in history.

Most importantly, the Beatles created a legacy that informed and inspired musicians for generations. From Led Zeppelin to Nirvana, Public Enemy to the Sex Pistols, Beyoncé to Taylor Swift – the Beatles’ DNA exists in every great pop song that came after them, and that includes a lot of great music yet to come.

In an era where three-minute pop songs vie for attention against endless streams of 30-second vertical videos, Taylor Swift has reignited a fervour for music, particularly albums (those curated collections of tracks that the Beatles famously popularised), among young people in a way unseen for years.

But before comparing this phenomenon to the arrival of Beatlemania in Australia, watch this video to see and hear what happened in this country 60 years ago.

Tom Compagnoni is head of creative video at Nine Metro Publishing.