John Lennon with Kiwi relatives (from left) Sue, Helen and Mark Parker, of Levin, during the Beatles 1964 New Zealand tour. Photo / Alexander Turnbull Library
Today marks 60 years since The Beatles landed in Wellington for their first and only New Zealand tour, which included a catch-up between John Lennon and his Levin-based cousins. Ethan Griffiths rediscovers the memories.
Sue Snaddon’s most vivid memory of The Beatles’ 1964 tour is the crowd miraculously parting as she and her siblings were whisked past thousands of screaming fans on Wellington’s Willis St.
“We were quite a way back, and [Beatles publicist] Derek Taylor got these security guards to part the crowd, and suddenly we were at the front door of the St George Hotel.”
It bore a resemblance to the biblical parting of the Red Sea. The main character of that book was memorably touted as less popular than the people Snaddon was about to meet.
“We’re more popular than Jesus now,” her cousin John Lennon famously quipped about his band The Beatles in 1966. Looking out on Willis St, you could almost believe it.
Safely inside, Snaddon and her siblings, Mark and Helen Parker, were whisked into a lift and taken into a lounge.
Their mother, Annie Parker, was a cousin of Mimi Smith, John Lennon’s aunt who raised him. They had written letters to each other for years, and Lennon brought her on the tour.
“We were asked if we wanted to do our hair and all that business, but mine was all teased to a mess.”
Within minutes Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr had joined them. Rumour has it Paul McCartney was busy entertaining a woman.
“We stayed with them for about an hour. John was asking us about things, what we liked at school and about our farm. He was really interested about life in New Zealand.”
Sue’s brother, Mark Parker, was a few years younger and not exactly overcome by Beatlemania. He doesn’t remember much, except sitting on the floor and later being joined by Ringo.
“He was a very natural fella, little Ringo. He was always the one falling around in the photos and laughing along.”
Looking back on that moment exactly 60 years later, both Mark and Sue have fond memories of their British cousin, the founder of what is considered the most influential band of all time.
“People still refer to it. When they come into our house they look at the pictures in the hallway and say ‘that man looks familiar’,” Snaddon tells me from her Raumati home.
But her brother Mark wasn’t as keen, only beginning to read about the band in recent months. “At the time I was more interested in rugby and cricket than music.”
“If an All Black was visiting, I’d much rather have met him.”
The band’s journey began in 1956, when Snaddon’s cousin formed The Quarrymen.
McCartney joined a year later, and Harrison a year after that. The band wasn’t complete until Starr joined in 1962, shortly before the Fab Four rose to nationwide fame in the UK under their new name.
By October 1963, The Beatles had their first New Zealand number-one with She Loves You. Within seven months they had topped the Kiwi charts another five times.
Sue, Mark and the late Helen weren’t immune from the invasion of this new sound from Liverpool. Sue knew her cousin was a member of this big new band, as her aunt had mentioned in letters to the Levin family.
“But I was always going to be a fan anyway. I had posters all over my bedroom wall.”
Aunt Mimi, as John knew her, stayed for more than just the tour. She lived with the Parkers on their Levin farm for months after Lennon left.
“We’d get these calls at night and it would be John, asking to speak to Mimi,” Sue recalls.
“I’d hurry over and pass her the phone”.
The tour beginning in June 1964 was the furthest the band had ever been. They played a single show in Hong Kong, before eight shows in Australia, and then the final leg in New Zealand.
Landing in Wellington, the group were met by a crowd estimated at 7000, including one fan who badly slashed her leg attempting to climb through wire fencing. They were greeted with a kapa haka performance and each gifted a plastic tiki. Lennon’s is now at Te Papa.
The band waved to fans from the back of a Holden ute before being whisked to the St George Hotel; these days a somewhat less exclusive boarding house. The crowds quickly followed.
The band played four shows in Wellington, two over two nights. Each lasted only 30 minutes, and the end of each show saw a procession of fans make the short walk from the Wellington Town Hall to the hotel.
At one of those concerts was the Parker family, in balcony seats next to the stage.
“We were with Mimi, and she said that John couldn’t really see any faces but he knew where we were. He signalled to us a few times.”
“His eyesight was no good. He crashed one of his cars at my cousin’s place in Scotland.”
Mark, true to form, was more interested in the antics of the crowd than the music.
“I was just watching the audience, I wasn’t all that interested in the music. Everyone was going berserk.”
Also in the crowd that night was 15-year-old Ray Ahipene-Mercer, who five years later would reach number two on the New Zealand charts with a cover of Wait for Me Mary-Anne with his band The Dedikation.
The song never got to number one. Ironically, the top spot was held by The Beatles and their song Something.
“After the concert, the place was a wreck. There were chairs everywhere, shoes and handbags on the floor. And I’ll never forget the screaming.”
Beatles fan Chris Watson went to the second concert that night, after winning tickets in a competition run by his local disc jockey in Timaru.
“I don’t remember the screaming so much, but I certainly remember the excitement.”
The cultural impact of the tour was on a scale that had never been seen in New Zealand. Sparked by the arrival of air travel, the widespread uptake of televisions and the popularity of radio, younger New Zealanders were seeing and hearing more than their parents and grandparents ever had.
Ahipene-Mercer’s band would later sit just below the Fab Four on the Kiwi charts, but he says he owed much of his musical success to them.
“It was massive. The Beatles blew the door open.
“Alongside my parents’ passion for music, it was that concert at the Wellington Town Hall in 1964 that started a lot of it for me, and almost every other band that followed.”
It also coincided with a panic from older New Zealanders, shaped by the depression and global conflicts, that their children would be corrupted by an invasion of moral delinquency. Countless articles and books recount stories of young fans sneaking out to see the band, knowing their parents would disapprove.
The fears weren’t only about morals. As Watson remembers: “There was some professor at the concert recording the noise, convinced everyone would be deaf in five years”.
The fear was irrational. The band would go on to be almost universally accepted as the most influential of all time, and one of the highest-selling in history. Watson’s ears remain intact.
But before their unmatched stardom, they were just the biggest stars at that particular time, visiting a country that didn’t often have the big names landing on its shores.
“Fads came and went,” Watson says. He was hardly to know the mop-headed, working-class, 20-somethings would become the most iconic musicians of all time.
Watson was also one of the lucky few who got to meet the band. He remembers being ushered backstage to find the band sipping Coka-Cola and eating apples.
“I remember asking Ringo a silly question, how many drumsticks he had. He said one, and they all turned to each other and laughed.”
After Wellington, the band would go on to Auckland; equally as riotous. The crowds were again immense, and Lennon later complained a chunk of his hair was ripped out by a fan. Mayor Dove-Myer Robinson hosted a civic reception for the band – controversial with some of his councillors.
Then came Christchurch, with a slightly more unwelcome reception with tomatoes and rotten eggs thrown at the band.
Dunedin followed, where the band was pulled and pushed by fans outside their hotel. Taylor later wrote in his book it was the “maddest crowd I have ever actually ventured into on foot”.
Looking back on what was the first and only time she met her famous cousin, Snaddon says what struck her most was Lennon’s generosity.
Of all those thousands, she was the country’s luckiest superfan, walking away with memories, autographs, and priceless family photographs, now on the wall and printed on coasters for the coffee table.
“He gave us his time, and I think he was very happy to see his family at the bottom of the world.”
In the days following, Aunt Mimi came home with a gift. Unable to leave the hotel himself, Lennon gave his aunt some cash to buy Snaddon a bangle. She polishes it as we talk, “probably for the first time in 60 years”.
The engraving reads: “Sue, from John Lennon.”
“And look, it still fits!”
Ethan Griffiths is a Beatlemaniac, former Herald journalist, and now the executive producer of Wellington Mornings on Newstalk ZB.
Ebony Lamb performs Successful Feelings. Made with funding from NZ On Air. Video / Locals Only