New Zealand would have missed out on The Beatles had it not been for the doggedness of people who knew nothing about them.
Looking at it 60 years on, it’s easy to view The Beatles’ June 1964 tour of Australia and New Zealand as a phenomenon of its time. A kind of pop culture big bang that finally brought the 1960s to the Antipodes. A sign of wilder things to come and the end of showbiz as we knew it. A defining moment in many a Kiwi baby boomer’s life.
But what is less remembered is that it was a miracle that The Beatles came here at all. The rapid rise and rise of the band during the preceding year caught Beatles manager Brian Epstein and the Australasian promoters on the hop.
Both sides started negotiations in October 1963, the month London’s Fleet St newspapers coined the phrase “Beatlemania”. Epstein finally signed – having raised his price from £1500 a week to £2500 a week plus airfares and excess baggage for drums and amps – in January 1964. That was a month before the band appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in the United States – another pop culture big bang – and their first American tour.
Still, three months later, The Beatles played two shows a night in the town halls and theatres of NZ’s four main centres and then flew home in time for the premiere of A Hard Day’s Night. They never returned.
A fascinating forensic history of the precarious negotiations to bring The Beatles to the other side of the world makes up the early chapters of new book When We Was Fab: Inside the Beatles Australasian Tour 1964, a definitive account of the band’s 20 or so days Downunder. It’s written by Australian Greg Armstrong and Gisborne-raised, UK-based rock historian Andy Neill, who has penned books about The Faces, an anthology on The Who and a history of the 1960s British pop show Ready, Steady, Go!
Before its accounts of Beatlemania gripping both countries in June 1964, the book’s early chapters outline how the tour came to be. Via diplomatic letters, emphatic tele-grams and handwritten notes, it shows the to and fro between old-school promoters on both sides of the Tasman, their determined London agent, Cyril Berlin, and Epstein.
It’s clear those local showbiz impresarios – in New Zealand that was Sir Robert Kerridge of Kerridge Odeon – got lucky and got a bargain, despite having no clue about the band or its audience.
“It was a chance thing that fell into their lap,” Neill tells the Listener. “What sort of makes it more interesting is that they had this amazing, fortuitous event. The Beatles are getting bigger and bigger and bigger and it’s slipping away from them.
“And of course, everyone forgets now that the negotiations had to be done by telegram and snail-mail. So, the time is really ticking.”
The other thing that briefly jeopardised the tour was Ringo Starr coming down with tonsillitis a week before the band was due to fly out. He was replaced for the early Australian dates by ring-in Jimmie Nicol before a recovered Starr flew in to play all the New Zealand dates.
Originally, Neill says, he’d hoped to have the book out for the 50th anniversary. After all, he’s been chipping away at it since the early 90s, doing research and collecting photos and interviews on visits home. “I was gathering bits with no definite plan but, obviously, a book was the desired end product. I didn’t have a deal or anything like that … but I knew it would prove worthwhile in the end.”
Neill had become a latter-day Beatles fan as a youngster in the 1970s, having inherited his eldest brother Chris’s record collection. Eventually, finding out that The Beatles had actually been to New Zealand the year before he was born “really blew my mind”. Neill linked up with Melbourne-based fellow Fab Four obsessive Armstrong about the time of the 40th anniversary.
Their book got so close to publication in 2014, there were extracts in the NZ Herald and Neill went on RNZ to talk to Kim Hill about it, saying it would be out by November.
But a late interview with Kerridge’s son (and former SPCA director) Bob Kerridge, who was working in his father’s office at the time of the tour, revealed a surprise. The Kerridge Odeon entertainment empire had never thrown away any paperwork. It was still in the derelict St James Theatre complex (the files are now archived at the Auckland War Memorial Museum).
For The Beatles tour, that included letters, telegrams, and other correspondence between the Kerridge Odeon offices in Queen St, the Australian promoters Aztec Services, Berlin and Epstein.
Many are reprinted in the book resplendent in their elegant letterheads and sober language. The letters occasionally mention other acts KO was promoting – The Vienna Boys Choir, The Scots Guards band, jazz man Kenny Ball and The Black and White Minstrels. But the treasure trove of documents required Neill to spend more time and put off publishing for another decade.
“When we discovered the Kerridge archive, it was a complete game-changer. I thought we can’t afford to rush this, and we can’t afford to ignore this. We’re talking literally thousands of pieces of correspondence, from dry-cleaning bills, to telegrams, to police reports – you name it.”
Having spent, he estimates, the best part of 10 years on research and nine months writing, he wasn’t fazed by the delay.
There are parts of the book that aren’t just about mop-top exuberance. Neill says he tried to find out what was behind the tragic story of a young woman from out of town who checked into the Hotel St George in Wellington hoping to meet The Beatles and attempted suicide after locking herself in the suite of the band’s road manager, Mal Evans. From his research, Neill says the unnamed woman, who had a history of psychiatric problems, eventually did take her own life.
On a happier note, the book also traces the travels of John Lennon’s doting Aunt Mimi, who raised him in Liverpool and who accompanied the band to New Zealand and stayed on with relatives in Masterton for months afterwards, seeing the country and worrying her nephew about whether she was ever coming home.
As for Beatlemania in the colonies, When We Was Fab has plenty of photos in which you can see the band on stage in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch or Dunedin – but you can still hear the screams from just out of shot.
When We Was Fab: Inside the Beatles Australasian Tour 1964 (Woodland Press) is released on June 16. Andy Neill has ticketed book launch events at Unity Books, Wellington, June 21; Hedley’s Books, Masterton, June 22; Big Fan, Auckland. June 25.
To read first-hand accounts of people who were there, go here.
