This Wednesday will mark 50 years of an experience that a generation of Australians will never forget. For them, it really did feel like it happened yesterday. And they’ve been telling their kids that ever since. For two extraordinary weeks in June 1964, never before nor since, has the country ever experienced such hysteria when four young, mop-topped men from Liverpool came down under. Yeah, yeah, yeah!
Before One Direction, before Bon Jovi, before U2, before AC/DC, there were The Beatles! Their music was played on every radio station; their famous mop tops copied by young men everywhere, wall to wall Beatles coverage in all print media. In the early sixties, at the height of the cold war and at the dawn of the civil rights era, music was changing. Whilst the pop and rock and roll trends of the 1950s remained popular, a new style was quickly developing. Heavily influenced by Elvis Presley and American soul music, the beat became more important than ever as well as a whole new way of moving and expression.
After announcing their first world tour and their first and only Australian tour, event organisers and officials could never imagine the frenzy the band would cause. Beatlemania had arrived! By the time they landed in Adelaide on 11 June, Beatlemania had exploded worldwide and the group, all in their early twenties, were on top of the world.
Just three months earlier in February, they made their famous appearance in the US on The Ed Sullivan Show. With worldwide No. 1 hits like I Want to Hold Your Hand, She Loves You and Twist and Shout, they were a band to be reckoned with. Nearly 300,000 screaming fans, almost half the population of the state, many of them as young as ten, without their parents, blocked the Adelaide streets to greet them upon their arrival. This would happen everywhere they went.
For those of us who were not there, THE BEATLES IN AUSTRALIA exhibition at The Arts Center Melbourne is the next best thing. Visitors will be taken on a journey back to the sixties. Still a relatively young and naive country, Australia was isolated from the rest of the world. People would crowd around shop windows for hours and watch black and white television in awe. So it would be no surprise when hundreds of shoppers crammed around the shop windows as Paul, John, Ringo and George sat down for their first Australian press conference. Who could forget that? Especially when one interviewer asked: “What do you expect to find here in Australia?” Lennon: “Australians!”
Jimmy Nicol was the stand in for Ringo who had his tonsils removed days earlier and was recovering in the UK. For just 10 days Jimmy was a Beatle before Ringo returned in time for the Melbourne concerts. They played sold out shows, some of them twice a day at Festival Hall in Melbourne. Everyone from Ted Whitten to Molly Meldrum, whose antics were so hysterical, he was kicked out by security, were there.
The Beatles were in Australia for only two weeks, but by the time they left, they had changed and inspired a generation. That generation that were the first to grow up with television, own a transistor radio, experience and take part in the counter culture of the late 1960s. Their visit also inspired many young musicians whose style was influenced by the Beatles. By the end of the decade, artists like Normie Rowe, John Farnham, The Master’s Apprentices and the Bee Gees had emerged and were dominating the Australian charts. All of them inspired by the Fab Four.
This free exhibition serves as a nostalgic time capsule where original items such as tickets, programs, fan mail, telegrams, concert footage, newsreels and newspaper cut outs are on display. Fans will be pleased to see some of the original merchandise: Beatle curtains, Beatle wallpaper, Beatle stockings, Beatle tea towels and Beatle talcum powder … There is even an original Beatle’s wig still looking good after half a century as it sits in its original package.
Developed by the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney and the Arts Center, Melbourne, THE BEATLES IN AUSTRALIA exhibition is on display at the Arts Centre, Melbourne until Tuesday July 1, 2014. There is free entry into the exhibition.