In July 1963, the Australian concert promoter Kenn Brodziak reached an agreement with the representatives of The Beatles that would see them tour Australia and New Zealand for three weeks the following June. Little did he know that, over the course of the intervening eleven months, the “up-and-coming” British band would become something closer to “a cultural force”.
Between 12 June and 30 June 1964, The Beatles would play 32 concerts in 8 cities: Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Wellington, Auckland, Dunedin, Christchurch, and Brisbane. The spectacle of the hundreds of thousands of people who lined the streets of Adelaide and Melbourne, and of the thousands who greeted them or saw them off at airports (although in Brisbane, university students threw eggs at the band as they left, provoking George Harrison to dismiss them as “schmucks” and Ringo “cowards”) or who gathered around their hotels, along with the footage of delirious teenagers at each stage of the tour, sealed “Beatlemania” as a seismic cultural moment within Australian history.
The sheer popularity of the band and the ecstatic nature of reaction they elicited from fans proved utterly perplexing to the Australian press. As an editorial in the Melbourne Herald put it: “Nobody including the group themselves has yet been able to give an adequate explanation of the mass emotions these four astonished and astonishing young men have stirred in teenagers across the world” (15 June 1964). A letter to the paper printed on the same day registered even greater generational alarm:
“The Beatles arrival in Melbourne recalls similar scenes in Hitler’s Nazi Germany twenty-five years ago and scenes in Russia when there is a rally. If anyone told me that I would be witnessing such mass hysteria by our own beautiful Australian youth to greet these musicians from overseas, I would never have believed them! What does the future hold for us all when youth can be so easily influenced?”
But what can account for the response the band received at the peak of their popularity? While the idea of a rock band was relatively new, the three albums they released by this stage are neither overly original (they contained quite a number of covers, after all) nor their best. And the string of songs that topped the charts in the United States and Australia in late-1963 and early-1964 — including “I Want To Hold Your Hand”, “She Loves You”, “Love Me Do”, “I Saw Her Standing There”, “Can’t Buy Me Love” — are pretty tame, especially considering what was to come. It is only in 1965, with Help! and Rubber Soul, that something like artistic and aesthetic greatness can be discerned — which culminated in Revolver (1966), Sgt Pepper’s … (1967), The White Album (1968) and Abbey Road (1969).
So what happened in the six months before The Beatles’ arrival that might have anticipated, or even cultivated, the popular response? Did their wildly successful appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show on 9 February 1964 (which garnered an audience of 73 million viewers) have anything to do with it — particularly after Bob Dylan’s (deliberately?) disastrous appearance the previous May? Was it the fact that the behaviour of crowds in the UK was already being replicated at scale in the United States? Which is to say: was their popularity vicarious, merely adopted from overseas, something like a cultural tidal wave or “cascade” that happened to reach its peak on Australian shores? Was the prevailing age and gender of the audience for this prototypical “boy band” decisive? Or was there something propitious about the cultural moment in Australia itself, still emerging from the Menzies-dominated 1950s and on the precipice of the political and social upheavals to come? Was this the spark that The Beatles fanned into flame?
Guest: Paul Long is Professor in Creative and Cultural Industries at Monash University. He is the co-editor (along with Holly Tessler) of The Journal of Beatle Studies.
Further reading:
- Christine Feldman-Barrett, A Women’s History of the Beatles (Bloomsbury, 2021).
- Michelle Arrow, “‘Screaming, chanting, struggling teenagers’: The enduring legacy of the Beatles tour of Australia, 60 years on”, The Conversation, 11 June 2024.
- Jill Lepore, “The View from Inside Beatlemania”, The New Yorker, 10 June 2023.
- Keith Moore, “‘Roll Over Beethoven’: The Beatles’ Australian Tour”, in Social Change in the 21st Century Conference Proceedings: Refereed Conference Papers, ed. E.L. Buys, B.E. Hanna, E.J. Woodley and J.A. Summerville (Queensland University of Technology, Centre for Social Change Research).
- Cass R. Sunstein, “Beatlemania: On informational cascades and spectacular success”, The Journal of Beatles Studies (Autumn 2022).
- Mark Duffett, “Reflections on Cass Sunstein’s Beatlemania article: Romantic behaviouralism?”, The Journal of Beatles Studies (Spring/Autumn 2023).
- David Brooks, “What the Beatles Tell Us About Fame”, The New York Times, 10 February 2022.
- Adam Gopnik, “A Close Read of the Beatles in ‘Get Back’”, The New Yorker, 16 December 2021.
Image Details
The Beatles arrive back in London Airport following their tour of Australia and New Zealand, on 2 July 1964. (Photo by Jim Gray / Keystone / Getty Images)