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.