John, Paul, George & Jimmie – The Beatles Downunder (1964) – Nostalgia Central

1964 was shaping up to be an extremely busy year for The Beatles. After touring the United States and Canada, sparking Beatlemania and performing their first live US television set on The Ed Sullivan Show to a record 73 million viewers, they returned to the UK in March to begin principal photography on their debut feature film, A Hard Day’s Night.

In April, they achieved historic chart dominance, occupying all top five spots simultaneously on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart and took a well-earned holiday.

When they returned from their break, their cases were packed for a world tour – but nobody told Ringo‘s tonsils!

The drummer collapsed with severe tonsillitis on 3 June, just one day before The Beatles were scheduled to fly out

Manager Brian Epstein faced a legal and financial nightmare if he cancelled the sold-out tour (tour insurance had not yet been invented). While John Lennon and Paul McCartney reluctantly agreed that they needed a temporary fill-in, George Harrison initially refused to tour without Ringo, famously telling Epstein and producer George Martin: “If Ringo’s not going, then neither am I. You can find two replacements.”

It took hours of intense persuasion from Epstein and Martin to convince George that cancelling would break contracts and let down hundreds of thousands of fans.

Jimmie Nicol, Temporary Beatle

The show had to go on – and it did, thanks to Jimmie Nicol, a 24-year-old session drummer known to George Martin. He was an experienced musician who had worked with The Spotnicks and Georgie Fame’s Blue Flames – and was used to picking up new material with confidence – but now he had to learn to be a Beatle overnight.

Jimmie was relaxing at his west London home after lunch on 3 June when the phone rang. It was George Martin, asking if he could come down to Abbey Road Studios immediately.

Nicol rushed to the studio, where he ran through a six-song audition with John, Paul, and George. The chemistry worked. He was hired on the spot, given a Beatles haircut, and told to pack his bags. He was on stage with them in Copenhagen the following night.

The only difference the 4,500 fans in Copenhagen’s KB Hallen on 4 June would have noticed was the absence of Ringo’s showcase I Wanna Be Your Man from the live set.

For the next 13 days, the session musician lived at the absolute centre of global Beatlemania. He found adjusting to overnight stardom far from easy.

“Before I was a Beatle, not one girl would even look me over. The day after, when I was suited up and riding in the back of a limo with John Lennon and Paul McCartney, they were dying to get a touch of me.”

Press accounts estimated Nicol’s pay at £2,500 per show, with a £2,500 signing-on bonus.

After every concert, John and Paul would go up to Nicol and ask him how he was getting on. All Jimmie would ever say was, “It’s getting better”.

It ended up becoming something of a joke phrase, and whenever the boys thought of Jimmie, they’d think “it’s getting better”.

Paul and John later used the phrase as the title and subject matter of one of the songs on the Sgt Pepper’s album.

Holland

Holland was the next port of call, and the group’s two days there saw them work and play equally hard. Their lunchtime arrival at Schiphol Airport on 5 June was swiftly followed by a six-song TV miming session, during which the stage was invaded.

Jimmie Nicol was left drumming along to the Can’t Buy Me Love playback as the ‘Fab Three’ beat a hasty retreat.

That evening, the band – with a police escort – headed for Amsterdam’s red light district and, according to some reports, spent the night in a brothel. Photographs are reputed to exist of John on his hands and knees, unable to walk, in the doorway of a house of ill repute.

The following morning, The Beatles were paraded through Amsterdam on a canal trip aboard a glass-topped boat, watched by an estimated 30,000 fans.

More than thirty determined fans leapt into the water and swam toward their craft. John and Paul hauled the sodden young girls aboard and physically shielded them from water police who were wielding rubber truncheons.

2,000 police, recalled from leave, failed to restore any degree of calm, and traffic on canal bridges was paralysed.

That night at the Blokker Cabbage Auction Hall, thirty-six miles out of Amsterdam (by police motorcycle escort), 150 steel-helmeted riot police and 250 civil guards battled two shifts of 3,000 rioting concert fans –  six of whom climbed the hall walls and swung onto the stage from steel girders.

The screaming pitch reportedly shattered windows in a nearby building.

London to Australia – via Zurich, Beirut, Karachi, Calcutta, Bangkok and Hong Kong

The group returned to London the next morning for a long-haul flight that would take them out of their comfort zone and introduce a large slice of the as-yet unsuspecting world to Beatlemania.

Jetting to Hong Kong was nowhere near as easy as it is today, with refuelling stops at Zurich, Beirut, Karachi, Calcutta and Bangkok. The fan frenzy they met at every airport – in Beirut, the Lebanese police cleared the runway of fans using hoses and fire-fighting foam – was but a prelude to their arrival in Sydney.

George revealed that the Hong Kong flight had been made with the assistance of the amphetamine tablets they’d first encountered in Hamburg, washed down with whisky and cola. “We’d been sitting on the floor drinking and taking Preludins for about 30 hours, so it seemed like a 10-minute flight.”

Unfortunately, the side effect was extreme jet lag; a promised personal appearance at a beauty pageant held at their hotel was cancelled, though John left his room to make a brief appearance.

Two concerts in Hong Kong were poorly attended because, apparently, the local promoter had priced each ticket at the equivalent of a week’s pay.

On 11 June, The Beatles officially entered Australia when their plane landed at Darwin Airport at 2:35 AM to refuel. Despite the hour, over 400 fans rushed the tarmac to glimpse the band.

After taking off from Darwin, the plane continued directly to its original destination, Sydney, landing just before 7:45 am amid a torrential downpour.

The band were trundled around the tarmac on an open-top truck, wearing batwing capes and unable to keep a firm hold on their umbrellas and wave at the same time. One wave too many by George saw his umbrella ripped out of his hand by a vicious burst of wind.

At the Sheraton Hotel, they were forced to make a brief balcony appearance in saturated and borrowed clothes; all except George, who wrapped a towel around his waist (which the press automatically described in print as his underpants) and did a snappy jig.

George later explained: “We were watching it all on television, and they were saying ‘I wonder why they’re not coming out to wave’, but there was no way we could tell them that we didn’t have any trousers, they were out with our capes being pressed. Paul and John managed to get a pair of trousers each from somewhere, but all I had was a towel. We went out to wave because they might have thought we were acting a bit funny if we didn’t.”

The Beatles stayed in Sydney only briefly before catching a chartered domestic flight to Adelaide the very next morning (12 June), where they performed their first official Australian concerts.

Adelaide

A crowd of nearly a quarter of a million people (in a state with a population of just over one million) lined the nine-mile route from Adelaide Airport into the city. At times, the open-topped limousine carrying The Beatles – managing a top speed of 9 mph – was completely engulfed by screaming fans.

The band enjoyed their first civic reception in Australia at Adelaide Town Hall, where a crowd of 30,000 people visibly shocked the boys as they addressed the throng from the Town Hall balcony.

After spending 25 minutes chatting to Mayor Irwin and his wife, they were presented with (more) toy koala bears, before being smuggled out through a back entrance of the Land Titles Office into a waiting car and off to the South Australian Hotel on North Terrace. It was twenty minutes before the crowds in the street woke up to the deception.

The Beatles performed at four sold-out shows over two nights at Centennial Hall (two shows per night). All 12,000 tickets (worth £22,000) sold out in less than five hours.

Melbourne police were so concerned by reports of the size of the Adelaide crowd that they had the army and the air force on standby to help with crowd control when The Beatles arrived in Melbourne.

Melbourne and The Return of Ringo

Meanwhile, Ringo and Brian Epstein were approaching Australia from the other direction via the US, Hawaii and Fiji.

The hapless drummer had forgotten his passport, which caught up with him in San Francisco.

He was finally reunited with his bandmates on 14 June at the Southern Cross Hotel in Melbourne, with another massive crowd of 20,000 fans gathered outside the hotel.

For the first and last time, *five* Beatles made an appearance on the first-floor balcony of the hotel to try and calm the throng outside.

The resonant roar of the crowd obliterated any words the group proferred, so John held one finger to his upper lip and threw a series of Nazi salutes, shouting “Sieg Heil.” He was joined in the salutes by Paul.

Below, the surge increased instead of abating.

On 15 June, while The Beatles were still asleep in their hotel, Jimmie packed his bags and was escorted to the city’s airport by Brian Epstein and tour manager Lloyd Ravenscroft, given £500 and a jokey ‘retirement present’ of an engraved gold watch for his two weeks’ work as a stand-in for Ringo and flew back to Britain and obscurity.

“The boys were very kind,” he said, “but I felt like an intruder. They accepted me, but you can’t just get into a group like that – they have their own atmosphere, their own sense of humour. It’s a little clique, and outsiders just can’t break in.”

The first official Melbourne engagement was an EMI Records reception at the hotel, organised by the company’s Victorian Manager Cliff Baxter, at which John Lennon erupted in a livid fit of anger because EMI Australia had designed a different cover for the With The Beatles album.

John exploded, saying he was going to contact the EMI Chairman in London and have EMI’s Australian Promotions Manager, Kevin Ritchie, and the whole of the Australian company fired. As soon as the moment passed, however, John forgot all about it.

The Beatles – now with Ringo reinstated – performed two shows that night at Melbourne’s Festival Hall, repeating them the following night (16th), with the second show filmed by the Nine Network and later broadcast as the television special The Beatles Sing For Shell.

They performed a final two Melbourne shows at Festival Hall on 17 June.

Sydney – Jelly Babies and Torrential Rain

The band arrived in Sydney on 18 June – Paul’s 22nd birthday (the first he had spent completely away from home) – and were dragged straight into a press conference at their hotel (the Chevron in Kings Cross), where a radio newsman declared to Ringo, “I’m from Perth, Western Australia”, and got back, “Are you bragging or complaining?”

“I have flown 2000 miles to record this interview,” he persisted.  “Gee, your arms must be tired,” commiserated Ringo, who then recounted his own woes, pointing out that his hands had become blistered as a result of his stint in hospital, away from his kit.

The Beatles performed two shows that evening at Sydney Stadium, followed by two more nights of two sets apiece.

A press story about The Beatles’ liking Jelly Babies caused onstage trouble with Paul likening the hail of sweets to “bullets from all directions.”

The Beatles left Australia on 21 June to tour New Zealand for over a week before returning for their final Australian stop.

Kia-Ora New Zealand

The group were met at Wellington Airport with a traditional Maori haka and a hongi (pressing noses) ceremony in front of 7,000 screaming fans. The band members were also presented with tikis.

The Beatles performed two shows at Wellington Town Hall on 22 June, but the primitive sound facilities were appalling. The Beatles were angry, and after the 6.00 pm show, John Lennon stormed backstage shouting, ‘What the fucking hell is going on?’

Meanwhile, hotel security at the St. George Hotel in Wellington intercepted a massive, heavy wicker laundry basket that had been delivered to the band’s private floor.

When security opened the lid, they found a teenage boy curled up inside. He had successfully paid a local courier service to ship him directly to The Beatles’ executive suite as “baggage” in a desperate bid to meet his idols.

He was swiftly removed from the hotel before the band could see him.

Wellington Hotel Siege

Wellington police severely underestimated the crowd size at the band’s hotel, and, following the band’s two concerts at Wellington Town Hall the following evening (23 June), thousands of fans breached the outdoor barricades, flooded the hotel lobby, stormed the stairs, and completely overwhelmed the hotel staff.

The Beatles were trapped in the corridor outside their room by a crush of screaming fans and had to physically fight their way through the mob to reach the safety of their rooms. There were no security guards or police officers on their floor.

Brian Epstein threatened to cancel the remainder of the New Zealand tour unless local police provided proper, military-grade security for the band’s movements.

Auckland

Upon arrival at the Hotel DeBrett in Auckland the following day (24 June), a crowd of 10,000 fans completely blocked the streets, forcing the band to sprint from their limousine into the hotel.

The Beatles performed two shows at Auckland Town Hall that night, with a further two the following evening (25th). During one of these shows, a female fan threw a vintage rotary telephone onto the stage, narrowly missing the band.

Auckland police were less than impressed with the presence of The Beatles in their city, and the inspector in charge grumbled: “We didn’t want ’em here, and I don’t know why you brought ’em.”

This hostile indifference from the police put the band in danger. Only three police officers were assigned to a mob of several thousand fans outside the hotel entrance. The Beatles became trapped inside their car, and members of their entourage had to push the car, inch by inch, towards the hotel garage through a sea of hysterical, fainting fans.

As they tried to get into the hotel, The Beatles were trampled underfoot and mauled by devoted fans.

To top things off, a bomb scare on the band’s plane delayed their departure from Auckland airport.

Dunedin

The band flew to Dunedin on 26 June, where the reception turned incredibly hostile when local “rockers” joined the crowd, sparking a massive street brawl with police right outside the City Hotel.

The Beatles performed two shows at Dunedin Town Hall, but the local police had provided so little security (just over 20 officers to manage a surging crowd of roughly 5,000 screaming fans) that the band had to protect themselves from fans rushing the stage. Fans used police helmets as footballs, kicking them up and down the aisles.

Christchurch

The following day, they travelled to Christchurch, where a 13-year-old girl managed to break through police lines and threw herself onto the bonnet of the band’s moving limousine, clinging to it briefly before bouncing off onto the road. Luckily, the car was travelling very slowly, and the young fan recovered quickly enough to be taken inside the hotel to share a cup of coffee with the group.

Shortly after arrival at their hotel, the group made their way onto the balcony but were forced to flee back inside as rotten eggs showered down upon them. Policemen protecting the front door were powerless to prevent the stream of missiles being hurled from the back of the crowd and parapets of the building opposite, and they themselves became targets.

The band had two shows at the Majestic Theatre in the evening. The final performance of the tour was one of the shortest: The Beatles were on stage for just 26 minutes. They’d had their fill of New Zealand.

The boys played no concerts on 28 June and spent the day resting behind locked doors at their hotel in Christchurch. They departed Christchurch Airport the following day to fly back to Australia for their final tour dates in Brisbane.

Brisbane – “A National Embarrassment”

The Beatles arrived in Brisbane (via Sydney) in the early hours of 29 June with an eager crowd of about 8,000 fans gathered at the airport to welcome them.

To let the fans see the band, the organisers placed John, Paul, George, and Ringo on the back of an open-top, flatbed truck to transport them from the tarmac to the terminal.

As the truck moved past the crowd, and most fans screamed in adoration, a small group of university students pelted the band with eggs and tomatoes.

The missiles narrowly missed John Lennon and Ringo Starr, but at least one tomato struck the truck next to them, splattering their clothes.

Apparently, not everyone Down Under had fallen under the moptop spell.

The Beatles were furious. John Lennon was particularly enraged, shouting profanities back at the troublemakers and refusing to wave to the crowd.

Disgusted by the lack of security and the disrespect, the group cancelled a scheduled press conference at the airport and travelled immediately to their hotel.

The Beatles performed two shows that night to incredibly ecstatic crowds at Brisbane’s Festival Hall.

When Australian reporters asked about the incident during a press conference the next day (30 June), Lennon labelled the culprits as immature children, stating, “I thought Brisbane was going to be nice, but they’re just a lot of kids throwing things. It’s silly. They shouldn’t do it.”

He also openly mocked their coordination and bravery, pointing out that they couldn’t even hit their targets properly despite the band being completely trapped. “They missed us anyway. They have lousy aim. If you’re going to throw something, at least have the guts to stand out in the open where we can see you, instead of hiding in a crowd.”

Lennon’s blunt retaliation worked. The public sided with the band, the Brisbane police heavily tightened security around the hotel, and the local press ran headlines apologising to the group for the “shameful” reception, branding it a national embarrassment.

Another two shows at Festival Hall that night went off without a hitch, and after a day to rest and pack, The Beatles departed Brisbane on 2 July to fly back to London – via Singapore and Frankfurt – officially ending their Australasian tour.