MUSIC When We Was Fab: Inside the Beatles Australasian Tour 1964 Andy Neill and Greg Armstrong, Woodslane Press, $69.99 Sixty years ago this week, an English pop group flew out of Australia, spent, never to return. Thirteen months later they’d stop performing altogether.
Five more years and they’d split in high dudgeon. Today two members are dead. And yet here we are, still blinking into the past and asking: “What just happened?” It’s the mania, not the Beatles, that fuels this proclaimed “last word on the subject”.
Sure, the musicians are pictured, often multiple times, on nearly every one of its 300 glossy, LP-sized pages. Their pithy press conference banter and polite newsprint soundbites are faithfully transcribed. But they’re not here.
Like their famously inaudible concerts, they’re obliterated by something beyond their doing and beyond all reason. The clue to clearly obsessive chroniclers Andy Neill and Greg Armstrong’s intentions as curators is in the title. When We Was Fab was borrowed from George Harrison’s sentimental single of ’87, but here the “we” refers to the people of the southern British colonies emerging from the post-war cold.
And blimey cobber, we weren’t half funny. To some of us, this pop group heralded the end of humanity: “a reversion to the corruptions, miseries and monstrosities of pagan civilisation before the Christian faith showed men and women how to be truly human and free”, one commentator wailed. To others, it.
