Unseen for 60 years: Lost Beatles tape unearthed at secondhand market

Greg Perano was such a huge Beatles fan that in June 1964 he climbed a hill in his home town of Picton, on New Zealand’s South Island, to hear them play. They were performing in Wellington, 100 kilometres away. Ah, the optimism of youth.

Half a century on, his luck changed. On a regular Saturday morning visit to a Surry Hills market, the one-time member of the band Hunters and Collectors, now a Sydney filmmaker, was drawn to a box of old 8mm films.

“Beatles,” read the label on one. Another was marked, “Sounds Incorporated. Johnny Devlin. Johnny Chester.” Those were the acts that opened for the Fab Four at Sydney Stadium, Rushcutters Bay, on that one and only tour of Australia and New Zealand, in June 1964.

“Twelve bucks,” the vendor said.

“Could it be?” Perano wondered.

Yes, it was. The spool contained live performance footage from Sydney Stadium that has remained unseen, as far as he can determine, for 60 years.

“This guy was really good at editing in camera, so the seven minutes we have takes us through the whole concert,” he says. “It has the Beatles walking onstage, then excerpts from a whole lot of songs, and then it’s them walking off at the end.

“There’s moments where he’s standing on stage filming Ringo, and he’s right in front of Paul and George who look straight at him … so he had amazing access. He was obviously well-connected.

“It makes them look a bit like a punk rock band. The other footage you see out there [on YouTube] is very much like newsreel stuff, but here you see John Lennon looking at Paul, you see them working together up close. It’s fantastic.”

It’s kind of surreal, actually, to see the Beatles stroll onstage, plug in their own instruments, shake their mops and have what appears to be an authentically good time, in those few golden months when Beatlemania was fresh and exciting. Even George appears to enjoy himself as he stares down the camera at close range.

Standard 8 film being a silent medium, the lucky finder has no music copyright worries to contend with. But the contents of the other reels gave him pause. These were family films, beautifully shot and edited. They had to be returned. The name on the box was an unusual one which he had little trouble tracking down.

The late Gil Wahlquist, he discovered, had been a Sun-Herald journalist from 1958 until 1974. He wrote a music column under the title Downbeat, and later his own name. Filmmaking, alongside music, was one of his many passions.

“It was wonderful,” recalls his daughter Asa Wahlquist, who also spent years as a Fairfax journalist in the 1990s. “In the era when it was so hard to get hold of overseas records … my Dad would get the new Beatles records ahead of the public release date. I would play them to my friends over the telephone. It was terribly exciting.”

Then there were the free concert tickets. She remembers seeing the young Rolling Stones, Roy Orbison, Gene Pitney and Bob Dylan. She would have been 12 when the Beatles played their six concerts at Sydney Stadium, two per day, in a total of 32 antipodean shows bouncing back and forth across the Tasman.

“It was a boxing stadium, so the stage was in the middle of the building,” she recalls of the venue, on New South Head Road, closed in 1970 to make way for the Eastern Suburbs railway line. “The audience was on all sides. And the stage used to slowly rotate.”

Compared to the modern international concert experience, “it was incredibly primitive”, she says. Moreover, “the reality of the Beatles concert is that I don’t recall hearing a note of music because all the girls screamed. They screamed and screamed.”

Asa Wahlquist has no idea how the footage fell into the possession of a Surry Hills market vendor. She only asks that her father is duly credited for his work.

Another reel, as well as the support band footage, also includes glimpses inside the Herald office of the editorial team preparing Beatles headlines: “BEATLES HERE. Special Edition”.

But it’s the previously unseen concert material that Perano hopes will catch the eye of a collector. Reluctant as he is to part with it, he’s currently financing the final stages of his own debut feature film, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.

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“We did at one stage get in contact with Paul McCartney, but I’d been warned by Bono through [Australian music video and filmmaker] Richard Lowenstein that Paul is notoriously tight,” Perano says with a laugh. “It’s like he’s still the poor kid growing up in Liverpool …

“I mean, he offered a reasonable amount of money, but we were advised we can do better. He said, ‘Oh, you know, there’s a lot of footage around … ’ But the point is that in Australia, I don’t think there is a lot of footage around. And this has a kind of handmade quality which is quite unusual.”

It’s hard to imagine in today’s wall-to-wall forests of jostling smartphones, but “no one took cameras along to film concerts back then”, he says. “They tended to just go along and enjoy the show.”