The Beatles were shadowed by local DJ Bob Francis from 5DN, who interviewed them in a range of locations including the Town Hall balcony. Francis also booked the suite next to theirs at the Southern Australia Hotel, from where he gave listeners hourly updates. (source: Beatles Bible).
Bob Francis remembers the Beatles…
You know, in 1964 I was working as a disc jockey, I had a bit more hair in those days, and we had some fabulous news — The Beatles were coming to Australia. The bad news is they weren’t coming to Adelaide and I had to get a little help from my friends. And we worked out that through the power of radio, we could change the course of history. The excitement of The Beatles was just amazing. They had five number one hits in the Top 40 chart. It had never been known before. And so when we had the information that The Beatles weren’t coming to South Australia, that really got me mad. And I thought, is it worthwhile asking on air why don’t we get some signatures together. Get some signatures together? We got 80,000 signatures in about three weeks, which was just marvellous. The telegram came back within a couple of days saying, “Beatles now coming to Adelaide.” And that was just fabulous news. I’d never seen it happen before. People actually camped from the Friday night after work and the Monday morning the tickets were going to go on sale.
We set up a studio on the terrace to be able to have music playing out of the trees in speakers. Ah, people were bopping all over the place. It was just such a — a fantastic atmosphere. And the lovely part was everybody behaved themselves. There was no booze, it was just a different era, a different time. Fabulous time. Well, the stage was set. 11 June 1964, they said, “Bob, would you like to go to Sydney?” And I said, “Yes, sir.” Off to Sydney, on a Fokker Friendship, to meet The Beatles. (Laughs) Just the greatest thing in my world had happened on that day.
