The Beatles' 1966 tour of Germany, Japan and the Philippines
The English rock group the Beatles toured West Germany, Japan and the Philippines between 24 June and 4 July 1966. The thirteen concerts comprised the first stage of a world tour that ended with the band's final tour of the United States, in August 1966. The shows in West Germany represented a return to the country where the Beatles had developed as a group before achieving fame in 1963. The return flight from the Philippines to England included a stopover in Delhi, India. There, the Beatles indulged in two days of sightseeing and shopping for musical instruments while still under the attention of the press and local fans.
Start date
24 June 1966
4 July 1966
13
The concerts were well attended yet provided the band with little in the way of artistic fulfilment. The programme was in the package-tour format typical of the 1960s, with two shows per day, several support acts on the bill and the Beatles' set lasting around 30 minutes. The band's setlist included their new single, "Paperback Writer", but no songs from their recently completed album, Revolver. Often marked by poor playing, the shows highlighted the division between what the group could achieve when performing live as a four-piece with inadequate amplification and the more complex music they were able to create in the recording studio. Concerts at the Circus-Krone-Bau in Munich and the Nippon Budokan hall in Tokyo were filmed and broadcast on local television networks.
The tour signalled a change in the Beatlemania phenomenon, as harsh measures were used to restrain crowds for the first time and the band became a symbol of societal division between conservative and liberal thinking. The bookings at the Budokan, a venue reserved for martial arts, offended many traditionalists in Japan, resulting in death threats to the Beatles and a heightened police presence throughout their stay. In Manila, the band's nonattendance at a social engagement hosted by Imelda Marcos led to a hostile reaction from citizens loyal to the Marcos regime, government officials and army personnel. The Beatles and their entourage were manhandled while attempting to leave the country and forced to surrender much of the earnings from the group's two shows at the Rizal Memorial Stadium.
On their return to London, the Beatles were outspoken in their condemnation of the Philippines. As a result of the events in Manila, the band lost faith with their longtime manager Brian Epstein and made the decision to end their career as live performers that year. By contrast, the stay in Tokyo established an enduring bond between the Beatles and Japan, where each of the band members visited or performed in the decades following the group's break-up in April 1970.
West Germany[edit]
Munich and Essen[edit]
The concerts in West Germany were the Beatles' first in that country since December 1962, when they played a New Year's Eve show as their final engagement at the Star-Club in Hamburg.[43][44] The principal reason that they had not returned in the past four years was the threat of a paternity claim by a young Hamburg woman.[45][nb 2] The 1966 visit was presented by Karl Buchmann Productions and sponsored by Bravo magazine. At the Beatles' insistence, the venues were restricted to a maximum capacity of 8,000 seats, which meant that Bravo was making a loss on the outlay for the tour.[47] The band arrived in Munich on 23 June, exhausted from their recent work in the studio,[48] and booked into the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, where they gave a short press conference.[17][49] The support acts for the German concerts were Peter and Gordon, Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers[41] and the Rattles.[24] The latter were a German group who had performed on the same circuit in Hamburg as the Beatles in 1962.[50]
The first shows were held at Munich's 3,500-seat Circus-Krone-Bau at 5:15 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. on 24 June.[24] The Beatles wore matching dark green suits with silk lapels, designed by the new Chelsea boutique Hung On You.[51] The 9:00 p.m. show was filmed by the West German ZDF network[49] and first broadcast locally, in edited form,[21] on 5 July.[19] The Beatles held a rare backstage rehearsal in advance of the concert.[49] According to musicologist Walter Everett, the Munich concert film shows the Beatles generally playing poorly amid the noise created by their fans and humorously attempting to remember the lyrics to the final song, "I'm Down".[26] Author Steve Turner writes that the tour was marked by average-quality performances masked by riotous screaming and that for the first time, the hysterical crowds were subjected to violent treatment and beatings by the host nation's police force.[52]
The Beatles travelled between destinations by train, accommodated in luxury coaches that were normally used for visits by international heads of state, including Queen Elizabeth II's the previous year.[49] After arriving in Essen on 25 June,[49] they played two shows at the city's Grugahalle.[53][54] A correspondent from Beatles Monthly magazine described the concerts as "frightening" due to the police's subjugation of the group's fans using tear gas and guard dogs.[55] The band then travelled overnight to Hamburg,[56] where they stayed at the Hotel Schloss, a former palace located well north of the city centre.[57]
Japan[edit]
Ideological concerns and controversy[edit]
The Beatles' flight to Tokyo stopped in Anchorage, Alaska late on 27 June, local time, and was grounded there due to the presence of a typhoon over Japan.[71][nb 3] Epstein arranged for the Beatles to wait out the delay at Anchorage's Westward Hotel, where the band's presence instantly attracted a crowd of local fans, who serenaded them from the street below.[72] The flight finally arrived at Haneda Airport in Tokyo in the early hours of 29 June,[73] according to a report by Dudley Cheke, a chargé d'affaires at the British Embassy.[74][75] Alternatively, an arrival time of around 3:30 a.m. on 30 June is given by Beatles biographers Barry Miles[71] and John Winn[76] and in a 2016 Tokyo Weekender article about the visit.[77][nb 4]
Stopover in India[edit]
Before leaving London, Harrison had arranged to disembark in Delhi with Aspinall on the return trip, and buy a top-quality sitar there.[182][183] During the tour, the other Beatles had each decided to join the pair,[183] although, after their troubles in Manila, all of the band would have preferred to return to London immediately.[184] Their plane landed at night at Delhi's Palam Airport.[185] While the Beatles had assumed that they were unknown in India,[186] they were welcomed by a crowd of 500 fans and journalists[187] and forced to give a brief press conference.[188] The group's two-day stay in Delhi similarly came to resemble the stops throughout the tour in terms of media attention[189] and periods of confinement in their hotel,[188] the Oberoi.[144]
On 6 July, the band managed to evade the fans camped out in front of the hotel and go to Connaught Place. There, they shopped for Indian musical instruments at Lahore Music House[190] and the prestigious instrument-makers Rikhi Ram & Sons.[191] Since their presence had soon attracted a crowd of fans, the Beatles arranged for the Rikhi Ram staff to visit them later at the Oberoi Hotel with a sitar for Harrison, as well as a sarod, tambura and tabla.[190] The entourage were also given a tour of Delhi, during which their Cadillacs were chased by a vehicle carrying the head of the local Associated Press bureau.[192] Once the journalist had received a comment from McCartney about the controversy in Manila, the tour continued on to villages outside the city.[192] The primitiveness and poverty they saw there was a shock to the band.[186][193] Starr described India as the first genuinely "foreign" country he had visited;[194] Harrison found it sobering to realise that their Nikon cameras, which were a gift to the group from their Japanese promoter, "were worth more money than the whole village would earn in a lifetime".[195] Other locations they visited while in Delhi included the historic Red Fort and Qutb Minar.[193]
At the Oberoi, the Beatles discussed the recent events in Manila and privately expressed their dissatisfaction with Epstein's management of their tours.[187] According to Brown, when Aspinall said that Epstein was already booking concerts for 1967, Lennon and Harrison insisted that their current tour would be their last.[175] They relayed this decision to Epstein either at the hotel, where he was bedridden with a high fever,[175] or during the flight to London.[194] The decision was also informed by the band's increasing dissatisfaction with the inadequate sound systems at the venues they played and the inane questions they faced at each press conference.[196]
Legacy[edit]
Over the decades since the Beatles performed their first Asian concerts there in 1966, Japan has continued to occupy a significant place in the band's legacy.[79][75] After meeting his second wife, the Japanese artist Yoko Ono, in November 1966, Lennon enjoyed visiting the country during the 1970s.[75] In December 1991, having never recovered his enthusiasm for performing live after the Beatles' experiences, Harrison carried out his second of only two tours as a solo artist in Japan.[212] McCartney and Starr have regularly toured the country since the late 1980s.[75]
Following the controversy surrounding the Nippon Budokan's first hosting of a rock concert in 1966, the hall has become the main venue for acts touring Japan.[77] Writing in The Japan Times in 2016, Steve McClure said that the Beatles' performances at the hall had "conferred on it a quasi-sacred status in rock mythology".[75] Among the fans who saw the Beatles perform there were future Japanese music-industry executives Aki Tanaka and Kei Ishizaka. Tanaka describes the concerts as "a social phenomenon" and credits them with inspiring "the birth of a real Japanese rock music scene", in which local artists wrote their own songs rather than merely covering Western rock songs.[75]
Steve Turner comments on the significance of the first leg of the Beatles' 1966 world tour in terms of the development of the Beatlemania phenomenon, in that the band's influence now incited "potential acts of terrorism", just as their music had started to "fuel the fight between conservatives and liberals" in the countries they visited.[213] Turner also views the brief stopover in India as important, since it represented the group's formal introduction to a culture with which they became increasingly associated over the next two years.[194]
For several years, the combined audience of 80,000[146] at the Rizal Memorial Stadium on 4 July 1966 stood as the world record for any act on a single day.[125] The Marcoses were enjoying a honeymoon period in the mid-1960s as the Philippines' American-style First Family, but the president later came to be seen as a dictator[214] and, having amassed a personal wealth of up to $10 billion, fled to the United States after being deposed in 1986.[215] They were indicted for racketeering, although Imelda Marcos was acquitted and returned to the Philippines, where she faced charges of corruption.[216] Given these revelations, McCartney has said that the Beatles were "glad to have done what we did … We must have been the only people who'd ever dared to snub Marcos."[217] As of 2016, none of the former Beatles had ever returned to the Philippines,[140] despite an attempt by Filipino musician Ely Buendia – in response to the promotional campaign for Starr's 2015 album Postcards from Paradise – to lure Starr back to the country.[146]