An Australian man has stumbled upon the purchase of a lifetime for only $11 at a flea market. What he thought was simply a box of eight-millimetre film turned out to be 60-year-old unseen live footage of The Beatles.
Musician Greg Perano was shopping at a market in Sydney when he came across a box of film. After paying $11 for the box, he discovered that one roll was inscribed with the band’s name.
When he played the footage, it contained close-up clips of The Beatles playing live at Sydney Stadium way back in 1964. “I sat down, and I went, ‘the guy’s on stage. He’s filming on stage’,” Perano told A Current Affair, an Australian news show, as the footage was even better than he could have expected. “It’s really good, beautiful black and white, 8mm quality. It just brought back all those memories because it’s not like a big band now playing up to the cameras,” he continued.
Not only was it a thrill for Perano to see the band in action, but it was made extra special as it truly captured The Beatles at their best. “It’s a band who look like they’re in a small club really enjoying playing. You see a band in its formative stage where they were really good live,” he said.
It has since been discovered that the footage was shot by Gil Wahlquist, who was a music journalist for Sydney Morning Herald and sadly died in 2012. Perano has been given the blessing of his family to keep the film, allowing the appreciation of his efforts to live on.
While the footage on the tape is silent, Perano said it’s easy to figure out some of the songs they’re playing. It includes a clip of the band playing their breakout hit, ‘Love Me Do’, with the buyer spotting one giveaway moment. “There was that moment where George and Paul, like everyone who watches it, goes ‘woooooooo’, so you know exactly what the song is,” he said.
The footage is now 60-years-old. The Beatles toured Australia for the first, and only, time in 1964. It was part of their huge world tour which saw Beatlemania break out globally.
Perano’s purchase also has a deeply personal connection to it as he tried desperately to get to the band’s show as a young kid. When he was 11 years old, the band played in his home country of New Zealand on that same tour. Just to try and hear even a snippet of the concert, Perano climbed a hill in Picton, on the north end of the South Island, in the hope that he’d be able to hear the show in Wellington, which was 100km away at the south end of the North Island.
“Of course we couldn’t hear them, but it was just that we knew that they were 100 kilometres away doing our show,” he said. However, in an unlikely turn of events, he now gets to own a special piece of that tour, all thanks to a random flea market purchase.
