The Beatles Live – Festival Hall, Melbourne, 1964 – Stereo

History

This was The Beatles’ last of three consecutive nights of shows in the city’s Festival Hall, Each night they gave two concerts, which were enjoyed by a total of 45,000 people.

Cameras from the Australian Channel 9 recorded the sixth and final show of the Melbourne leg of the world tour. It was screened on 1 July 1964 as an hour-long special, The Beatles Sing For Shell, named after the oil company which sponsored the broadcast.

Nine of The Beatles’ Melbourne performances were included in the show: ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, ‘You Can’t Do That’, ‘All My Loving’, ‘She Loves You’, ‘Till There Was You’, ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, ‘Twist And Shout’, and ‘Long Tall Sally’. During the final song a male audience member rushed onto the stage to shake John Lennon’s hand.

The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein had initially agreed to allow Channel 9 to show just 12 minutes of the performance. However, after watching the recording an hour after the show he had a change of heart and increased the limit to 20 minutes.

In the end 22 minutes of The Beatles were included, the rest of the hour being footage of Australian and international performers. The only song from the set not broadcast was ‘This Boy’. Full bootleg recordings exist of both concerts from this day.

The Video

I found a really decent copy of it done by Kane McCarthy. I re-worked it slightly, but the bulk of the work was done by Kane.  Included in their video was an attempt at remixing the audio, which I thought was okay, considering the sources used, which were from a video dub, bumped a few too many generations for my liking. So, I wiped the audio and found some better sources (two of them, one which contained “This Boy” and “I Saw Her Standing There”… the other had the rest of the tracks). Somewhere, unless lost or deteriorated beyond repair… is the complete footage Australian Channel 9 shot. I’m speculationg, of course, that it is probably in a vault owned by Apple Records… because I cannot see them NOT buying it up for a possible Direct-To-Disc thing down the line. Again… speculation.

The Audio

The temptation was there to use Lord Reith’s stereo mix and just make some minor adjustments… but this is just one of those (very) rare instances where I thought I could do slightly better than LR (GASP!). So I started from scratch with a really clean mono mix sourced from Historic Live Recordings from the “OxTango” (Volume 2) collection; with the exception of “I Saw Her Standing There” and “This Boy” which had to be taken from “IndyMuse” (IND-65). The tools of choice, in this case, were iZotope v.10 for AI denoising (very effective, although “I Saw Her Standing There” and “This Boy” were slightly more difficult, since the source was a few generations down from the rest. This time I used DEMUCS v.3 entirely for the AI track stem seperation…and then simply remixed it for Stereo (Surround 5.1).  Finally, everything you hear was digitally re-synced back to video. The stereo mix is available in FLAC and MP3 below:

The Set List

FLAC/MP3 Download