“When we arrived in Sydney it was pissing down with rain. We got off the plane and they put The Beatles on the back of a flat-back truck so the crowd could see them. They were carrying umbrellas and wearing the capes made in Hong Kong. The driver was doing one mile an hour, and John kept leaning over and saying, ‘Faster, faster!’ but he wouldn’t go any faster. I was saying, ‘Go faster - it’s pouring down,’ and he said, 'These kids have been waiting here for twenty-four hours to see these guys.’
“Nothing was going to make this big Australian trucker go any faster. By the time they got to the hotel everybody was blue because the dye in the capes had run and soaked right through; they all looked like old Celtic warriors covered in blue dye.”
[Neil Aspinall, Anthology]
Soggy Beatles arrive in Sydney, Australia on the 11th June 1964.
