As the four Beatles bundled into a limousine bound for London on a dark Sunday evening at the height of Beatlemania in 1965, no one could have realised the significance of what had just gone before that day.
In two loud and raucous 30-minute sets the band had just finished their last UK tour performances ever, they would perform just a handful more times on home soil, including on the rooftop at Apple, but for British fans, the touring stopped there, that Sunday night in Cardiff.
For an event so significant, the Welsh capital has made little of the occasion. It sits as barely a footnote in the history of music in Wales, despite the enduring popularity of the Beatles, and it’s high time that Cardiff embraced its role in the Beatles legend like San Francisco has done across the pond.
Candlestick Park is famed as the Fab Four’s last concert performance in the US. In countless documentaries, the screams of fans are faded out over images of feinting girls as we are told that the Beatles had grown tired of touring and longed to go in a different musical direction.
But, that decision was already being debated no doubt as the Beatles, between shows in Cardiff’s Capitol Theatre, munched down on sausages and chips and watched a Western on TV to recharge and get the energy to go again for that final set.
And it will come as little surprise that concertgoers on the twelfth of the month have said that they remember little in terms of the actual music being as this was, the height of the mania, but they do remember the occasion and that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see Liverpool’s finest.
Jon Holliday, a journalist for the South Wales Echo at the time, got to cover the concert for the paper and agreed that for the fans, even if not the Beatles themselves, it was the event that mattered more than the music,
“Those girls were there to enjoy themselves, each other and the scream. And it’s an excitement! You talk about it for weeks when you got the ticket, you enjoy it, and you talk about it when you go home. It’s a great event but it’s not a musical event.
“And that is very disarming for a performer. Particularly for two of them, John and Paul who were really interested in music and what they had to say!”
And it was that inability to reach the audience as they would like that eventually made up their mind, the Beatles would simply stop touring and not tell anyone (Until they finally cottoned on). No fanfare, no fuss, just a move from a touring group to a studio group with a focus on music not money – after all, they had plenty of both, and their first love would always win out.
Video: While the Beatles were tired of touring, they did not of each other and seemed in good spirits in Cardiff
Going back to those Sunday evening shows, the two sets were vintage Fab Four and over those two half hours, 2500 fans packed Cardiff’s Capitol Theatre and Cinema, just a 10th of those who queued or applied for tickets. The lucky ones that made it, could they have heard the music over the din of screams, would have been in for a musical treat.
The Beatles opened with ‘I Feel Fine’ and ‘She’s A Woman’, with Paul’s attempts to talk in between songs barely audible, despite his best efforts.
After that, they rocked through versions of George’s ‘If I Needed Someone’, ‘Act Naturally’, ‘Nowhere Man’, ‘Baby’s In Black’, ‘Help!’, ‘We Can Work It Out’, ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Day Tripper’ before ending with the all too telling ‘I’m Down’, perhaps a nod to them growing increasingly weary of touring and having to shout their way through numbers, just to be heard.
But, despite the disappointment of what that night signified and the Beatles bringing the curtain down for those fans who wanted but never got to see them live, Cardiff as a city has still never really laid claim to own its place in Beatles’ history, the last stop on the last UK tour of the greatest band there has ever been, and it feels like a missed opportunity.
The ‘Cap’ as it was known, no longer stands, in its place the Capitol Shopping Centre, but with redevelopment underway just outside its doors to reopen lost waterways and create a Canal Quarter, it seems like it is high time that Cardiff owned its little slice of Beatlemania.
Be it via a blue plaque or a dedication it should be shouted from the rooftops that the Beatles were here, they rocked the Capitol. John, Paul, George and Ringo. Surely that is something to celebrate.
(Written by a proud Welshman)
Acknowledgements –
Jon Holliday quotes – Courtesy of The Guardian
Beatles Cardiff 1965 setlist – Courtesy of The Beatles Bible
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