The object of his regard was the creative lighting that Australian singer Johnny Chester had used while performing the Peggy Lee song Fever. “I just wanted to make it memorable,” Chester recalls. “The house lights were turned off and I had ultra-violet lighting to pick out the white gloves of the bass player and drummer with a red spotlight shining on my face.”

Chester was one of the local acts who supported the Beatles on their Australian tour in June, 1964. It’s 50 years ago but he has never forgotten that backstage remark from one of pop music’s greats.

This week marks the half century since the Beatles made their only tour to Australasia. For three weeks, the Beatles turned Australia and New Zealand upside-down as they performed 32 concerts in eight cities. Crowds lined city streets to see them. Young women risked their lives to meet them. Their appeal crossed the generations. And they prompted an unprecedented marketing frenzy.

All the while, a group of young Australian support performers - including Chester - had the experience of a lifetime: a ringside seat at one of the great events in 20^th century Australian popular culture.

So, what was the experience of the tour like for them? Did it help their respective careers? And what influence did the tour have on the directions that Australian popular music took in the years after?

Hundreds of fans huddled in the rain as the Beatles’ flight touched down at Sydney’s Mascot airport just before 7:45am on Thursday June 11, 1964. Australian television, then just eight years old, broadcast the event live. Hundreds of thousands of viewers watched as the Beatles were ferried to the terminal on the back of a truck, wrestling with umbrellas being turned inside out by the wind and rain. Inside, they faced the first of many press conferences, replying to often inane questions with good-natured humour.

Australian entrepreneur Kenn Brodziak had booked the group 12 months earlier, just before the eruption of Beatlemania, for an unbelievable £2500 ($5000) per week. The support acts for the tour were booked by venues manager Dick Lean. Melbourne singer Johnny Chester had already supported several international acts and compered the television program Teen Time. Johnny Devlin, a major star in New Zealand and Australian since the late 1950s, was selected because of his trans-Tasman appeal. And Melbourne-based instrumental group The Phantoms, styled on Britain’s The Shadows, were chosen as backing band for Chester and Devlin.

At first, Chester was disappointed that he couldn’t use his regular band, the Chessmen, but eventually signed a contract for £125 ($250) a week. “It was such a thrill to be asked that I would have probably paid for the opportunity,” he laughs. Devlin signed but was less impressed with the money, at the time earning between £200 ($400) and £300 ($600) per week for his regular gigs.

For Noel Tresider, keyboard player with The Phantoms, the experience of being thrust into the madness of Beatlemania was even more striking than for the other Australian support acts.

“I was brought in especially for the tour,” he recalls. “I was 23 years old and studying chemistry at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. My musical career was just part-time and the £50 a week contract was much more than the three guineas a week I was earning as an accompanist on radio 3DB in Melbourne.”

After a day’s rest in Sydney, the Beatles headed for the opening concerts in Adelaide in a chartered Fokker Friendship aircraft. As throughout the tour, the support acts travelled with the Beatles. Ringo Starr, recovering from tonsillitis, was yet to arrive in Australia and his place was filled in Adelaide by British drummer Jimmy Nicol.

Tresider remembers the crowds, estimated at more than 250,000 people, that lined the route from Adelaide airport to the city. The Beatles traveled in a convertible, the rest of the party in sedans. “The fans were all screaming as we went past. They had no idea who was in the cars.”

Audiences paid up to 37/- ($3.70) a seat for the concerts. There were two sessions a night, one at 6pm and the second at 8:30pm.

By today’s standards it was an unusual format. The first half would begin with British compere Alan Field performing several Frank Sinatra songs. He would then introduce Devlin, dressed in a black leather suit, who sang four numbers including the hit C’mon Everybody. Chester would follow with four numbers ranging from Elvis Presley’s (You’re So Square) Baby, I Don’t Care to Little Richard’s Miss Ann. The 45-minute first half would conclude with the British instrumental group Sounds Incorporated, who were part of Beatles manager Brian Epstein’s stable.

After the interval the Beatles would perform the second half of the show, a 30-minute set of just 11 songs from their then first two albums, as well as Can’t Buy Me Love from their soon-to-be released A Hard Day’s Night.

The Australian support acts, after finishing their performances each night, would always remain to watch the proceedings. And '‘watch'’ was the operative word. “You couldn’t hear the music,” Devlin recalls. “It was a mad screaming frenzy. Chester agrees: “None of us were used to anything on this scale. Although the adulation wasn’t directed at us, it was hard not to get caught up in all the excitement.”

In the 1950s, singers such as Johnny Ray and Frank Sinatra had attracted screaming audiences. However, this was the first time that a group, outside a Royal Tour, had enjoyed such hysteria and blanket media coverage.

Bob Rogers, then a disc jockey for Sydney radio station 2SM, was with the group throughout the tour. "To be on tour with the Beatles meant living every minute upside-down and inside-out," he recalls. "It was mentally and physically exhausting. And everything the Beatles said or did was of momentous importance, even if they'd said or done it many times before. That was part of Beatlemania."

Off-stage, the Beatles were unassuming. “Between shows, we would eat together and talk in the dressing rooms,” Chester says. “I remember having a long talk with George Harrison backstage at Festival Hall in Melbourne. We shared a similar interest in cars – with one difference. He had just bought an E-type Jag while I was still driving my FE Holden.”

Tresider remembers swapping jokes with Lennon and chatting with McCartney as he played his guitar backstage. He also remembers the crush to attend the after-show parties on tour. “These were mostly people who were well-connected or in society. And there were lots of girls who were very keen to party with anybody from the tour.”

Devlin enjoyed a friendly relationship with John Lennon, one heightened by helping to solve major sound problems at the concerts in Wellington when Lennon threatened to cancel the remainder of the tour.

The final concert was held in Brisbane’s Festival Hall on Tuesday, June 30. Afterwards, the entire tour party gathered together for a group photograph. The Beatles said goodbye and left for their hotel. The following day they flew out of Australia.

The current Powerhouse Museum exhibition ‘'The Beatles in Australia’', on show in Melbourne, suggests that the Beatles’ tour was “a catalyst for immense social, political and cultural change that took place [in Australia] throughout the remainder of the decade.”

But for the Australian support acts on that tour, the association with the Beatles was more varied. The performances by Devlin had impressed Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein, who suggested he might do well in Britain and invited him to stay in touch with the group’s press manager Derek Taylor.

“I did go to England in 1965 but, by then, Taylor had broken up with the Beatles so it all went a bit haywire,” Devlin recalls. “But I managed to get some work over there as well as a recording contract with Columbia Records.” He returned to Australia in 1967.

For Chester’s career, the raised profile from being associated with the Beatles presented a different opportunity. “Several months after the tour, ABC television offered me the opportunity to host a national television show with my group, The Chessmen. That was Teen Scene, which was broadcast in 1964 and ’65. Going to work in England was an option I never considered. By that stage, I’d made my mind up that I wanted to get into country music. I don’t think that I could really have made any more of the Beatles tour than I did.”

Meanwhile, for Tresider, it was back to chemistry studies as well as his part-time musical career with radio 3DB and rock and roll band The Premiers. He went on to have a successful career in chemical engineering. “A year after the tour, my association with the Beatles was forgotten. Now, when I’m introduced, it’s mentioned all the time.”

The Phantoms, the group with which Tresider played with on the tour, eventually split up with bass player Pete Watson going on to form the band MPD Ltd. And that points to one important effect the Beatles had on the direction of Australian music at the time.

“The Beatles tour changed Australian pop music completely,” Tresider observes. “Previously, the popular style had been been a lead singer with his backing band or instrumental bands in the style of The Shadows. Now, the fashion was for bands, like MPD, where everyone sang.”

But the Beatles’ influence on Australian bands was even more significant because of the large population of young, British migrants in Australia at the time, argues Melbourne-based academic, writer and broadcaster Lawrie Zion. “Many of these British-born immigrants, especially in Adelaide, identified closely with the Beatles,” he says, adding that most of the successful Australian groups that emerged in the wake of the Beatles’ tour – including the Twilights and the Easybeats – had at least one British-born member.

There were also more tangible influences in hairstyles and fashion. Chester recalls that, after the Beatles’ tour, the accepted brushed-back (‘Rocker’) hairstyle for men was now challenged by the brushed-forward (‘Jazzer’) style favoured by the Beatles.

And Tresider remembers how the tour made unfashionable the gaudy band uniforms of the earlier 1960s: “For the Melbourne concerts, the Phantoms wore bright blue lamé suits with patent leather, pointed-toe boots. When the Beatles saw us in this attire they fell about laughing. Those suits were never worn again.”

The Beatles in Australia at the Arts Centre, Melbourne until July 1.