The Daily Telegraph catches up with Kenn Brodziak, who says he took a lucky roll of the dice when booking the Beatles for their manic Australian/New Zealand tour back in spring 1964.
It was on a trip to London in mid-1963 that he first came across The Beatles, quite by chance after being given a list of five bands by an agent who wanted him to book them for an Australian tour. Brodziak didn’t want five but said he’d take one — and if that worked out well he’d book the others.
“The agent said, ‘which one would you like?’,” Brodziak said. “And I said ‘I’ll take The Beatles’. That was all there was to the story. I didn’t know anything about the group except that their name sounded familiar, I think because of their playing in Germany.”
On the strength of that, a verbal agreement was struck with Beatles manager Brian Epstein for a flat fee of 1500 pounds a week. It seemed like a reasonable deal all around, but the events that unfolded in the following months turned it into one of the shrewdest — and most lucrative — deals in Australian rock history.
By the end of the same year, The Beatles had notched up three UK No. 1 singles and their debut album, Please Please Me had been sitting atop the chart for 30 weeks.
...Brodziak recalled in an interview years later: “One of the first things that George (Harrison) said when the band arrived in Sydney was, ‘You got us at the old price, didn’t you?’ I said ‘Yes’, but he didn’t seem to mind.”
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