The Beatles' 1966 tour of Germany, Japan and the Philippines

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 24th of June 1966, the Beatles opened a tour of West Germany, Japan and the Philippines with two shows at Munich's Circus-Krone-Bau, at 5:15pm and 9:00pm. It was the first of thirteen concerts the band would play across three countries in a matter of days. By the time they boarded a plane home, the group had faced death threats, a hostile mob and a manager whose judgment they no longer trusted. In West Germany they returned to the country that had shaped them before fame ever found them. In Japan a martial-arts hall became a flashpoint for a whole society's argument with itself. In the Philippines a missed social engagement turned into a night of violence at the airport. Somewhere between those three stops, four men who had spent years chasing screaming crowds decided they had had enough of hearing them. What happened on the way there, and on the way home through Delhi, would settle a question the band had been circling since their album sessions that spring: whether performing live was still worth doing at all.

• 2. A Reluctant Return

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  In December 1965, following the Beatles' UK tour, the band rejected a planned film project. It was an adaptation of Richard Condon's novel A Talent for Loving, and Brian Epstein, their manager, had already purchased the film rights. The rejection gave the group an unprecedented three months free of professional engagements. Epstein had originally intended 1966 to repeat the pattern of the previous two years. That meant a film and soundtrack, a summer tour, and a second album released before Christmas.

  The group resumed work in early April, when they began recording Revolver, an album reflecting a more experimental approach. It also deepened the divide between the music the Beatles made live and what they created in the studio. The band briefly interrupted the sessions on the 1st of May to perform at the NME Poll-Winners Concert.

  During the early months of 1966, Epstein arranged a series of concerts due to begin in late June, in West Germany, Japan and the Philippines. These dates formed the first leg of a world tour. It would resume on the 11th of August, when the group began their third tour of the United States. Discussing a possible itinerary in New York on the 3rd of March, Epstein said the Beatles were also likely to play in Britain. He made no mention of the Philippines, though concerts in what was then the Soviet Union were under consideration too.

  The band completed work on Revolver on the 22nd of June and flew to Munich the next day. According to author Jonathan Gould, the Beatles would gladly have stayed in Britain rather than perform again in halls full of screaming fans. Their dedication to finishing the album, combined with a lack of touring experience since December 1965, left them under-rehearsed. Author Philip Norman adds that knowing their music would be inaudible over the fans' hysteria gave the group another reason not to bother rehearsing. None of it had prepared them for a set stripped down to eleven songs and thirty minutes.

• 3. Eleven Songs, Thirty Minutes

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  The Beatles' set that summer ran to eleven songs and lasted just over thirty minutes, and none of it was drawn from the newly finished Revolver. Author and critic Richie Unterberger writes that some commentators read the omission as laziness, though it matched the band's policy against playing unreleased material live. Their new single, Paperback Writer, replaced We Can Work It Out, alongside two Rubber Soul tracks, Nowhere Man and If I Needed Someone. The band could not reproduce the multi-track intricacy of the studio recordings on stage, whether on the new songs or the old.

  Otherwise the set stayed close to the 1965 UK tour. Rock and Roll Music became the new opening number, and Ringo Starr's featured song changed from Act Naturally to I Wanna Be Your Man. For the first time, the Beatles played Yesterday with full electric backing, rather than as McCartney's solo acoustic turn. Author Jon Savage called it a strange set, writing that rockers were interspersed with slow or mid-paced numbers, preventing any excitement from building.

  Alongside Epstein, the touring party included press officer Tony Barrow, road managers Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans, and Epstein's assistant Peter Brown. Photographer Robert Whitaker, who worked regularly with the group, documented their time in Germany and Japan. Vic Lewis, a colleague of Epstein and Brown's at the management company NEMS, joined the tour in Japan, having helped arrange the Far East concerts. The band's chauffeur, Alf Bicknell, travelled with them in Tokyo and Manila.

  On stage, Lennon and Harrison played Epiphone Casino guitars, McCartney played his Hofner violin bass, and Starr played his Ludwig drum kit. Lennon had adopted the Epiphone earlier that year, at the NME Poll-Winners Concert, and kept using it for the rest of the band's career. New 100-watt Vox amplifiers powered the tour, though they still could not match the fans' noise. Harrison played a Rickenbacker 360/12 on If I Needed Someone, and a photograph by Whitaker shows his Gibson SG and McCartney's Rickenbacker 4001 also went to Japan. None of that equipment would matter once the tour reached the country that had made them a group in the first place.

• 4. Return To West Germany

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  The Beatles had not played West Germany since New Year's Eve 1962, when they closed out their engagement at Hamburg's Star-Club. The main reason for the four-year gap was the threat of a paternity claim from a young Hamburg woman. Bravo magazine sponsored the 1966 visit, presented by Karl Buchmann Productions. The Beatles insisted on capping venues at 8,000 seats, a limit that left Bravo losing money on the tour.

  Arriving in Munich on the 23rd of June, an exhausted band checked into the Hotel Bayerischer Hof and gave a short press conference. Peter and Gordon, Cliff Bennett and the Rebel Rousers, and a German group called the Rattles supported the shows. The Rattles had worked the same Hamburg circuit as the Beatles back in 1962. At Munich's 3,500-seat Circus-Krone-Bau on the 24th of June, the band wore matching dark green suits with silk lapels, designed by the Chelsea boutique Hung On You. The West German network ZDF videotaped the 9:00pm show and broadcast an edited version locally on the 5th of July. Musicologist Walter Everett notes that the Munich film shows the group playing poorly amid the fans' noise, even fumbling the lyrics to their closing song, I'm Down. Author Steve Turner writes that average performances were masked by riotous screaming, and that for the first time the host country's police used violence against the hysterical crowds.

  The group travelled between cities by train, in luxury coaches usually reserved for state visits, including Queen Elizabeth II's the previous year. In Essen on the 25th of June, the band played two shows at the Grugahalle. A correspondent for Beatles Monthly called the concerts frightening, describing police subduing fans with tear gas and guard dogs. The band then travelled overnight to Hamburg, checking into the Hotel Schloss, a former palace well north of the city centre.

  Hamburg felt like a homecoming. On the 26th of June the group played two shows at the 5,600-seat Ernst-Merck-Halle and reunited with old friends, including Astrid Kirchherr and Bert Kaempfert, the German arranger who had briefly produced the band early in their career. During one show, Lennon told the crowd, "Don't listen to our music. We're terrible these days." Among the audience was future West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, there with his wife Loki. A planned group outing to St Pauli, the Beatles' old stomping ground, was cancelled over security concerns, though Lennon and McCartney slipped out late at night to see the Reeperbahn anyway.

  Harrison later recalled that Hamburg brought "a lot of ghosts materialised out of the woodwork, people you didn't necessarily want to see again, who had been your best friend one drunken Preludin night back in 1960." McCartney remembered it differently: "It was as if we'd mutated into something different... we were still just the boys. But knew that we'd got famous in the meantime..." The German press conferences had worn thin by then, and only McCartney bothered to humour local reporters. At one Hamburg conference, Lennon's visible impatience led a female reporter to ask why the band had become "so horrid and snobby". On the 27th of June, the group flew from Hamburg to Heathrow, then boarded a Japan Airlines flight bound for Tokyo, over the North Pole.

• 5. Tokyo's Fortress

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  The flight to Tokyo was grounded in Anchorage, Alaska late on the 27th of June, delayed by a typhoon over Japan. Epstein arranged for the band to wait out the delay at Anchorage's Westward Hotel, where local fans gathered below and sang up to them from the street. According to Dudley Cheke, a charge d'affaires at the British Embassy, the flight reached Tokyo's Haneda Airport in the early hours of the 29th of June. Biographers Barry Miles and John Winn, along with a 2016 Tokyo Weekender article, instead give an arrival around 3:30am on the 30th of June.

  Japanese authorities had viewed the band unfavourably until their appointment as MBEs in 1965, yet the Beatles now served as unofficial cultural ambassadors. The visit became a matter of national debate, arriving as Japan sought to re-establish its cultural identity after its defeat in the Second World War. To meet Epstein's fee of $100,000 per performance, organisers booked the 10,000-seat Nippon Budokan hall, with tickets priced at twice the rate charged for any earlier visiting pop act. The Budokan doubled as a shrine to Japan's war dead and a venue reserved for martial arts. The booking outraged the country's hardline nationalists, who vowed to stop the shows. Combined with a written death threat the band had already received in Hamburg, the controversy brought extreme security. The operation mobilised around 35,000 police and fire brigade personnel, a scale comparable to Japan's measures for the 1964 Olympics.

  Stepping off the plane, the four musicians wore happi coats bearing the Japan Airlines logo, arranged by an airline eager to be linked with the band's commercial success. Facing a wall of glaring lights, they assumed they were waving to a crowd of fans, as usual. In fact only twenty members of the public were present; the rest of the scene was security. The Japan Times later called the resulting photograph an iconic image of the Beatles' visit. The band was confined to the Presidential Suite of the Tokyo Hilton for the length of their stay, leaving only for one press conference and their concerts. At that conference, on the afternoon of the 30th of June, Lennon spoke out publicly against the Vietnam War on the band's behalf, the first time the group had done so on tour. A planned visit to Kamakura that same day was cancelled once police admitted they could not guarantee the band's safety. Starr recalled that every departure was handled with military-style precision by their Japanese hosts, so the band took to delaying their own exits just to fluster the security staff.

  The Beatles played the first of five Budokan concerts on the 30th of June, backed by six local acts including the Drifters and the Blue Comets. Sponsored by the newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, the shows on the 30th of June and the 1st of July were filmed in colour by Nippon TV and later broadcast as The Beatles Recital: From Nippon Budokan, Tokyo. Ultranationalist students demonstrated outside the venue, and press officer Tony Barrow said police feared the protesters might have placed snipers in the crowd. The stage stood on an 8-foot-high podium, with ground-floor seating cleared entirely; anyone caught standing or cheering risked arrest. Barrow and Aspinall said the band's especially poor performance on the 30th humbled them into playing better for the remaining dates.

  Confined to their suite between shows, the Beatles collaborated on a psychedelic painting, using materials supplied by a visiting hotel tradesman, and listened to a tape of their unreleased album. Whitaker, who photographed the sessions, later said he never saw them calmer or more content, adding that after a concert it was always, "Let's go back to the picture!" Having struggled to settle on a title since Munich, the band finally chose Revolver and cabled the decision to EMI on the 2nd of July. Reporting to London's Foreign Office, Dudley Cheke wrote that the cyclone over Japan had given way to a "Beatles typhoon" that "swept the youth of Japan off their feet". Japanese academic Toshinobu Fukuya later said the band's presence had shown young people that it was "possible to follow one's own path and still be socially and financially successful in life." None of that goodwill would survive the flight to Manila.

• 6. The Manila Reckoning

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  The Beatles' concerts in Manila had been anticipated on a scale that author Jonathan Gould likens to the band's 1964 tour of Australia. Newly elected President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda especially welcomed the visit. The Araneta family had refused to price tickets at 50 pesos, so the shows moved to the Rizal Memorial Stadium instead of the Araneta Coliseum. A Cathay Pacific flight carried the band into Manila Airport at 4:30pm on the 3rd of July, amid security comparable to President Eisenhower's 1960 visit. Rather than the diplomatic treatment they usually received, the four Beatles were hustled into a vehicle by armed men in civilian clothes and separated from Epstein, Aspinall and Evans for the first time on any tour. After a press conference at Philippine Navy headquarters, the band was taken to a yacht owned by industrialist Manolo Elizalde, whose 24-year-old son wanted to show them off to friends. Epstein caught up with them before it sailed, and the group did not reach the Manila Hotel until 4:00am.

  On the 4th of July, apart from McCartney, who went sightseeing, the Beatles were woken by security staff intent on taking them to a party hosted by Imelda Marcos at Malacanang Palace. Epstein had already declined the invitation while the band was still in Tokyo, in keeping with his standing policy on official functions. When guards told Lennon that President Marcos was among the dignitaries awaiting them, he retorted, "Who's he?" The band learned of the offence taken only by watching television footage of the empty seats reserved for them, and of the First Lady saying they had let her down.

  That afternoon the Beatles played to a crowd of 30,000 at Rizal, followed by a second show attended by 50,000; the combined 80,000 was the largest audience to see the band in one day. Filipino writer Nick Joaquin thought the performance halfhearted, writing that even the fans' screams "seemed mechanical, not rapture but exhibitionism." Between shows, Epstein recorded a televised explanation of the snub, but the broadcast sound was distorted and his words went unheard. Barrow recalled the backlash beginning that same night, when the band's convoy was trapped behind a gate and surrounded by "organised troublemakers." Vic Lewis was taken by police for a three-hour interrogation over "snubbing" the country, and death threats reached both the embassy and the band's hotel.

  By the morning of the 5th of July, all hotel security and police escort had vanished, and newspapers ran front-page condemnations of the band. A tax bill was presented against earnings still held by promoter Ramon Ramos, despite a contract clause requiring the promoter to cover it. At the airport, Peter Brown said the scene resembled an "armed military camp"; hundreds of citizens jostled the tour party while airport manager Willy Jurado had the escalators switched off. In the departure lounge, uniformed men and figures from the earlier abduction beat and kicked the group; Jurado later bragged about knocking Epstein down and punching Lennon and Starr, saying, "That's what happens when you insult the First Lady." Evans, who had shielded the band, took a particularly severe beating alongside Bicknell. McCartney said that once safely in their seats, "We were all kissing the seats." Marcos later called the violence an overreaction to a "misunderstanding" and lifted the tax, while Joaquin compared the Philippines' misreading of the band to "Batman being transplanted to Thebes in Ancient Greece."

• 7. Delhi And The Decision To Quit

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  Before leaving London, Harrison had arranged to stop in Delhi with Aspinall to buy a sitar, and after Manila the rest of the band joined him, though all would have preferred flying straight home. Landing at night at Palam Airport, the Beatles were surprised to find 500 fans and journalists waiting, despite assuming they were unknown in India. On the 6th of July, the group shopped for instruments at Lahore Music House and Rikhi Ram and Sons in Connaught Place, later receiving a sitar, sarod, tambura and tabla at their hotel, the Oberoi. Touring villages outside Delhi, Harrison found it sobering that their Nikon cameras, a gift from their Japanese promoter, "were worth more money than the whole village would earn in a lifetime." Starr called India the first genuinely "foreign" country he had visited.

  At the Oberoi, the band privately vented their dissatisfaction with Epstein's handling of their tours. According to Peter Brown, when Aspinall mentioned that Epstein was already booking 1967 concerts, Lennon and Harrison insisted this tour would be their last. They relayed the decision to Epstein, bedridden with a fever, either at the hotel or on the flight to London, citing poor venue sound and inane press questions as further reasons.

  Arriving at Heathrow on the morning of the 8th of July, the band gave a bitter ITV interview about Manila. Lennon said they would "never go to any nuthouses again," while Harrison said the only reason to return would be to drop a bomb on the country. Starr called the ordeal "the most frightening thing that's ever happened to me." Two days later, Freddie and the Dreamers cancelled their own Philippines concerts in solidarity. Epstein, diagnosed with glandular fever, retreated to North Wales to recover, before being called to the United States on the 5th of August to manage the fallout from Lennon's remark that the Beatles had grown more popular than Christ. According to Barrow, the decision to stop touring was made without McCartney's agreement, the first time the band had committed to a course without unanimity. McCartney came around only after the group's concert in St. Louis on the 21st of August.

• 8. Two Legacies

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  Japan has held a lasting place in the Beatles' story since 1966. Lennon met his second wife, the artist Yoko Ono, in November of that year and enjoyed returning to Japan through the 1970s. In December 1991, Harrison, who never recovered his enthusiasm for live performance, carried out one of only two solo tours of his career there. McCartney and Starr have toured the country regularly since the late 1980s. The Nippon Budokan, once at the centre of controversy, has since become Japan's main venue for touring acts; writer Steve McClure said in 2016 that the Beatles' shows had given it "a quasi-sacred status in rock mythology." Future music executives Aki Tanaka and Kei Ishizaka were among those in the crowd, and Tanaka credits the concerts with inspiring "the birth of a real Japanese rock music scene" of artists writing their own material rather than covering Western songs. Steve Turner argues the brief Delhi stopover mattered too, marking the group's formal introduction to a culture they grew closer to over the following two years.

  The Philippines took a different path. The 80,000 who saw the Beatles at Rizal stood as a world record for a single day's audience for several years. The Marcoses, then enjoying a honeymoon period as an American-style First Family, later fell from grace; Ferdinand Marcos amassed a personal fortune reported as high as $10 billion before fleeing to the United States after being deposed in 1986. Both he and Imelda faced racketeering charges, though she was acquitted and returned to the Philippines to face separate corruption cases. Looking back, McCartney said the band was "glad to have done what we did... We must have been the only people who'd ever dared to snub Marcos." Filipino affection for the band nonetheless endured; songwriter Jose Mari Chan, whose career began in the 1960s, said in 2019 that Beatles music had shaped the artists of the Philippines' Golden Age of OPM between 1973 and 1990. Even so, as of 2016 no former Beatle had returned to the country, despite musician Ely Buendia's attempt to lure Starr back using the promotional campaign for Starr's 2015 album Postcards from Paradise.