HERE, THERE AND EVERYWHERE by THE BEATLES. Story by Darren ‘Smokie’ Dawson.

Essendon Airport, 1964

When The Beatles arrived for their only tour of Australia, in 1964, they did so without their drummer Ringo Starr, who was ill with tonsillitis. However, he was able to join his bandmates prior to their Melbourne shows, and when he landed at Essendon Airport he was greeted by a large and enthusiastic crowd.

One youth leapt the security fence and, having jumped onto the side of the vehicle transporting Ringo from the plane, thrust his arm through the open window and shook the hand of the startled Beatle, before being ushered away by the police. On the verge of turning 17, that youth will, only sixteen months later, become a father. And it is into a Beatles-loving home that I was born.

Smokie’s dad, Eddy. Newspaper clipping, 1964.

My Beatles education commenced early, with my initial exposure to their music being via my parents’ chunky reel-to-reel tape player, which took pride of place on a table in the lounge room. On one of the reels was over an hour’s worth of Beatles tracks. I was still only a toddler when my dad taught me how to rewind, fast-forward, and thread the tapes without the machine ‘chewing’ them.

For my ninth birthday, my parents bought me a portable cassette-player, and allowed me to choose a tape to play in it. I was not to know it at the time, but at the moment when my eyes were drawn to its cover, and I select Revolver – arguably The Beatles’ greatest album – a life-time love affair had commenced.

By this time, my parents had bought a taxi business in the town of Eden, on the far south coast of New South Wales. My dad also drove a thrice-weekly mail run between the towns of Pambula and Bombala.

In the summer holidays I accompanied him, assisting with the mail deliveries all the way up the unmade Mt Darragh Road to the foot of the Snowy Mountains. When setting off we would place my brand-new tape-player between us on the front seat and press ‘play’. And with that, the songs of Revolver, on my one and only cassette tape, would fill the taxi and accompany us for the entirety of our journey:  from Taxman, Eleanor Rigby, and Yellow Submarine, to Good Day Sunshine, Got To Get You Into My Life and Here, There and Everywhere …..to mention only half the tracks on Revolver. The variety never ceased to amaze me. By the end of that summer, I had memorized every name on every letterbox along the mail route, and I knew every lyric and musical note on that wonderful album.

There had never been a favourite track in particular, because for me that would have been akin to choosing your favourite child. That all changed in the lead-up to my wedding, when I suggested to my wife-to-be a track which I thought would be perfect for our wedding song. She agreed, remarking that she thought the gentle Here, There and Everywhere was “gorgeous”.

The singer Hugh McDonald, of Redgum fame, had taken up a weekly residency at the Morning Star Hotel, our local pub. We had developed a friendship with him, and were fortunate to book him to play at our wedding. He asked us what wedding song we had chosen, and when we told him, Hugh informed us that it was a personal favourite of his, and assured us that he would do the track justice. Which, of course, he did.

In late 2022, a new ‘super-deluxe’ edition of Revolver was released, and its success confirmed that the public’s appetite for new Beatles product remains as enduring as it was when I was born, at the height of Beatlemania. It had been some time since I listened to my favourite record, but these songs to which I first listened almost fifty years ago are instantly as comfortable and familiar as an old pair of shoes.

But it is when Here There And Everywhere commenced, and Paul McCartney’s tender vocals filled the room, that I found myself being transported both back through time and across a range of emotions: from the joy of my wedding day, to the sadness that the late Hugh McDonald was taken far too early, and back even further to the excitement of a young boy delivering mail with his dad on a dusty bush road.

Stereo Story #748

Photo by Eric Algra.

Smokie Dawson narrated this story, backed by the Stereo Stories band, at the 2023 Williamstown Literary Festival. The story stemmed from a piece Smokie  wrote for Almanac Music, in which he listed his top 50 Beatles songs.

Photo by Eric Algra