Playing to Win
Published by Nero,
an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd
Level 1, 221 Drummond Street
Carlton VIC 3053, Australia
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Copyright © Jeff Apter 2016
Jeff Apter asserts his right to be known as the author of this work.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Apter, Jeff, author.
Playing to win: the definitive biography of John Farnham / Jeff Apter.
9781863958806 (hardback)
9781925435269 (ebook)
Farnham, John, 1949 –
Rock musicians—Australia—Biography.
Singers—Australia—Biography.
781.66092
Jacket design by Peter Long
Text design and typesetting by Tristan Main
Cover photograph: Robert Cianflone / Staff / Getty Images
Endpapers: Melinda Nagy/Dreamstime
CONTENTS
Introduction: ‘If You’re Not Standing, You Have No Soul’
1. Blue-Collar Balladeer
2. When Darryl Met Johnny
3. The Loneliest Number
4. The Prince of Panto
5. Wedding Bell Blues
6. A Fading Star
7. Help Is on Its Way
8. Uncovered and Reborn
9. Playing to Win
10. Reined In
11. Whispering Jack Phantom
12. Back on Top
13. Aussie of the Year
14. Spokesman for the Common Man
15. Burn for You
16. Riding the Rails
17. Facing Fifty
18. How Many Last Times?
19. Warm Undies and Shameless Nostalgia
20. Good Deeds and Close Ties
Epilogue: Jack’s Back
Discography
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
For Diana, who found her own voice
INTRODUCTION
‘If You’re Not Standing, You Have No Soul’
ARIA Music Awards
21 October 2003
Sydney Super Dome
John Farnham has never had much time for cool. It’s fair to say that the closest he’s come was during his mid-1980s Whispering Jack–era resurrection, when he sported hair even bigger than his voice, and dressed like a rock-and-roll stormtrooper, with a shinbone-length Driza-Bone and upturned collar on full and bold display. Yet even that look was more yuppie than trailblazer. Nope, throughout the bulk of his six-decade-long career, Farnham’s kept cool at a reasonable distance. He’s always been family-friendly, G-rated, likeable. Daggy. And hugely successful, at least most of the time.
By 2003, deep into his fifties, he was part of the old guard, the music biz establishment. A survivor, an ageing sex symbol your gran would welcome in for tea and biscuits. But he was an uneasy fit at a time when every charting act seemed to boast awkward, multisyllabic names like Powderfinger, Regurgitator or Silverchair and promote themselves as so damned ethical they’d rather live in a garret and focus on their art than ‘sell out’ by going commercial. These acts treated success on Farnham’s scale – millions of records sold, many arenas filled, Australia’s favourite middle-aged son – with extreme caution. They were in it for the music, man. Or at least that’s what they liked the public to think.
And I have to take some blame for perpetuating that narrow mindset. As a reporter for Rolling Stone, I was swept up in the cult of cool, even though my taste (at least behind closed doors) ran to the more commercial. I bandied about the words ‘credibility’ and ‘art’ as if they were sacred cows – sacred vows, even. I found as much joy in a Savage Garden melody as I did in a You Am I rock-and-roll onslaught, but I wasn’t being paid to celebrate my dagginess. So I wrote about the hip and the edgy. The alternative. The anti-everything. Bores, some of them, truth be told.
Yet I never missed the chance to attend the ARIAs. Sure, the next day I’d moan about how cheesy it all was, how the deserving acts went unrewarded, how the obvious won out, once again – blame the industry, so commercial and glitzy, blah, blah, blah. It was still fun, though. I guess I’d never quite shaken off my uncool suburban roots. I was always quietly thrilled to be surrounded by pop stars and rock heroes, household names – some of whom even knew me. Fancy that!
But I didn’t anticipate what would happen at the 2003 awards. It might have been the night of nights for siren Delta Goodrem, but it would be remembered for something else altogether.
Towards the business end of proceedings, Rove McManus, the night’s MC, a perennial nice guy – TV’s very own Farnham – stepped forward.
‘When it comes to our next performer,’ he gushed, ‘they don’t come bigger than this.’ He listed Farnham’s ARIA stats – 20 wins to date – before gushing some more. ‘The name “legend” gets thrown around quite a bit, but this man is certainly deserving of the title.’ Earlier that night Farnham had been inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame. He was a lifetime achiever and he’d just been handed pop’s equivalent of a retiree’s gold watch.
The stage lights dimmed and the crowd started to make some noise, clearly excited, but not entirely sure what to expect. There stood Farnham, in a sharp black shirt and strides, his fair hair swept back, looking good. Conservative, a tad paunchy, but still pretty damned good. Brett Garsed was to his right, strumming an acoustic guitar. Together they began Farnham’s signature song, ‘You’re the Voice’, but in unplugged mode, low-key.
‘We’re all someone’s daughter,’ Farnham sang, gently urging the crowd to get involved, ‘we’re all someone’s son.’
It was hardly a show-stopping start – but everyone in the room got the sense that the singer had something up his sleeve. Like a volcano starting to rumble, the band kicked in: drums, bass, keys, electric guitar, strings. Farnham sang more strongly, passionately, and the audience started to push towards the front of the stage. It was a rare sight: ARIA crowds, or at least the industry part of the audience, never got too engaged. Uncool. Not a good look. But tonight was different.
Two bagpipers, kilts and all, appeared on stage, blowing their lungs raw as ‘The Voice’ built and built and built. (They were actually jamming the bagpipe riff from AC/DC’s ‘It’s A Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock ’n’ Roll)’.) The crowd was really in the moment now; even all the jaded industry hipsters in the pricey seats were on their feet. Farnham’s long-time manager, friend and true believer, Glenn Wheatley, beamed a smile at his star. Behind Wheatley, Ian ‘Dicko’ Dickson, flavour of the month thanks to his role as head prefect on Australian Idol, danced a crazy jig, lost in the song.
On stage, Farnham powered on. ‘Woah-ohh, oh-ohh, oh-oh-oh-oh,’ he bellowed, and the audience roared right back at him. Then even more pipers, perhaps a dozen in all, invaded the stage, kilts and pipes everywhere you looked, and the audience lifted the roof right off the building. It was pandemonium. Blissful chaos.
In the crowd, the evening’s winners and grinners were up and singing, forgetting all about the pointy statuettes and high-end booze on their table. Right now, everybody – from the men of Powderfinger to the indie trio of Something for Kate, from afro-ed pop star Guy Sebastian to Best Male Artist Alex Lloyd and golden girl Goodrem – was a Farnham fan. They stood, awestruck, gazing at Farnesy. Smiles lit up the faces of the crowd, which had formed a mini moshpit at the foot of the stage. They knew it was a special moment.
Farnham responded with a signature microphone-stand twirl, throwing it high into the air and catching it with the ease of an Aussie slips fieldsman. He cracked a broad smile – Shit, glad I didn’t drop it – and brought the song home.
As the band crashed and clanged to a thunderous close behind him, the crowd went berserk. Everyone in the room – and there were many thousands squeezed into the Super Dome – was screaming, yelling, clapping, stomping. The applause, the sheer noise, was deafening, and continued for what seemed, at least from the floor, to be longer than the song itself. Farnham beamed, saluting the crowd, before waving his arm and mouthing ‘the band’, generously bringing them into the celebrations.
Finally, McManus strode out onto the stage and vigorously pumped Farnham’s hand. ‘If you’re not standing – in this room, or at home,’ McManus shouted above the din of the audience, who didn’t plan to stop cheering anytime soon, ‘you have no soul.’
In just a few minutes, Farnham had finally bridged the credibility gap, turning even the most image-conscious muso into a gushing fan. He may not have been the coolest guy in the room, but John Farnham sure knew how to bring the house down.
1
BLUE-COLLAR BALLADEER
As birthplaces of Oz pop icons go, nowhere seems a less likely origin than Dagenham, East London. This Dickensian slice of blue-collar England might be capable of producing a captain of industry, perhaps even a sporting great, but an Australian pop star? Not bloody likely. Only 15 kilometres separate Dagenham from the City of London, but in 1949 Australia was another planet altogether.
Yet John Peter Farnham – whose surname means ‘the ferny place where the river bends’, probably referring to the town of Farnham in Surrey – came to be one of Dagenham’s more famous sons – and an Aussie icon. His British-born father (also named John) was one of many thousands employed at the Ford motor plant, the most imposing sight in this very working-class town. John Sr was a pipe fitter. At its peak, the Ford plant, spread over 55 acres, consumed four million square feet of factory space, employed 40,000 workers and, during seven decades of operation, churned out some 11 million vehicles. And in postwar England, you lived where the work was to be found.
While this all sounds very grim – even the town’s name smacks of grittiness – Dagenham was something of a boomtown around the time of Farnham’s birth on 1 July 1949. It was the epicentre of England’s industrial south-east. As well as the thriving Ford plant, the local docks were home to many then-thriving companies: Union Cable, Briggs Motor, Solvent Productions, Pritchett and Gold, Kelsey-Hayes Wheels Co. The nearby Barking Power Station employed another 1800 workers. If there was a golden age for Dagenham, this was it.
The area would produce some successful entertainers: Brian Poole, who, with his band The Tremeloes, hit big in 1963 with ‘Do You Love Me’, and Sandie ‘Puppet on a String’ Shaw, who, with Lulu, Dusty Springfield and Cilla Black, led the vanguard of successful female pop singers in the mid to late 1960s. All these acts first made it big in the UK, but John Farnham Jr’s future lay elsewhere.
He may have been a Dagenham local, residing at 69 Waldergrave Road, but John was a Cockney by birth. He was born ‘within the sound of Bow Bells’, the bells of St Mary-le-Bow in the Cheapside district of the city of London. John’s mother, Rose (née Rose Lilian Pemberton), a dark-haired, slender woman, quiet and reserved, who was attractive in an understated way, was forced to give birth to her first child at Mile End Hospital in Stepney: there simply weren’t enough beds in the hospital at Dagenham, which says something about this fertile postwar period. Rose took one look at her five-pound one-ounce son and declared him a ‘gorgeous baby’. John inherited his soft, almost feminine features from his mother – and his hefty ears from his robust, solidly built dad. Over time, John, whose blond hair grew out wildly as a baby, was joined by sisters Jean and Jaquiline (Jackie). His brother, Steven, was born in Australia.
John’s early days were the stuff of a typical working-class Londoner: Dagenham provided his first object of desire (‘a girl with beautiful red hair’, as the adult John would recall), his first rejection (same girl) and his first whiff of danger – he and a mate would sometimes play under a railway bridge, dangerously close to the tracks. John was a lively kid, well mannered but with a worrying smoking habit, which he picked up at the age of five. John cut a hole in one of his books to hide his ciggies and matches from his parents.
During a childhood bout of pneumonia, John was given a record player by his Uncle Alf to stave off boredom. ‘Here, take this,’ said Alf, handing John a 78 record of American Jim Reeves’ treacly ballad ‘He’ll Have to Go’, a huge global hit in 1960. Bedridden and bored, John played the record over and over, eventually wearing it out. Alf also taught John a few basic guitar chords on a cheap plastic four-string, John’s first guitar. As musical tuition went, this was pretty much it for the sandy-haired, jug-eared John Jr.
One day he heard Paul Anka’s hit ballad ‘Diana’ on the radio. ‘That’s it,’ John said to himself while strumming his guitar. ‘That’s a song I can play.’ He learnt the basics of Anka’s ‘Diana’ and other popular songs of the day from Tommy Steele and The Everly Brothers. Over time, they’d all become big influences on John. He’d sing them at family get-togethers, but wouldn’t dream of performing at school. Once, invited by a teacher to sing, he ran out of the school hall and scarpered all the way home. Stage fright hit him hard.
Alf wasn’t the only musically inclined Farnham. John’s grandfather blew a mean penny whistle and was also a dab hand with the squeezebox. At family gatherings he’d sprinkle some sawdust on the floor and improvise a lively soft-shoe shuffle. John looked on, seriously impressed. A song-and-dance man!
There seemed no reason that the Farnham family wouldn’t follow in the footsteps of their fellow hardworking East Londoners: find a job, have some kids, settle into the neighbourhood and stay there until retirement. Get buried nearby. Next. As one dock worker for Samuel Williams & Sons said of the time, ‘Life was a bowl of cherries in them days. I never ever thought I’d leave. Started at 14, retired at 65.’
But one day at the Ford plant, John Sr had a chance conversation with two expat Aussies. ‘You should go to Australia,’ they told him. ‘The sun shines every day.’
The Australian government, in its desire to bump up the postwar population and supply labour for the country’s various booming industries, had introduced what was known on bureaucratic paperwork as the Assisted Passage Migration Scheme. (No wonder it was colloquially shortened to the ‘ten-pound Pom’ scheme.) It was open to all British subjects. The price of entry was, funnily enough, 10 quid, which subsidised the cost of travel by sea. As an added bonus, all kids travelled free.
About one million immigrants took full advantage of this and similar schemes, including the Gibb brothers (better known as the Bee Gees), one Redmond Symons (guitarist of shock-rockers Skyhooks) and the families of businessman Alan Bond, Hollywood hunk Hugh Jackman, pop star Kylie Minogue and prime ministers Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott.
A number of John’s uncles and aunts had already signed on for the scheme, planning to leave grey and drizzly Dagenham for this enticing faraway place. Duly encouraged, John Sr, Rose and the kids booked passage on the ocean liner SS Orsova, bound for Melbourne via the Suez Canal, with pit stops in Bombay, Colombo, Penang, Singapore, Fremantle and Adelaide (the Orsova usually then continued all the way to the US west coast and, eventually, to Madeira).
John Jr was 10 years old when he and his clan and their 1500 fellow passengers boarded the ship at Southampton docks. Everything his family owned was contained in a few tea chests.
Young John got up to some hijinks on board the 220-metre-long ship, including one terrifying stunt that would stay with him for the rest of his life. He’d befriended another kid, and they’d been given rubber tomahawks with which they ran amok and caused mayhem. John had left his in the ship’s play area, which was closed for the day; to retrieve it he needed to walk the ship’s
rail, the sea churning beneath him. At one point he slipped and nearly fell, just managing to hang on to the rail. ‘I thought I was dead,’ John recalled. When he retrieved the tomahawk he threw it into the ocean – too many bad memories.
Upon their arrival in 1959, the Farnhams learnt why Australia was called the Lucky Country. They were fortunate to avoid the migrant camps set up for the so-called New Australians, the many immigrants flooding into the country from eastern and central Europe and the UK. John’s Aunt Mary was already settled in Joan Court in Noble Park, a humble slice of Victorian suburbia, and the newly arrived Farnhams moved in with her. Flinders Street and the bustling metropolis of Melbourne, the site of the Olympic Games just three years earlier, lay only an hour away on the train from Noble Park. Melbourne’s population was growing fast, soon to top the two million mark. Its cultural mix was also rapidly expanding. The Farnhams couldn’t have picked a better city in which to settle.
John Sr got work at the recently opened Ford plant in Campbell-field, and soon progressed to a better job at a local plastic works. John Jr, however, had some trouble acclimatising.
‘The first thing I remember [about Australia],’ he once said in an interview, ‘was wondering about all the sayings.’ John was accustomed to terms like ‘smashing’, but what the hell did ‘grouse’ mean? And why did the local kids tell him to go to ‘nicky woop’? Where was that? What happened when you got there? John was just as stunned when his aunt instructed him not to flush the toilet each time he used it – ‘number twos only, please’ – in order to save paying for the water. Pay for water?
Avoiding the migrant hostel was one stroke of luck, but something even more substantial was about to happen to the Farnhams. John was lying on the couch, sick, when the phone rang. His mother ran over to him, a huge smile lighting up her face. ‘We’ve won the lottery!’ she cried. Rose and an aunt had bought tickets in the state lottery, which paid the winner a hefty 10,000 quid – $200,000-plus in today’s money. John tried to get his head around the news, but the numbers were simply too huge for him to comprehend. Ten thousand pounds? Seriously?