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  And Johnny’s most recent singles, ‘You Love Me Back to Life Again’ and ‘Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’, had come and gone without a murmur, this time on Infinity records, Sherbet’s label, EMI having not renewed his contract. The ‘Hall of Fame’ single was an interesting diversion, with just a hint of disco groove lurking beneath the pop-rock surface. Johnny’s vocal was tougher than usual, grittier – but it hardly mattered. No-one was listening.

  In the late 1970s there was unfashionable, and then there was Johnny Farnham. He resorted to occasional work as a radio DJ, pulling a few day shifts at Sydney’s 2GB, sitting in for regular host Jimmy Hannan. He also did a week at Gold Coast station 4GG. He even judged talent quests.

  ‘It was tough,’ Farnham said of this incredibly difficult time. ‘I couldn’t get a job.’

  He spent a lot of time at home on the couch, packing on a few pounds, watching his bills pile up. Johnny’s restaurant was still in the red, his records weren’t selling and a hefty, unpaid tax bill pinned to the fridge kept catching his eye. Sometimes he’d go fishing, one of the few things that truly relaxed him, or he’d disappear into the garden. When he was on the road, no matter where he was or what the situation, he’d call Jillian before he went to sleep.

  ‘It’s all fine,’ he’d reassure her, even if the opposite was true. ‘Everything’s going great.’

  Jillian remained the only true supporter he had, the love of his life.

  She sometimes found herself protecting her husband. At a show in Adelaide, during a break between sets, Jillian snuck away to the bathroom, where she overheard a conversation.

  ‘I can’t stand that Johnny Farnham, he makes my skin crawl,’ slurred one woman.

  ‘Oh, I hate him,’ replied her friend.

  This was too much for Jillian, who approached them.

  ‘Oh, I love him,’ Jillian announced. ‘I think he’s great.’

  ‘How could you?’ the two asked in unison. They seemed shocked.

  ‘I’m his wife,’ Jillian snapped back.

  The bathroom emptied quicker than you could say ‘foot in mouth’.

  ‘I love being married,’ Johnny said in an interview from these bleak days. ‘I wouldn’t be single again for anything. Jill is a terrific person … she keeps me in line.’

  Despite the ongoing disappointments, Johnny didn’t consider quitting the business. He was a singer, an entertainer. What else could he do?

  7

  HELP IS ON ITS WAY

  Johnny changed managers yet again early in 1978, hooking up with his friend Danny Findlay, Colleen Hewett’s partner and a former member of the band M.P.D. Limited. Findlay was the third member of the Backstage restaurant troika, which remained a problem – the venue was bleeding money. Findlay was surprised to learn how insecure Johnny was feeling about his career – though, considering its sad state, it shouldn’t have been a shock. Farnham was no longer recording, his TV career had flopped; all that remained were endless, soulless nights on the club-and-pub circuit, trying to sway punters’ attention away from the pokies.

  Glenn Wheatley, now making a huge splash as manager of the Little River Band, caught Johnny playing at Twin Towns RSL at Tweed Heads, and felt the same quiet despair he’d experienced after witnessing that concert on the beach a few years back. As Wheatley watched, the RSL gig started badly and didn’t get much better. A few songs in, Johnny stopped the incompetent house band and was forced to count them back into the song. They played with no feeling, no soul and the couple of hundred people looking on turned away, disinterested.

  Wheatley was stunned. He knew that Farnham was much, much better than this, yet here he was, adrift in pop purgatory, picking up a few hundred dollars a night.

  ‘This is the great Johnny Farnham,’ he thought to himself, nursing a drink, watching the train wreck continue, ‘singing with a band who can’t play. What’s going on?’

  Johnny was recognised by some in the business as the ‘Man Who Can’t Say No’, and here was tangible evidence – he was performing with a dud group to a bored, distracted audience. It was a big comedown.

  Wheatley hung in long enough to check in with Johnny after the show. Johnny had changed into his street clothes; his stage suit was hanging nearby. Without saying a word, Wheatley grabbed Johnny’s tux and threw it into a garbage bin. Farnham didn’t protest. Nothing said middle-of-the-road like a penguin suit. Johnny’s wardrobe needed an update.

  Wheatley left him with some advice: ‘From here on in, we’re going to have to forget all this. You have to start again.’

  Though he didn’t make any specific promises on the night, it was clear that Glenn Wheatley could well be the key to Johnny’s future.

  Though he lacked confidence, Farnham remained an optimist at heart. He believed that someone would throw him a lifeline, and he was proved right. It came in the form of a popular TV show. Johnny couldn’t sell records, he had no record deal, and he was finding it hard to grab the attention of club-goers, but he did have the support of Don Lane. And for once Johnny’s timing was spot on.

  Lane, the so-called ‘Lanky Yank’, began hosting his hugely popular The Don Lane Show on Channel 9 in 1975. Over its eight years and hundreds of episodes it would become the highest-rating variety program in Oz TV history; Lane became the highest-paid celeb on the small screen. He won a Logie for Most Popular Personality on Australian TV in 1977 – ‘The Lanky Yank Takes the Gold,’ proclaimed TV Week.

  John’s thing – it would always be John from now on – for big ballads and show tunes made him a natural for the program. Right now he was a much better fit with the blue-rinsers who watched and loved Don Lane than he was among the screaming teens of Countdown.

  One of his earliest appearances on Lane’s show took place on 22 November 1979. John, accompanied by a lone pianist, wrapped himself around Paul Simon’s epic, aching, gospel-ly ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’. His suit was a sombre brown, his tie only as wide as his collared shirt would permit, his hair not quite the super-mullet that would soon be his trademark, but getting there, inch by sneaky inch. He looked great. John’s eyes were closed much of the time, and he enunciated every last word carefully, soulfully, singing as though his life – not just his career – depended upon it. Just as he’d done with Harry Nilsson’s ‘One’, all those years ago, John had found a song that allowed his voice to soar, and a lyric he connected with deeply. Love, loss, despair – ‘Bridge’ had the mother lode.

  John absolutely nailed it – and just for a moment, as the song came crashing to a close, the Don Lane Orchestra having chimed in during the final verse, it seemed as though Lane’s audience was about to jump out of their seats – a stretch, given their vintage. The applause was deafening. John smiled and nodded, as if to say, ‘There. Told you I could sing.’ Farnham had found his audience.

  John heaped praise on Lane: ‘He helped me over my nerves on being on live TV, he always had something positive to say and always gave me much-needed advice, which I still rely heavily on today.’ They became good friends, very tight.

  Lane always introduced Farnham in the most fulsome manner – John was the best vocalist in the country, he was a terrific guy, a great friend, a good family man and so on. And behind the scenes John had the backing of Kate Halliday, a producer on the show, someone who also had total faith in John’s ability. (She’d go on to work with Glenn Wheatley.) Yet sometimes John’s pre-show nerves were so bad he’d ask for cue cards, even when he was singing a tune he knew inside out. Other times he had a song’s lyrics scrawled on his hand. Memory was not his strong point.

  The problem with the Lane show, if there was one, was simple: after a run-through with the band at around 6 p.m., and a final rehearsal, John was left with several hours to kill before making his live, late-night appearance. He’d pace up and down, up and down, wearing a hole in the green room carpet. Still, the audience was huge, Lane’s support was undeniable, and the pay – $250 per spot – was very handy.

  John forged other
friendships on the show. After one appearance, he came home with quite the surprise for Jillian: half a dozen visiting test cricketers, his co-stars on that night’s program. Fortunately, Jillian, like John, was a cricket fan – and thankfully they had a decent-sized couch.

  In August 1979 John and Jillian scraped together enough money to take a holiday in Las Vegas, travelling with none other than Lane himself. Coincidentally, on 17 August the Little River Band was playing the Aladdin in Vegas, midway through their latest American tour. They filled the 7000-seat concert hall for three nights running. The band was on fire in America. Their latest single, ‘Lonesome Loser’, was yet another Top 10 hit in the States. It would be nominated for a Grammy.

  John tried and failed to get a ticket for the sold-out show, so he called his old friend Wheatley and managed to swing some freebies. That night John sat in the hall, a face in the crowd, absolutely blown away by what he witnessed. This ‘little’ Aussie band was killing it: the crowd went nuts, they knew every number that LRB performed. John was blown away. Why didn’t he know about this?

  John and Jillian caught up with Wheatley afterwards. It was midnight and they sat and talked as the crew bumped out the group’s gear. It was a warm night in the desert – but temperatures ran even hotter backstage, as John briefly witnessed the hard-to-please band pick apart each other’s faults. Still, John was astounded by what he’d seen on stage.

  ‘Is it always like this?’ he asked Wheatley.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Wheatley replied.

  ‘The crowd, the madness. The way the people responded. They blew me away. It was great.’

  Wheatley assured him that yes, it was the same wherever they went in the States. The band was at their absolute peak; America couldn’t get enough of them. They’d just filled the Universal Amphitheater in LA five nights running. Their records were selling in huge numbers.

  ‘I just never knew the Little River Band were this big in America,’ gushed John. ‘It’s incredible. They’re superstars. You must be incredibly proud of what you’ve achieved.’

  Wheatley was proud. He also had an idea.

  ‘What if I were to manage you?’ he asked.

  Wheatley had seen how low John’s career had sunk in Australia. He firmly believed in John’s talent as a vocalist. As Wheatley wrote in his memoir Paper Paradise, John was ‘probably the greatest interpreter of songs Australia has produced’. He knew John had the chops, charisma and stage presence to do much more. On the flipside, Wheatley also knew what he was getting into: the Farnham name was poison with record companies and record buyers back in Oz. It would be a tough battle to get him a deal, let alone get his music played on radio. Still, he couldn’t just sit on his hands and watch his friend’s career implode.

  John was very tempted by Wheatley’s proposal, but was still working with Danny Findlay. And, as always, his sense of loyalty came into play: how could he sack Danny, who’d hung in with him during the toughest time of his career? Findlay was also a friend – and a partner in Backstage. John didn’t know which way to move, but he did agree to meet with Wheatley again, back in Australia.

  That meeting took place in early 1980. By this time, Wheatley had formed a company with his brother Paul, simply known as WBE: Wheatley Brothers Entertainment. Their client roster was impressive; they repped LRB, Australian Crawl, Ross Wilson and Stylus. John, meanwhile, had finally accepted that it was time to part ways with Danny Findlay, although, typically, it had taken him some six months to decide it was the right move. Loyalty was one thing, but Wheatley, clearly, had the contacts and drive – and the score on the board with LRB – to take John’s career in a new, better direction.

  ‘I knew how America worked and that was a big factor,’ Wheatley wrote, reflecting on John’s decision. ‘He also desperately wanted to get back on top in Australia. He did not want to end up doing clubs for the rest of his life.’

  John’s old mentor, Johnny O’Keefe, had been stuck on that seemingly endless treadmill when he died in October 1978, aged just 43. His last gig, in fact, had been at an RSL in Bathurst, to an enthusiastic yet small crowd. Farnham loved O’Keefe but didn’t want to head down that path.

  ‘That meeting with Glenn was the turning point in my life,’ he said of their sit-down, ‘both personally and professionally. It was not only the start of my public resurgence, it was also the beginning of a lifelong friendship. In fact, he is like a brother to me.’

  But even the most cursory once-over of John’s accounts made it clear to Wheatley that his new charge had big problems. Backstage was still haemorrhaging money, for one thing. John owed more money than he owned. Wheatley brought in lawyer Ken Starke, along with accountants from the reputable firm Ernst & Young, to help put John’s finances in order.

  Business-wise, the first point of order was to sell some assets, which meant John and Jillian were forced to flog the two houses they owned, in Melbourne’s Surrey Hills and Bonnie Doon. Only a year before, John and Jillian had been talking up their Bonnie Doon ‘haven’ to a reporter from The Australian Women’s Weekly. ‘This is the only place where we can share everything and we can be ourselves.’ Now, out of necessity, it was gone.

  For someone raised by solid, sensible working-class parents, selling his properties was a huge sacrifice for John, especially at a time when he ‘felt like a washed-up singer’.

  ‘To lose that dream and have to rent was soul-destroying for him,’ Wheatley wrote.

  John was devastated but had no choice. It was time to cash things in – and to man up. There was also the matter of finding a new home for their dogs, a borzoi named Laczar and a Great Dane called Bonnie, as well as their four cats. The Farnhams had lost what was a fair menagerie.

  ‘Wheat, Jillian and I are broke, clean broke. I’m in real trouble,’ John admitted during one of their earliest meetings.

  ‘How much do you need?’ Wheatley asked him.

  John gave him a figure and Wheatley proceeded to write a cheque for $50,000, no further questions required. John couldn’t have asked for a greater show of faith.

  Wheatley’s commitment gave John the sense he might yet get out of this mess.

  Wheatley tried to negotiate a new record deal for John, but without success. No-one, from John’s former label EMI down, was willing to gamble on a Farnham comeback. They simply didn’t believe it could happen. After a few months of knockbacks, John signed directly to WBE Records, Wheatley’s own label. In an interesting twist of fate, WBE was distributed by EMI, the label that had just rejected their former biggest star. The irony wasn’t lost on John or Glenn. They’d show them.

  Farnham reinforced Wheat’s faith when he appeared on the Royal Charity Gala Concert TV ‘spectacular’ in May 1980, which aired on Channel 9. Wheatley approached director Peter Faiman and suggested that John perform ‘Help!’. Faiman wasn’t so sure.

  ‘Why a Beatles song?’ he asked. ‘Can’t he do something contemporary?’ But eventually he accepted that it might work. It did much more than that. John was no master of the ivories – ‘this is the only song I know how to play on the piano,’ he’d tell audiences before playing ‘Help!’, ‘and then not very well’ – but there was something unique and intriguing about the way he played, and sang, ‘Help!’. Jillian had heard it hundreds of times at home, John plunking away on the piano in their lounge room.

  As a vocalist, John was at his best when he tackled a lyric with which he could genuinely connect, emotions like the despair of ‘One’ and ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’. ‘Help!’, given his circumstances, couldn’t be more poignant: if anybody needed a leg up, it was John Farnham, flat broke and stuck in music biz limbo. Sure, there was more than a whiff of melodrama to the arrangement – he didn’t so much give it the kitchen sink treatment, but the entire kitchen, dishwasher and fridge included – yet the effect was powerful, overwhelming. John Farnham stole the Gala Concert.

  His co-stars, Peter Allen, Julie Anthony, Olivia Newton-John, Helen Reddy and ocker comic Paul ‘H
oges’ Hogan, watched on in amazement, as did the resident royal, Queen Elizabeth. Farnham shone even more brightly than Liz’s jewels.

  The Royal Charity concert pulled a huge audience of more than six million viewers, making it one of the most viewed TV shows of all time (just a little south of the Moon landing). And many of those six million watching wisened up to the fact that the country’s best singer was back in action.

  Wheatley was in Germany with the Little River Band when the show took place. The next morning, his telex machine clicked into life, the message making it very clear how great Farnham’s performance had been. It was then that he knew they were on the road out of hell.

  8

  UNCOVERED AND REBORN

  What John now needed to do was make a musical statement, to really drive home the fact that he was back. Farnham agreed to Wheatley’s idea of teaming him with Little River Band’s Graeham Goble, a huge Farnham fan. The feeling was mutual; Farnham was a big admirer of Goble’s LRB hits. Maybe together they could come up with some musical magic. Goble needed an outlet for his songs; the battle to get his own material on LRB albums was one of the more challenging aspects of a band not short on internal friction. And perhaps Goble could help ‘update’ John’s sound and image, something he desperately needed.

  Uncovered was an album of firsts: the beginning of John’s professional relationship with Wheatley, his first release for WBE and the first (but not the last) time Farnham worked with Goble. It was also the public ‘coming out’ of John Farnham: now, finally, he was Johnny no more. Uncovered marked the start of his ‘adult contemporary’ career. There’d be no more novelty songs or show tunes in his repertoire from now on. The release of Uncovered in July 1980 was the first time John had been anywhere near the business end of a chart since 1973.

  Goble, clearly in the midst of a creative purple patch, wrote or co-wrote nine of the 10 tracks that made the final cut – the only other song included was Lennon and McCartney’s ‘Help!’, a no-brainer after John’s standout rendition for the royals. Goble also produced the album, which was recorded over three weeks at Balance studios in Melbourne. For John’s studio band, Goble assembled an impressive line-up: guitarist Tommy Emmanuel, keyboardist Mal Logan, who’d played with LRB and the Renée Geyer Band, and bassist Barry Sullivan, who’d been part of Chain. Guitarists Ric Formosa and David Briggs – both past members of LRB – contributed to the album, as did current LRB members Derek Pellicci and Wayne Nelson. With their involvement, and Goble’s, the album was an accidental dry run for Farnham’s near future. Inspired, John nailed his vocals in the rapid time of three days.