Playing to Win

by Jeff Apter

  ‘I’m very fortunate. I’m 50 years old and I can count the number of truly close friends on one hand, with a few fingers left over. I have lots and lots of friends, but my close friends are few and far between. Glenn and his wife, Gaynor, are two of my dearest friends. I consider ours a lifetime friendship. This man is in charge of my universe. I really have no idea where I’d be if it weren’t for Glenn.’ As public an event as his 50th had been, John still seemed more than happy to disappear from the spotlight for extended periods of time, if not quite retire. It now took a very special opportunity to lure John away from his family and his horses and back onto the stage. Whatever he did had to mean something for him; otherwise why bother? He didn’t need the money or the acclaim.

  But there was one other offer John chose not to refuse during his 50th year, the chance to entertain Australian troops operating in Dili, the capital of the newly independent East Timor, troops three months’ deep in their mission to help with liberation of the country. Doc Neeson, singer of the Angels and a former Vietnam-era digger, called Wheatley, whose company Talentworks helped put the project together. In November 1999, Farnham and Wheatley undertook a ‘reccie’ trip to figure out what was required to stage a brief tour a month later.

  ‘We’re going into a third-world country, a war zone,’ reported a very sombre Wheatley on his return. ‘There’s no infrastructure, we have to bring everything with us: generators, roofing, flooring. They have nothing.’ Meanwhile, John and the rest of the Tour of Duty troupe – Kylie Minogue, James Blundell, the Living End, Neeson, hosts HG Nelson and Roy Slaven – prepared to board their military transport and head for East Timor.

  This type of morale-boosting tour has a long history: Farnham’s former mentors, Johnny O’Keefe and Col Joye, had rocked the troops in Vietnam in the 1960s, along with Little Patti, Rick Springfield and many others. Entertaining the troops had become a rite of passage for Australian singers, from Vietnam to Iraq and now East Timor.

  Thousands of screaming troops and the occasional local – some perched in the nearby trees – packed the Dili Stadium on 21 December. Despite the tropical heat and ever-present rain, the mood was overwhelmingly positive. John got into a good-natured tete-a-tete with the huge crowd, who chanted ‘Sadie!’ as if it were game day at the MCG. Farnham had no option but to submit.

  ‘I’ll do whatever you say,’ he said, raising his hands in submission. ‘After all, you’re armed.’

  Even Nelson and Slaven couldn’t resist, joining John on stage and demanding that the audience spell out the song they wanted to hear. ‘Gimme an “S”!’ HG yelled, and the crowd erupted.

  John complied, sort of, mumbling a quick grab of ‘Sadie’ before he and the band burst into an inspired, roof-raising ‘That’s Freedom’, a way more suitable song for the occasion. ‘Sadie’ jokes peppered his brief set of songs – and he did eventually sing it in full, but only after a ripping take on ‘Chain Reaction’ and an urgent ‘Playing to Win’. During the latter John was almost pulled into the crowd as he slapped hands with eager punters down the front.

  Then John, keeping his cool in blue shirt and matching tie, shades firmly in place, and Doc Neeson, rocked an Easybeats’ medley of ‘She’s So Fine’ and ‘Sorry’. The band, horn section roaring, sounded tight.

  Then, finally, it was a group rip-and-tear through ‘You’re the Voice’, John’s very own anthem, as the Timor rain fell almost horizontally, drenching everyone and everything. ‘The Voice’ mightn’t have won over the Chinese officials, back when Wheatley almost stage-managed a tour behind the Great Wall, but it struck a powerful chord with the thousands of saturated Aussies in Dili. Seemingly every single arm in the stadium was raised and waving in time with John, whose smile couldn’t have been any broader. It was a huge moment.

  John then shouted himself hoarse for ‘It’s A Long Way to the Top’ as the crowd simply refused to leave. Wheatley joined everyone on stage for the closing ‘Take a Long Line’. John, shaking a tambourine, happily took a backseat to the scarf-waving Neeson, in full ‘wild Doc’ mode. Dili was well and truly rocked – and the rain just kept falling.

  As you’d expect, a TV crew documented everything. ‘There was something good happening in East Timor today,’ announced the report when it was screened back home. ‘Australian entertainers Kylie Minogue and John Farnham were in town, leading the troupe and getting a jubilant reception at their first stopover.’

  ‘These people are real, they’re resilient and they’ve come back from the most awful trauma,’ John said. He was soaked to the skin.

  Off camera, John was speechless as he was driven through the streets of Dili in an armoured vehicle, his security guards, soldiers ‘bristling with arms’, by his side. He spotted young children ‘who’d been in this horrendous situation’. As reality checks went, they didn’t come any more real than a trip through a war zone.

  When they played smaller, unplugged shows in Suai and Balibo, John and his fellow entertainers were mobbed as often by locals as by Aussies. ‘It’s unbelievable, fantastic,’ John gushed as yet another wave of people rushed forward to get close to him and Kylie Minogue.

  On one of the Aussie bases, John even tracked down a soldier who shared his surname, happily posing for a photo. ‘We’re the Farnham brothers,’ he proclaimed. ‘And I’m the oldest.’

  ‘It was the concert of a lifetime,’ Farnham told a reporter on his return.

  For his first studio project in five years, John decided not to work in a studio at all, or at least not in a conventional, digital-age facility. Instead, during the early months of 2000, he and his regular crew – producer Fraser, bandmates Lim, Edwards, Field, Burchall and the rest of Team Farnham – spent six weeks holed up in a (barely) converted Richmond warehouse, getting back to basics. The control room, such as it was, was in a truck parked inside the factory. Fraser and his team needed to turn sideways and try not to breathe too deeply in order to work together. There were none of the usual studio indulgences: no spa, no pool, no bar. The only escape was a nearby back alley. There was barely a functional bathroom – during one of the first days of recording, John walked in on Field, who was scraping the crusty sink clean with paper towels.

  John was taken aback; he had a flashback to old days on the road.

  ‘This is just like being back in LRB,’ he joked. Sort of.

  There was a method to this madness, because John was fulfilling a long-held dream to cut a selection of soul and R&B standards – ‘black music’, in pre-PC vernacular. The philosophy was simple and classic: he and the team would rehearse each song, get it right and then record it pretty much live. A bare-boned inner-city factory lent the right amount of grit to such a project, as did a red-hot three-man brass section brought in for the sessions, comprising Steve Williams, Bob Coassin and Lex Tier. Alabama’s legendary Muscle Shoals, the studio where many of these types of songs were born, was hardly a five-star joint, so a backstreet Richmond warehouse felt right. And perhaps lightning could strike twice: after all, John and Fraser cut much of Whispering Jack in an equally gritty garage.

  This wasn’t the crowd-pleasing jukebox soul of Jimmy Barnes and his bestselling Soul Deep records. John might have cut ‘When Something Is Wrong with My Baby’ with Barnesy back in 1991, but he wanted to dig deeper. Now he dusted off such R&B/soul greats as ‘I’ve Been Lonely for So Long’, a 1972 hit for American Frederick Knight, released by the renowned Stax records, soul music’s label of choice. He also covered ‘You Don’t Know Like I Know’, which had been recorded by Sam and Dave, of ‘Soul Man’ legend, and co-written by Isaac ‘Shaft’ Hayes. As for ‘That Driving Beat’, it had been cut by US bandleader Willie Mitchell, while Otis Clay had grazed the charts with ‘Trying to Live My Life Without You’ in 1972, a song that had since been covered by working-class hero Bob Seger. John particularly related to the lyric about the lengths a scorned lover was willing to go to in order to win back his lady – he, too, had been smoking close to ‘five packs of cigarettes a day�
�� back when he and Jillian shared their chronic addiction to durries.

  These songs weren’t obvious choices; they were interesting, challenging soul nuggets, songs that would push John as a singer and also stretch the band and producer Fraser. The Farnham crew would be the first to admit they’d locked into a comfortable groove over the past few hit records and it was now time to push themselves. The sound John wanted was pure, not pretty. Soulful.

  ‘It’s been amazing,’ John said of the entire process, as the album slowly came together. ‘I’ve always loved brass, big band, swing – I get a lot of joy out of this stuff.’

  The word ‘organic’ came up time and time again as the best way to describe the entire exercise. All the players praised the organic nature of the record, its rootsiness, the fact that it was another example of John’s willingness to mess with the formula just a little. This was no pop record. If anything, it was retro, a flashback to the 1960s and ’70s, the golden age of ‘black music’. It was clear that Farnham loved the material and felt connected to it, even if he struggled with some of the slightly raunchier material. John may have had soul in spades, but he was no lover man.

  Even John’s wardrobe, if you could call it that, reflected how at ease he felt: most days he’d enter the makeshift studio decked out in a checked plaid shirt and jeans, mountain man clobber, ideally suited to his increasingly heavy build. He looked as though he’d come straight from his beloved country hideaway. There was probably a little horse manure on his boots.

  The mood, as always, was good. One day, John was sent a gift from a fan – a talking toy bear, operated by simply inserting one’s finger up its furry, beary backside. John briefly thought about regifting it to his buddies in Human Nature, but considered it weird enough to keep. It became a surrogate studio mascot.

  John’s soulful makeover was not left unnoticed by critics on the release of 331/3 in July 2000.

  ‘It worked for Phil Collins almost two decades ago,’ noted Fairfax music writer Bernard Zuel in an astute review. ‘[And] it mostly worked for Jimmy Barnes a decade ago (sales wise, anyway; musically, he murdered the songs). It always works for whichever teen pop band needs a quick injection of easily recognised brilliance. So why shouldn’t John Farnham give it a go?

  ‘Happily, unlike the majority of those who turn to the wellspring of Stax/Motown/Chess/Atlantic, Farnham hasn’t gone for the standards, the “Mustang Sallys” and “Midnight Hours” you can hear any day on classic-hits radio. Don’t worry, Farnham fans, while there are great-but-unknown-to-most-Australians songwriters such as Little Milton Campbell, he hasn’t gone completely obscure – we are still talking material from the likes of Isaac Hayes and David Porter and Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong.’

  John found himself in an unlikely sparring match upon the album’s release. Jimmy Barnes had again taken the more predictable route with his ‘new’ tribute record, Soul Deeper, and the two Aussie icons were competing for airtime and sales with a similar concept. It was no contest. John’s album debuted at number one, Barnes’s at number three, a reflection of the superior quality and judgement that went into John’s LP. Barnesy was merely recycling; John was reinventing himself, just a little.

  But neither act could persuade commercial radio to get on board, a problem John really hadn’t encountered since the dark days of the late 1970s. The first single was ‘Trying to Live My Life Without You’, a punchy cover of a great song, but programmers either passed, preferred to play John’s ‘old’ material – from the Whispering Jack era, that is – or reached for the new single from Bardot, Killing Heidi or Madison Avenue. It was more a reflection of the risk-averse mindset of Australian radio programming than a comment on the quality of ‘Trying to Live My Life’ and 331/3.

  ‘I actually get a lot of play on radio, but it’s not mainstream radio,’ a slightly disgruntled Farnham told a Fairfax reporter. ‘But that’s always been the case. When we released Whispering Jack, we had enormous problems getting it played. It was the highest-selling record in Australia’s history and we had to put that out on a label that didn’t have a name on it so people could get past my past image.’

  Nowadays, that public image could be a bit of a problem, at least when it came to the cooler customers. John understood this. Joked about it, even. ‘You’re not allowed to say publicly that you own a Farnham album,’ he admitted. ‘You’ve got a Farnham record in your hand and you’ll be like, “Yeah, I found it on the bus.”’

  As for those who did embrace his music – and would even admit to doing so in a public place – was he concerned how they’d react to 331/3? After all, it was quite a departure from what had come before.

  ‘I worry every time I make an album,’ John admitted. ‘Yeah, of course I was worried people wouldn’t accept this, but I also didn’t want to make Romeo’s Heart Part 2. I thought this is something I want to do; it gives me somewhere else to go. I thought maybe I needed to take a different approach, to not be so predictable.’

  The unspoken truth was that John also needed to shake things up; after five albums of grown-up contemporary pop music, he needed a creative left-turn such as 331/3 to keep him engaged and interested. He also needed to remind his fans that he was more than a song-and-dance man with a good line in mother-in-law jokes: he was a seriously good song interpreter. Barely two years later, Rod Stewart would undergo a similar reinvention with the Great American Songbook, which sold close to four million copies globally. Australian Idol winner Guy Sebastian followed suit in 2007 with The Memphis Album.

  In order to gain traction for the record, Wheatley drew on his early source of inspiration: Stan Cornyn’s article ‘The Day Radio Died’. If radio wasn’t interested, Wheatley figured, then he’d book John on TV and also get him back out on the road. The 20-show Man of the Hour tour ran through October and continued in December 2000, packing the big venues that his peer Barnesy could only dream of filling: five nights at the Melbourne Tennis Centre, four at the Sydney Entertainment Centre, with equally full houses in all the capitals. John and band added staples ‘You’re the Voice’, ‘Two Strong Hearts’, ‘Chain Reaction’ and ‘That’s Freedom’ to the smattering of ‘new’ songs from 331/3.

  Channel 9 broadcast the obligatory TV special, also entitled Man of the Hour. Wheatley allowed himself a told-you-so chuckle and took solace in a job very well done. 331/3 sold around 100,000 copies domestically, topping the charts for five straight weeks. Even without mainstream radio support, John could still shift some units and pack venues; he also picked up a staggering 14th Mo award in 2000, for Arena Performer of the Year. John had few, if any rivals.

  John had received so much media exposure over the past 15 years that news outlets started spreading a wider net for their definitive Farnham story. Prior to his Man of the Hour shows at Melbourne Park, The Age managed to track down the joint presidents of the John Farnham Fan Club, 43-year-olds Maree Illingworth and Sue Smith. The very notion that an old-school fan club still existed in the age of the internet – there were currently 1200 members, down from a late 1980s peak of 5000, but still good numbers – said plenty about John’s rusted-on audience.

  Illingworth and Smith were like walking, talking Farnham time capsules; they’d seen it all. They’d been outside the Glenroy church in 1973, in tears, when John and Jillian tied the knot; they were among the few at his poorly attended 1970s gigs – they’d even seen Johnny croon ‘Sadie’ at the Chadstone Shopping Centre way, way back. Don Lane Shows, ‘comeback’ Whispering Jack-era concerts: they’d witnessed the lot. Their scrapbooks bulged with Farnham clippings and memorabilia; their walls were lined with photos and posters. They were the truest of true believers, who, like so many Farnham diehards, would now organise work holidays around his touring schedule, flying from city to city, show to show. Some attended eight, 10, even a dozen shows in one run. They could not get enough of the man.

  ‘He’s not aloof, like many of them,’ Illingworth said, when asked to explain Farnham’s enduring appeal. �
�When he speaks to you, even if it’s only for five minutes, it’s like you’re his best friend. And he could move down the line and talk with 28 people, and they would all react the same way.’

  Just before setting out on the I Can’t Believe He’s 50 tour, John was asked about being overexposed: had he passed his use-by date?

  ‘I was a bit apprehensive,’ he admitted at the time. ‘How was everybody going to take the news that I am going out … again? I don’t want to bore people to death. There’s nothing worse for any performer than to be met with indifference.’

  A similar question came up again in 2000, but this time the ‘R’ word was used: when was he going to retire? Was it even a possibility?

  ‘That’s going to happen one day – I don’t want to finish playing to half-houses or quarter-houses,’ he accepted. ‘But we just pretty much sold out this tour. Why would I consider retirement when everything is going so well? I’m having the greatest time and doing it in the best circumstances. I don’t have to drive over the Nullarbor Plain or drive for 500 miles after the show. I get up the next day and get on a plane, get taken to a hotel and I’m a happy daddy.’

  It was a good response, but this became something John considered more and more over the ensuing years. When was he going to quit? And could it be done with a little dignity?

  18

  HOW MANY LAST TIMES?

  If Farnham and Wheatley made one mistake during their remarkable union it was that they never clearly stated if and when John intended to retire. But by calling a tour The Last Time, as they did in 2002, if John kept touring he risked being viewed as the man who didn’t quite know when or how to say goodbye, stuck with tags such as ‘The Dame Nellie Melba of Pop’. There was also the risk of alienating punters who’d bought tickets to shows in the belief they’d never see Farnham perform again. And as history would prove, The Last Time was anything but.