Fans see the fame and fortune but rarely have insight into the stars they admire. ‘John Farnham: Finding the Voice’ reveals the real struggle John Farnham has had over his long career. We see the highs we know but the documentary also goes into great details about the lows and pitfalls that Farnham had to overcome.
John Farnham rose to become Australia’s biggest pop star of the late 60s when he was 17-years old. The initial fame came from a novelty song ‘Sadie (The Cleaning Lady)’ that could very well have been the beginning and end of John’s career.
John initially had an opportunist manger in Darryl Sambell, a former hairdresser who like Col. Tom Parker to Elvis, treated the star as a product. Sambell was clearly out of his depth, especially when he tried to launch John into the UK market but was quickly rejected because they already had their “own Farnham” in Cliff Richard.
Farnham was yet to find his inner talent. His schedule was so full that his own songs were hardly ever recorded and his albums relied on covers.
Sambell shopped John into anything to make a buck, including theatre where he drifted further from his true self. After Sambell was dumped, and EMI did not renew his contract, John was limited to the pub circuit with a band who couldn’t really play.
Along came Glenn Wheatley, who himself had found fame as bass player for The Masters Apprentices around the same time as Farnham became a pop star. Glenn identified the scam of the business when his band was earning next to nothing for sold out performances at Melbourne’s 5000+ capacity Festival Hall. That was the catalyst for Glenn getting into management. With his inner knowledge of how the business worked, Glenn took Little River Band to the top of international charts and began to manage John. It became a lifelong friendship.
Glenn brought in LRB’s Graham Goble to write and produce a comeback album for John. The result was ‘Uncovered’. It was John’s first album in five years and in 1980 put John back in the top 40 for the first time since 1973 with the single ‘Help’, an original arrangement of the classic song by The Beatles.
While ‘Uncovered’ repositioned John, it was more Graham’s album than his own and he was still unfulfilled. Instead of “finding the voice” on his next album, another side-track happened. Little River Band singer Glenn Shorrock was fired from the band and John became the new lead singer.
Being the lead singer of LRB put John on big stages with huge productions and a massive audience for the first time but it still wasn’t him. John recorded three albums with Little River Band but it wasn’t the same sound and fans of the Birtles, Shorrock, Goble harmonies of the original albums quickly dropped off.
John accumulated massive debt in Little River Band. The band was in debt to EMI for the high costs of the early albums and the John LRB albums never recouped (made money). After the ‘No Reins’ album of 1986 John left the band broke … and depressed.
Wheatley mortgaged his house to get John back in the studio. The result was ‘Whispering Jack’, the biggest selling Australian album of all-time and second biggest selling album in Australia behind Meat Loaf ‘Bat Out of Hell’.
This is where Farnham found his voice, found his part in the music industry and began to control his own destiny.
‘John Farnham: Finding The Voice’ includes a first-hand account of the story from Glenn Wheatley filmed just six months before he passed away. Glenn’s wife and partner Gaynor Wheatley and John’s two sons Robert and James feature highly throughout the movie, detailing John’s journey through both his talents and fears. At one point Glenn talks about John’s fear of failure (“it wasn’t called depression back then”) which gives further insight to why Farnham was such a recluse over most of his career.
Radio executive Cherie Romaro talks of the radio comeback of John with ‘You’re The Voice’. John’s longtime band members Brett Garsed, David Hirschfelder and Angus Burchill and producer Ross Fraser, as well as friends Tommy Emmanuel, Daryl Braithwaite and Jimmy Barnes, round out the story of a remarkable career, so tragically stopped now with John’s cancer.
A few fun facts revealed in the movie: An early demo of ‘We Built This City’, written by Bernie Taupin was considered for Whispering Jack but John didn’t like the song. Starship made it a global hit before Whispering Jack was released.
Also, when it was decided to make ‘Whispering Jack’ Quincy Jones was the first choice as producer but Australian sound engineer Ross Fraser took on the job. Ross produced every Farnham album after that with the exception of John’s 2016 Christmas album with Olivia Newton-John.
‘John Farnham: Finding The Voice’ will be in cinemas for three weeks from May 18, 2023. It will then be broadcast on the 7 Network before heading to a streaming service.
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