How a washed up teen star became Australia’s greatest success

How a washed up teen star became Australia’s greatest success

John Farnham is perhaps the most famous singer in Australian history. I mean, really incredibly famous. He was literally called “The Voice.”  At one point, he was a teen idol, with screaming fans, a TV show, and a number one single at just 18 years old.  And then his career almost disappeared, but he came back from the abyss with an album recorded in a garage that became the best- selling album by an Australian artist in history.

This is a fantastic story, and this is actually a request from Chris Tugee, who wrote me a great idea for this video.  So, thank you very much Chris for your support.  And of course, if you want to suggest your own topic for the video , as always, the link is in the description.  So, yes, this is John Farnham.

  And maybe you don’t remember the name, but you’ve definitely heard some of his songs. But the funny thing is that for John Farnham, this was n’t the first time he became famous .  He did it 20 years before that.  His biggest album, Whispering Jack, was actually a comeback. This wasn’t his first breakthrough.

  And that’s what we’ll focus on today.  And also, this may shock you, but he was actually born in England. So how did the child of British immigrants become the voice of Australia? John Farnham was born in England in 1949.  His family moved to Australia when he was about 10 years old and settled in Melbourne.  He showed an interest in music from a very early age and was already performing in local bands as a teenager.

  It was quite obvious that he had talent, and he soon landed a recording contract with EMI.  And in 1967, when he was just 18 years old, he released his first solo single called “Sadie the Cleaning Lady .”  And even then, you can hear hints as to why he was later nicknamed “The Voice.” Oh, “Sadie the Cleaning Lady.” I have to say, as always, you can only use about 6 seconds of music in these YouTube videos before the copyright police come.

  But as always, I upload extended versions of all my videos to my Patreon page.  This is patreon.com/musicmongoose if you want to support the channel and help me create the content that I do.  So this song reached number one on the Australian charts and became the best-selling single by an Australian artist in the entire 1960s.

  And suddenly John Farnham became a teen star. Or better yet, Johnny Farnham, as he was called then.  And Australia just went crazy for this guy.  He won the title of ” King of Pop” by TV Week for five consecutive years and had a string of top 10 hits, including another number one—”Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”  It was also full of him on television.

  He was a real idol for teenagers.  He was everywhere.  And that’s important, because when people think of John Farnham today, they usually picture a guy in a leather jacket singing ” You’re the Voice,” his big hit.  Unfortunately, there was a dark side to this story , as is often the case with teen stars .

  His manager was a scoundrel and a manipulator.  At the age of 75, Farnham openly stated that his first manager, Daryl Sembell, was often sexually aggressive towards him, making advances that he awkwardly rejected.  And he believes this fueled jealousy and a desire for control in Sembelle .  He controlled where and what I worked on, what I sang, what I wore, what I ate.

  He isolated me from friends and family.  He tried to keep me away from Farnham’s current wife, Jill.  He gave me drugs and made me believe that all my success, everything I had, was because of him.  But the problem with being a teen star is that sooner or later you stop being a teenager.  And when Johnny got older, it didn’t sell as well as it used to.

  He continued to perform, appear in musicals, work on television, and give concerts, but there were no more big hits.  And eventually things started to get seriously worse.  By the late 1970s he was performing in nightclubs and cabarets, and the guy who had once been one of Australia’s biggest stars was now struggling to stay relevant.

  Eventually, the record company dropped him, and for a while it seemed like the Johnny Farnham story was effectively over.  But this is where things get interesting, because instead of giving up, he decided to completely reinvent himself.  He stopped wanting to be Johnny and became John.  And he wanted people to stop thinking of him as that boy who sang “Sadie the Cleaning Lady.

”  He wanted to be taken seriously as a singer.  And then in 1980 something happened that broke the deadlock.  John was invited to perform on the televised Royal Gala, and he chose a song that on paper was a rather odd choice: “Help ” by The Beatles.  But he did something completely different with her.  He added his own vision and performed this incredibly emotional slow version of “Help.

” This is absolutely wonderful. The boy whom audiences had seen on screens years earlier could still sing, really sing, perhaps even better than ever.  This performance helped change the course of his career, and his version of the song “Help” became a genuine Australian top ten hit, his first such success in many years.

  He released the album Uncovered, and gradually the image of the former teen idol disappeared, giving way to a serious adult performer. But he still wasn’t the John Farnham that many remember.  He got one step closer to that when he met a guy named Glenn Wheatley. Wheatley was a former musician turned manager and had connections to the Little River Band.

  He became manager of Farnham, and in 1982 he made a decision which, looking back, seems absolutely crazy. Little River Band singer Glenn Shorrock left, and John Farnham was invited to replace him.  The Little River Band were already a big Australian rock band with a sizable audience in America, and they had just lost the singer who had performed all their major hits.

  So they took Farnham, a guy who had just recently been performing in cabaret, trying to save his career.  It was a huge risk for them, and to be honest, it didn’t quite pay off.  Farnham recorded and toured with the “Little River Band” for several years, and they had some success in Australia. Their 1982 single ” Down on the Border” reached number seven, but American audiences never embraced Farnham the way they had Glenn Shorrock.

  In addition, the band had internal problems.  In late 1985, Farnham left the band and essentially found himself back at square one. And it was hardly easy for him in such a situation.  He was about 35 years old. He was already famous, then saw that fame fade, and now he’s left one of Australia’s most popular bands. He needed a break.

  He needed another solo album.  But this time there was no guarantee that anyone would be interested .  And it is here that we move on to “Whispering Jack”, the circumstances of whose appearance are quite extraordinary. Farnham kept Glenn Wheatley as his manager and together they took another huge risk, and I mean really huge.

  Wheatley mortgaged his own family home to help finance this album.  This is a show of enormous trust.  And remember, he was n’t betting on guaranteed platinum sales like Michael Jackson or Madonna.  He bet his house on a guy who was popular over 10 years ago.  Much of the album was recorded in Farnham’s garage, and what they created sounded very different from the sweet teen pop music of the 1960s.

  And the way they made this album was almost as risky as the decision to make it.  They did n’t have a huge record company throwing money at them. They didn’t even have a real studio. Despite this, they managed to acquire some of the latest recording technology at the time .  They had a Fairlight sampler, synthesizers, an eight-track tape recorder and one of Australia’s first sampling drum machines.  It was 1985.

Digital recording was still in its infancy, and they were essentially creating one of the most significant albums in Australian history in a garage.  And they worked like hell.  The sessions lasted about 9 weeks, sometimes 18 hours a day.  John was in his thirties. His career was hanging in the balance, and there was a very real possibility that this album would be his last chance.

  So he literally put everything into it.  Sitting in that garage, for the first time in my career, I was able to sing and be myself the way I wanted to sing and be myself. They recruited songwriters from all over, sat and listened to thousands of demos in search of songs for this album.  I listened to each of them from beginning to end.

After a few pieces, your brain shuts down a bit, but you can’t afford to miss anything.  The lead single “You’re the Voice” was written by four English songwriters, and one of them, Chris Thompson, apparently heard that the former “Sadie the Cleaning Lady” singer wanted to record his song and actually said no.

  In his opinion, John Farnham was a slightly humorous character from another era, and this song was too important to give to him.  But John still managed to get this song, and when they were recording it, he really gave it his all .  This is fantastic vocal work.  It was the complete evolution of John Farnham.  This was a guy in his 30s who had spent the previous decade watching his career fade away and doing everything he could to revive it, and it really comes through in his performance.

  They released the song in September 1986, and it immediately topped the charts in Australia, where it remained for 7 weeks.  It also reached the top 20 in most European countries, and suddenly everyone was talking about John Farnham again.  And when the album came out, it exploded like nothing else he had done before .

  The album spent 25 weeks, 25 weeks at number one in Australia, eventually becoming the best- selling album in Australia by any Australian artist.  1.6 million copies sold in Australia alone, which is crazy when you consider that at the time, there were only about 16 million people living in the whole of Australia.  And to better imagine this, let’s remember that AC/DC are Australian, as is Kylie Minogue.

  The album has since been certified 24x platinum.  So, it would be fair to say that he completely saved his career and got back the money his manager spent on the house. In fact, his new career made his teenage years seem like child’s play, even though in reality it was not at all the case.  And the story doesn’t even end there.  In 1988, he released the album “Age of Reason”, which again reached number one, and the title track became another number one single.

Then, in 1990, came “Chain Reaction,” another chart-topping album.  He was unstoppable. The following year he was named ” Australian of the Year”. In fact, his voice became so recognizable that Australians gave him their typically straightforward nickname—”The Voice,” and he never looked back.  He continued to release albums throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

  He continued to tour and win awards. However, there was a slight hitch in 2002 when he announced what was supposed to be his last major national tour, and even called it ” The Last Time” after a Rolling Stones song.  The tour became huge, but John is John: it wasn’t actually the last time. When he later announced new tours, one fan even contacted the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, claiming he had bought tickets believing Farnham was indeed retiring.

  The complaint was, of course, dismissed, but the whole situation became the subject of jokes about Farnham’s endless “farewells” to the stage.  He eventually became one of the most awarded Australian artists in history, winning 20 ARIA Awards and being inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in 2003 .  Unfortunately, in 2022, he was diagnosed with oral cancer and required complex surgery to remove the tumor.

  This was followed by a massive 12-hour operation in Melbourne. Part of the jaw was removed, followed by reconstructive surgery, and that was just the beginning. He then underwent an eight-week course of radiation therapy and a series of follow-up procedures and faced complications during his recovery.  The cancer receded, but John paid a huge price for it.

The surgery so drastically changed his face and mouth that it became incredibly difficult to sing.  And therein lies the cruelest part of this story. He later explained that he couldn’t open his mouth wide enough to sing properly, and that trying to make the sounds he wanted hurt him.  His actual vocal cords weren’t destroyed by the treatment, but that didn’t mean he could just pick up a microphone and start singing again.

  This is truly a cruel end to a brilliant singing career. Few artists in the world can claim to have had two completely separate, record-setting careers. Ozzy Osbourne, maybe. Johnny Cash, Cher.  But John Farnham can claim to have done it even better than them.  By the way, speaking of incredibly talented singers , I recently made a video about Steve Perry and how he actually saved the band Journey from complete failure.

  You can watch it next here.