by Jeff Apter
Johnny was seated at the drum kit when Sambell and Harrell entered the venue. One thing struck Sambell immediately: Johnny was way too good-looking to hide behind a kit, lost up the back of the stage.
‘You aren’t the drummer, are you?’ Sambell asked him.
‘No,’ Johnny replied, a little startled.
‘Thank goodness for that,’ Sambell replied, as he and Harrell headed in search of the dressing room.
Later that night, when Johnny came off stage after finishing his set with the Strings, Sambell pulled him aside to share some advice.
‘Next time you go on,’ he half suggested, half directed, ‘could you sing a fast song and then do a couple of slow songs?’
‘Sure,’ the ever-agreeable singer replied. He didn’t realise Sambell was sizing up his ability as a performer. This was a surrogate audition.
After the show, Johnny shared a drink with Sambell and Harrell. It seemed to be nothing more than a friendly post-show get-together, fellow travellers hanging out. But Darryl had an agenda. He took Johnny’s parents’ phone number and promised to get in touch. Soon.
In his management of Harrell, Sambell showed true entrepreneurial flair. Soon after the release of Harrell’s 1968 hit ‘One in a Million’, Sambell secured the singer her first TV spot, advertising Hills Hoists, of all things. (‘It’s a dream, this new easy wind-up action,’ she recited through a plastered-on smile in the ad, a condescending 60 seconds that wouldn’t stand the PC test today.) It was hardly the edgiest gig, but the exposure was priceless – pretty much every Aussie suburbanite craved a Hills Hoist, and people from Devonport to Darwin soon knew the name Bev Harrell. This was just the type of salesmanship Johnny could use.
By July 1967 there were big changes in Johnny’s world: two of the guys in Strings Unlimited announced they’d had enough, and the band folded. Sambell, who was now sharing a Melbourne office with Ian Meldrum, heard the news and acted quickly, setting up a meeting with Johnny and his parents. It was time for Sambell to make his big pitch.
Sambell understood the zeitgeist: the late ’60s in Australia was a golden age for attractive male pop stars. Pretty boy-next-door Ronnie Burns – a former window-dresser at Melbourne’s Myer department store – had left his band The Flies and broken out as a solo act. In August he would be voted Top Male Singer in the Go-Set pop poll. Billy Thorpe, having struck gold with the big ballad ‘Over the Rainbow’, was numero uno, having recently hosted his own TV show, It’s All Happening!, a rare opportunity this side of the helter-skelter days of Johnny O’Keefe and Six O’Clock Rock. Normie Rowe was still dropping hit singles, although in late 1967 he would be called up for National Service (not so much a case of ‘he is coming’ as ‘hope he’s coming back’). Golden-haired Russell Morris was poised to leave his band Somebody’s Image in pursuit of a solo career: timeless hits ‘The Real Thing’ and ‘Sweet Sweet Love’ would soon follow. Former DJ Johnny Young had scored major success with the singles ‘Step Back’ and ‘Cara-Lyn’, both as catchy as Asian flu. And good-looking duo Bobby (Bright) & Laurie (Allen) had a run of hits between 1965 and 1969.
Darryl Sambell knew that Johnny Farnham was prettier than all of them – and could sing, too. Sambell had big plans for Johnny: he sensed that Farnham could become an all-round entertainer, a sort of super-pop-star. He had the kind of easy good looks and natural, boyish charm that could break teenagers’ hearts and win over their parents. That was rare. Sambell envisaged Johnny branching out into television, theatre, maybe even films. Anything was possible.
Not long after the demise of Strings, the Farnhams met with Sambell.
‘I can make your son a star,’ Sambell told John Sr and Rose. ‘He’ll be the biggest entertainer Australia’s ever seen.’
It was a clash of cultures – Johnny’s caring, solidly working-class parents, and livewire Sambell, decked out in a turtleneck and denim, talking a huge game. Johnny’s father wasn’t convinced by Sambell’s pitch. His son was barely 18 and only two years into his apprenticeship. John Sr had a classic (and perfectly understandable) blue-collar mindset: what would happen if Johnny failed? What would he have to fall back on?
‘I’d suggest you stick with your plumbing,’ John Sr told his son when Sambell had left. ‘But it’s your decision.’
‘Well,’ replied Johnny, clearly divided, ‘if I don’t try, I’ll never know.’
They struck a deal: if his musical career didn’t work out, he’d return to the building site.
They spoke with Stan Foster, who said he could release Johnny from his apprenticeship but they’d first have to meet with the State Apprenticeship Board and get their approval. The committee examined Johnny’s tech results, which were strong, and recommended a two-year period of leave. But Johnny’s plumbing days were well and truly over.
If Johnny Farnham needed proof of Sambell’s belief in his talent, it could be measured in miles. At the beginning of their working relationship, Sambell still had business in Adelaide, so every weekend he’d drive all the way to Melbourne, collect his new charge and then drive back to Adelaide for Johnny’s gigs. Then he’d return Farnham to Melbourne, having covered a few thousand miles in the process.
During these early days with Sambell, while playing an Adelaide venue called St Clair, Johnny had a strange new experience: young girls screamed at him. Loudly.
‘What was that about?’ he asked Sambell on the long drive back to Melbourne. Sambell said nothing; he didn’t have to. Things were working out nicely.
Sambell had scored Johnny an ad for the airline TAA. The jingle that Johnny recorded, a chirpy tune called ‘Susan Jones’, was pressed as a single and given out free to customers. Farnham received $40 for his work, but got no formal recognition – the song was credited to the Susan Jones Rock Five. The tune was cheesier than Kraft, but the record’s producer, David Mackay, was impressed by Farnham. ‘He’s a pro,’ Mackay told Cliff Baxter, the Victorian manager of EMI Records. ‘And he can sing really well.’ It didn’t hurt, either, that he looked so damned good.
Cliff Baxter was in the market for a pop star. He’d missed the boat with Normie Rowe, who’d signed to Festival Records and duly become a solid-gold idol, and he had no intention of striking out again.
Sure enough, Johnny Farnham was signed to EMI in September 1967. And so the search began for the perfect song, the track that would introduce Johnny Farnham to the whole country.
Over the years, many people have laid claim to ‘discovering’ ‘Sadie (The Cleaning Lady)’, the song that would become both blessing and curse for Farnham. Darryl Sambell claimed he’d found it, as did Cliff Baxter. DJ Rofe, who invited Johnny to appear regularly on Uptight, the TV show Rofe hosted, insisted he was the man who found the chirpy ditty.
‘Sadie’ was written by a team of three Americans: Ray Gilmore, Dave White and Johnny Madara. White and Madara had a big hit in 1957 with another novelty tune, ‘At the Hop’, an American number one for Danny & the Juniors (later dusted off by Sha Na Na during their legendary 1969 Woodstock appearance). White and Madara had also composed the big ballad ‘You Don’t Own Me’, a huge hit in 1963 for the 17-year-old Lesley Gore. They had real form penning pop hits for the teen market.
Not everyone was sold on ‘Sadie’ on first listen. Johnny’s dad, for one, wasn’t mad for it when Johnny played it down the phone to him from the studio where he was recording with Mackay. Anyone with functional ears could tell it was corny, lightweight. But it was also incredibly sweet and catchy.
Once the recording was ready in late 1967, salesman Sambell engaged overdrive. Not the kind of guy to neglect a cross-promotional opportunity, he reached out to vacuum-cleaner retailer Godfreys to have their popular mascot, Mr Jolly, on hand whenever Farnham was promoting ‘Sadie’. There was even a credit on the record that read: ‘Vacuum cleaner solo – Mr Jolly’. It seemed that everywhere Farnham sang the song – especially on TV – a troupe of dancing cleaning ladies was nearby, ready to spring into choreographed action.
&nb
sp; A Fairfax newspaper report from December 1967 earmarked ‘Sadie’ as a hit and Johnny as ‘the big pop singing sensation of 1968’. The hype was kicking in.
Sambell convinced the ABC’s This Day Tonight to produce a short piece on his new charge. They tailed Farnham with a film crew as he encountered screaming female fans at a rural show. The narrative of the segment was typical of the time – the ‘serious’ media trying to make sense of the world of pop, zeroing in on this smiling, slightly awkward teenager who seemed to be on the verge of stardom. The journo’s tone was smug and more than a little starchy.
‘The current number-one pop idol is a Johnny named Farnham. We caught him in the middle of a country tour with Col Joye.’
Images of giddy fans flashed on the screen; then the camera cut to an interview with Johnny.
‘This evening I have in the studio with me Johnny Farnham, the ‘Sadie (The Cleaning Lady)’ Man, who’s in town tonight with the Bandstand of Stars show.’
Johnny mumbled a polite hello as the host asked about his newfound audience.
‘My fans are wonderful,’ Johnny managed to say, clearly nervous. ‘Last night at Tamworth I had the sleeve of my shirt ripped out. But that’s okay. The fans made me. I haven’t been mobbed very often, I’ve only been in the business for a while, but confidentially I love it.’
And what about the girls?
‘I was a plumber, you see, before this,’ Johnny revealed, looking a bit bewildered, ‘and still don’t have the nerve to ask a girl to go out with me. There were four girls in my hotel room the other night – I nearly dropped when I walked in. I don’t know how they got there.’
The pop life, in all its many guises, was opening Johnny’s eyes wide. Plumbing was never like this.
By 31 January 1968, with the heavyweight support of DJ Rofe and Meldrum, who was working as a reporter on the pop scene for Go-Set, ‘Sadie’ topped the Go-Set national singles chart and stayed there for several weeks, in some impressive company. Also in the top 10 were The Beatles’ ‘Hello Goodbye’, backed with ‘I Am the Walrus’ (not a bad double A-side single), The Monkees’ ‘Daydream Believer’ and the Bee Gees’ ‘World’. Great pop songs. But ‘Sadie’, an ode to a humble washerwoman with ‘red detergent hands’ and little time for love, cleaned up.
It was a sweet victory for Cliff Baxter and EMI, and a whirlwind beginning to the solo career of Johnny Farnham. ‘Sadie’ was the label’s fastest-selling single since Slim Dusty’s laconic ‘Pub with No Beer’, and it would go on to sell 180,000 copies, eclipsing Rowe’s ‘Que Sera Sera’ as the biggest Oz single of the ’60s. It would hold the record of biggest-selling Australian single until 1979.
When ‘Sadie’ reached gold record status, a reception was held at Hosies Hotel, not far from Melbourne’s Flinders Street station. In attendance was Arthur Major, the national chairman of EMI Records; his presence said a lot about the impact of this shining new star. When Johnny received his gold record, he broke down in tears. Within a few fast months, he’d gone from humble plumber’s apprentice, knee-deep in crap, to – in the words of The Beatles – ‘the toppermost of the poppermost’. Johnny was speechless.
‘This week I had my first taste of money,’ Johnny told a reporter soon after the event at Hosies. ‘I went out and spent $50 – just like that!’
Johnny splashed out on a gift for Sambell and some jewellery for himself.
‘It was beaut,’ he stated, thrilled by his windfall.
As for Darryl Sambell, he continued to dote on Johnny, even washing and ironing his clothes when they were on the road, which was most of the time. This earned him a new nickname: from now on, he was ‘Sadie’.
Johnny Farnham’s wasn’t the first career to be based upon the shaky foundations of a novelty song. It was a curse that stuck like mud to groups such as Herman’s Hermits (for ‘Mrs Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter’) or solo acts like Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett, who sang about the ‘Monster Mash’ in 1962. The Monkees tried, over time, to escape the teen market straitjacket by writing their own songs, but their popularity quickly faded.
As for Farnham, credibility was hard to come by when your success was based upon something as lightweight as ‘Sadie’. His easy-on-the-eye looks didn’t help. Like The Monkees’ Davy Jones, Johnny was your typical 1960s pop idol: saccharine-sweet, family-friendly, unthreatening. But he had a voice that deserved respect, if only middle Australia took the time to see beyond his pretty face and ever-present smile.
‘The scarring for Farnham perhaps came from having begun his career with a novelty song and for that single to have then become the biggest-selling Australian record of the ’60s,’ Robert Forster observed in a 2010 article. ‘He couldn’t escape it.’
But Johnny had heard a new song that he thought would be the perfect follow-up to ‘Sadie’, an ever-so-slightly psychedelic pop confection called ‘Friday Kind of Monday’. Like ‘Sadie’, it was the handiwork of some stellar American composers: in this instance, husband-and-wife team Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, Brill Building stalwarts. Most songs with their imprimatur meant ‘hit’; they’d written chart-toppers for The Ronettes (‘Be My Baby’) and The Shangri-Las (‘Leader of the Pack’). Along with uber-producer Phil Spector, they’d also crafted the epic ‘River Deep – Mountain High’, which became a signature song for Tina Turner.
‘Please let this be my next single,’ Johnny pleaded with producer David Mackay, as soon as he heard the 1967 original of ‘Friday’, cut by Americans The Meantime.
This seemingly straightforward request revealed a lot about Johnny Farnham’s situation: the key decisions about his career were being made by others further up the line, Sambell and EMI particularly.
‘I knew very little about the business,’ Johnny admitted.
This was something he’d come to regret.
‘Friday’ was a strong song, contemporary and catchy, but it was agreed that it would connect even more strongly if it was teamed with another novelty song. It would be one part of a double A-side single, giving radio DJs the choice to play the track their audience preferred. The flipside was ‘Underneath the Arches’, a quaint slice of English music-hall whimsy, written way back in 1932, and subsequently recorded by Londoner Max Bygraves, among many others. Bygraves was the type of light entertainer that Sambell envisaged Johnny becoming.
‘We hope the oldies will like “Underneath the Arches”,’ Johnny explained, ‘and the kids will like the pop number. We’ll cop it both ways.’
Together, ‘Friday’ and ‘Arches’ reached the Top 10 in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide in early April 1968, while ‘Sadie’ was still in the charts. Johnny again had stellar company, from Manfred Mann with ‘Mighty Quinn (Quinn the Eskimo)’ to Tom Jones (‘Delilah’) and the Small Faces (‘Tin Soldier’). Fellow Aussies The Masters Apprentices, whose bassist was an ambitious fair-haired up-and-comer named Glenn Wheatley, were also charting, with their psychedelic rocker ‘Elevator Driver’.
One of Johnny’s more peculiar appearances promoting his new hit was a TV spot in which he shared the set with an antique car, driver and all. For reasons best left unexplored, and little understood, Johnny and chauffeur spent much of the performance awkwardly sharing the front seat, before they finally drove off into the darkness of the studio. Anything to sell the song appeared to be the attitude of Darryl Sambell and EMI. But if credibility was something Johnny craved, this was no way to achieve it.
Hans Poulsen, who’d tipped off the guys in Strings Unlimited to Johnny, had by now left the 18th Century Quartet to focus on song-writing. After a couple of indifferent releases under his own name, he turned his hand to writing songs for others. Poulsen, with his Van Dyke beard and granny specs, was a curiosity, described in the Australian Encyclopedia of Rock and Pop as the era’s ‘resident hippie eccentric’. Hippies weren’t yet a common sight in Oz, especially in the company of middle-of-the-road pop stars like Johnny Farnham. Quality homegrown pop songwriters were even thinner on the ground. But P
oulsen had some good songs that seemed a perfect fit for Johnny, among them ‘Rose Coloured Glasses’ and ‘Jamie’. They’d be Johnny’s next two singles, the first time he’d recorded local compositions.
On the release of ‘Rose Coloured Glasses’ in late July 1968, Johnny put in yet another Uptight TV appearance. He wore shades as a reminder of the song’s title, but it was a mistake: why hide Johnny’s smiling eyes, the very thing that made teenage girls swoon? At least Johnny’s mega-watt smile never left his face – even when he was confronted with the challenge of what to do during the song’s instrumental break. He opted for a nervous jig, which just went to show that Johnny Farnham was a singer, not a mover.
Awkward spots such as this didn’t impede his success. As Johnny’s star continued to rise, so did the commotion outside his parents’ Noble Park home, night and day. It didn’t seem to matter that Farnham was rarely there; young girls gathered on the front step of Chateau Farnham, or in the nearby street, and refused to leave, chanting Johnny’s name. Rose and John Sr, who remained rock-steady, community-minded folk, had no idea what to do when confronted with Johnny’s ardent admirers. Should they make them a cup of tea? Invite them inside for a chat? Chase them off with the hose? And Rose definitely didn’t know what to say when one particularly enthusiastic fan asked her what colour socks Johnny was wearing that day. Why would anyone want to know that?
Their phone rang off the hook, 24/7.
‘[But] they never did any damage,’ said Rose. ‘They never did anything wrong.’
She was enormously proud of her son, the pop star. But Johnny, every inch a mother’s boy, was worried that Rose might find the pressure too much.
‘I’m fine,’ she reassured him. ‘I think it’s great.’