by Jeff Apter
Writing bespoke music necessitated a different approach to the usual for both Hunter and Pigott; they needed to take into consideration the expectations of Farnham’s audience, rather than just draw on their own experiences and emotions. The song’s words needed to be more universal, less personal. But while the structure of the song took months to come together, the lyrics took only the best part of 10 minutes. The broader message of ‘Age of Reason’, its theme of measured optimism and global responsibility, made it the perfect sonic companion piece to ‘You’re the Voice’. Ross Wilson described John as a ‘spokesman for the common man’, and these two songs proved him right, as did later Farnham hits such as ‘That’s Freedom’.
Although the song was completed, it wasn’t a given that John would record it, let alone make it his next single and the title of the new album. Marc Hunter had recorded a demo of ‘Age of Reason’ with Dragon, but struggled with one of the verses. And he didn’t appear to be a big fan of the song. The demo tape was sent to Farnham and Ross Fraser, who’d signed on to produce John’s new album, and the waiting game began. ‘Age of Reason’ was among 3000 contenders for John’s record, a staggering number – more proof, if needed, of how Whispering Jack had changed everything. Two years back, John, Fraser and Wheatley were desperately searching for material; now, hit songs were delivered to their doorstep.
A year, perhaps more, after completing the ‘Age of Reason’ demo, Hunter and Pigott got a call from Fraser.
‘Love the song,’ the producer told them, ‘we’re doing it.’
On the surface it seemed an unlikely alliance: the key songwriters for Dragon, a band of legendary hedonists, writing for the darling of the Aussie mainstream. But the proof was in ‘Age of Reason’, the perfect track for Farnham, a song that flexed both his powerful voice and his burgeoning social conscience. The layers of keyboards and programming applied by Fraser and Hirschfelder in the studio gave it the requisite contemporary sheen; it sounded every bit as modern as anything else on the airwaves upon the single’s release in July 1988. Chart-wise, in August it quickly took the poll position from fellow Oz popster Kylie Minogue and her latest hit, ‘Got to Be Certain’, and stayed atop the charts for three weeks – a dream return for Farnham. And ‘Age of Reason’ had legs, becoming a staple of John’s live set for the next three decades. The royalties helped Hunter and Pigott buy a rustic country home on the NSW south coast, where they still live, write and record today. Everyone was a winner.
The Age of Reason LP dropped in late July, muscling aside Crowded House’s Temple of Low Men and topping the album chart for nine weeks, quickly going platinum. Picking up on the momentum of Whispering Jack, the album hit the Top 10 in Sweden and Norway – Scandinavians couldn’t get enough of the man with the windswept hair and the powerful voice.
There were some familiar names among the credits of Age of Reason. Ross Wilson wrote ‘We’re No Angels’; Chris Thompson, one of the co-writers on ‘You’re the Voice’, contributed to ‘The Fire’ and ‘Don’t Tell Me It Can’t Be Done’. The ‘house band’ consisted of Farnham regulars Hirschfelder, guitarist Garsed, drummer Angus Burchall and backing vocalists Lindsay Field, Venetta Fields and Lisa Edwards. This time around there were a few star cameos: James Morrison blew his horn on ‘Some Do, Some Don’t’, while expat Kiwi singer Jon Stevens, from Noiseworks, helped out on ‘Listen to the Wind’.
John launched Age of Reason with a seriously hefty splash on 25 July 1988 at the World Expo in Brisbane, ruling the Expo’s River Stage in front of 25,000 fans. Unlike with Whispering Jack, he was now a fully fledged superstar; John confidently reminded the public that ‘You’re the Voice’ and all that came with it was just the beginning. With the support of high-flying businessman Skase, who had finally locked John in for a series of TV specials, the Brisbane show was broadcast live and nationwide by Channel 7. Local radio station FM104, recently acquired by Wheatley, presented the show; Hoyts FM simulcast it around the country.
On Channel 7, popular radio DJ Jonathan Coleman introduced the gig as ‘the concert event of the decade’; Farnham fans had been filing into the site since the morning of the show, the moment the Expo gates were opened. ‘What do you think of John Farnham?’ asked Ian Rogerson, the broadcast’s co-host, as he walked through the crowd, pre-gig. ‘He’s excellent,’ gushed one devotee. ‘He’s gorgeous,’ said another. John must have felt like he was reliving the wild days of ‘Sadie’, but this time with a whole new generation of fans. ‘He’s a good singer, a good entertainer,’ observed an older member of the huge crowd. ‘But he could cut his hair.’ John was forced to ride a boat from his hotel to the venue; there was simply no way he could make it through the crowd to the stage. Farnham fever had reached critical mass.
‘Now we’re going to get into some serious rock-and-roll,’ John told the huge crowd at the end of his rapturously received set. ‘This is the definitive rock-and-roll song.’ Never one to bypass a good laugh, John, a plectrum wedged between his teeth, then strapped on a guitar and placed a tiny practice amp next to his microphone stand. ‘You may laugh,’ he quipped, ‘but let me put this thing on 11.’ He pulled a few guitar god poses before getting down to business, he and the band tearing into ‘It’s A Long Way to the Top’ with a ferocity rarely witnessed in anyone but AC/DC themselves. Hirschfelder replicated the song’s immortal bagpipe solo on his keyboard axe as John worked the crowd and the band into a serious sweat. The applause continued long after they left the stage. This was the concert event of Expo – maybe even the decade, as Coleman had said earlier in the night. Even the ever-creative and resourceful Wheatley couldn’t have planned a better album launch – a crowd of 25,000 and a TV audience of several million.
There was only false step. John thirstily slugged a Heineken after this frenetic closer, as he joked on camera with Coleman and Rogerson, his every gulp captured by the TV crew. Unfortunately, the show’s sponsor was Coke. They were on the phone to Wheatley first thing the next morning, voicing their complaints. ‘No beer, John must drink Coke!’ The stakes were higher now, as Wheatley – and John, by association – scaled the corporate ladder.
That faux pas aside, John had locked into a million-dollar groove: more charting singles were lifted from the album (‘Two Strong Hearts’, number three in September 1988, and ‘We’re No Angels’, which brushed the Top 40 in May 1989) and it garnered a swag of ARIAs at the 1988 awards. John was declared Best Male Artist and also won gongs for Best Adult Contemporary Album and Outstanding Achievement. Age of Reason was the highest-selling Australian album of 1988. In a couple of years, John Farnham had transformed himself from yesterday’s hero to a solid-gold, highly bankable brand.
Dapper George Hamilton, legendary Hollywood lounge lizard, provided the most unlikely of cameos in the clip for ‘Two Strong Hearts’, an informal, sun-and-fun and colour-drenched affair shot on the run in northern Queensland. In it, John and George shared a chilled poolside tipple like two drinking buddies catching up on old times.
The only thing missing from John’s trophy cabinet was a Logie – but at the 1988 awards he collected the statuette for Most Popular Music Video for ‘Age of Reason’. John, his mullet now in full bloom, wearing a smart black tux, stepped on stage to receive the award from fellow entertainment industry lifer, Bert ‘Moonface’ Newton.
‘Thank you very much indeed,’ John said, all smiles. He proceeded to thank director Robbie Wellington, who made him look good, Farnham insisted, via the use of ‘mountaineer socks on the lens’. This drew hearty laughs from the crowd. He also thanked his band, ‘among the finest musicians and singers you can find’. But then John paused for a beat too long; something wasn’t quite right. Oh crap, he realised, he’d just talked up the wrong video. Wellington had directed the clip for ‘Two Strong Hearts’, not ‘Age of Reason’; that was the handiwork of Stephen Priest. Ever the pro, John turned his embarrassment into a joke, borrowing Newton’s glasses to check his notes.
‘It’s the hair,’ he explained, a
s the crowd laughed along with him, ‘it’s taken all the brain food out.’
The same music critics who’d written John off as a blast from the past were now paying him long overdue respect. Mike Daly, writing in The Age, noted that Farnham resisted cloning Whispering Jack, which must have been hugely tempting. Age of Reason ‘is a measured response,’ he wrote, ‘less strident than the first, with fewer obvious singles, but melodically sounder … It’s also a band album.’ Daly gave credit to Hirschfelder, Garsed and producer Fraser. Age of Reason fared the best of the other new releases covered in Daly’s 4 August column, which included Kylie Minogue’s Kylie – ‘efficient, mind-numbing machine music’, according to the critic. Ouch.
John, however, still had moments when he struggled with his role as a very public commodity – Australian of the bleeding Year, thank you very much. One day, John was out with his son, Robbie, when someone approached the boy.
‘What’s it like having a famous dad?’ he was asked.
Robbie looked confused. ‘What do you mean, famous? He’s my dad.’
Farnham tried hard to smile, but he really wanted to throttle the fool.
‘Some people’s perception,’ he scoffed, ‘is that you live 24 hours a day thinking how famous you might be.’
That simply wasn’t the case for John Farnham, family man and pop star.
The Age of Reason tour was the next stage of John’s now financially rewarding album/press/performance cycle, and it reaped huge returns. He played to almost 200,000 people during shows in December 1988 and January 1989. Having decided to mix things up, John was backed by his band during the first set, and by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in the second.
With the inclusion of the MSO, the tour party numbered about 150. Wheatley struck up a deal with Australian Airlines; John now had his own touring plane. (It would be years before another Australian act, the reformed Cold Chisel, were afforded the same luxury, in 2011.) Coke, having forgiven John his Heineken slip-up, stumped up more cash for a national TV campaign, for which John recorded ‘It’s A Long Way to the Top’. He’d come a long way since warbling about Susan Jones for TAA back in the days of Darryl Sambell.
The only genuine on-tour drama came about in late November, when John was ill, and the first of three Brisbane Entertainment Centre shows was put on hold. The plan was to postpone the show until three nights later. But then Wheatley was exposed to the mysterious inner workings of the musicians’ union. The MSO had to vote on whether this extension was acceptable to the musicians; union rules stipulated seven days’ notice. As Wheatley looked on, a rep asked, ‘Would all non-union members please leave the room so that we can take a vote?’ Silence. It took two more requests before Wheatley realised the request was directed at him. The vote, when it was finally held, was ‘no’. Wheatley solved the problem by opening up more seating for the two nights on which John was able to perform.
Clearly at ease on stage, and kept at arm’s length from any behind-the-scenes drama, Farnham briefly dipped into his past during the tour, dusting off ‘Comic Conversation’, ‘Please Don’t Ask Me’ and ‘Don’t You Know It’s Magic’ in a smartly constructed mini-set with piano man Hirschfelder. Long-time fans at the Sydney Entertainment Centre show were insistent, chanting ‘Sadie! Sadie! Sadie!’ Until recently, this would have been enough to erase the ever-present smile from Farnham’s face, but not tonight, not now. He laughed, revved up the orchestra and granted the full house their wish.
‘Farnham’s ability as an entertainer was reaffirmed,’ noted Variety’s reviewer at the show. ‘Yet again.’
Manager Wheatley’s ambitions weren’t just restricted to corporate empire building; he wanted to spread all things Farnham into new territories. They’d conquered Europe with Whispering Jack and ‘You’re the Voice’, so now Wheatley turned his gaze to China, pop’s final frontier. Brit duo Wham! had stepped beyond the Great Wall in 1985, becoming the first Western pop act to perform in China and gaining huge coverage in the process, so why not the man known (almost) universally as The Voice? Armed with a personal letter of introduction from PM Bob Hawke, a promise from Coke that they’d underwrite a tour, a few promo copies of Whispering Jack and photocopies of John’s song lyrics, Wheatley left for China in August 1988. First stop Beijing, then Shanghai.
Showing all the dogged commitment he’d displayed when lobbying US record companies on behalf of LRB, Wheatley, who’d recently been crowned BRW’s Marketeer of the Year, attended banquet after banquet, eating his way, diplomat style, through the many layers of Chinese bureaucracy. Everywhere he went, party officials shadowed him.
There were matters of cultural sensitivity to tackle – every word John proposed to sing would need to be dissected by bureaucrats, just in case they led to an uprising (hence the lyric sheets). The mention of a gun in ‘You’re the Voice’ was a big issue, as was AC/DC’s ‘It’s A Long Way to the Top’, now a staple of John’s live set. It was deemed ‘too rock-and-roll’ for the proletariat. Both songs were out. The Chinese pencil-pushers wanted their people to hear ballads and nothing but; this ‘Touch of Paradise’ song was lovely, they decided.
‘We want more of those. What else do you have?’
Wheatley’s persistence was rewarded by a sit-down with Deng Pufang, the son of leader Deng Xiaoping.
Finally, after perhaps more argy-bargy than at any other time in his managerial career, Wheatley had a deal and John became the first Australian entertainer to be invited to perform in China. There’d be four shows in late October 1989, including one in Beijing’s Great Hall, where Placido Domingo had recently performed, and another at Tiananmen Square. John had even been given a Chinese name, which roughly translated to ‘Golden Hair’. The planned tour was a huge coup, both for Farnham and Wheatley – who, it must be said, was probably the more driven of the two in this particular odyssey.
It was no commercial windfall, though, as Wheatley revealed in his memoir Paper Paradise. ‘They were talking about paying us in produce.’
‘How about soy beans?’ John half joked, when the subject arose.
The planned China trip turned out to be a rare failure for Team Farnham. As soon as tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square in June 1989 and all hell broke loose, Wheatley knew that the tour would never happen.
By this time, however, John had made inroads into another spot that didn’t feature on the typical Farnham tour itinerary. A new openness was being enjoyed in the former Soviet Union, thanks to a reform movement known as Glasnost, introduced by leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1988. It allowed the Soviet people more liberties, including enjoying Western-style music.
‘You’re the Voice’ had been included on a Greenpeace album entitled Breakthrough, which had been compiled by Brit Ian Brooks, a friend and colleague of Wheatley. John was joined on the LP by U2 (who contributed ‘[Pride] In the Name of Love’), the Pretenders (‘Middle of the Road’), Sting (‘Love is the Seventh Wave’) and Peter Gabriel (‘Red Rain’). Big names.
In February 1989 Farnham and Wheatley, along with The Edge from U2, Gabriel, Annie Lennox and Chrissie Hynde, embarked on a Greenpeace-arranged globetrotting mission to promote the record and the cause, taking in London, Bremen, New York, Montreal, Toronto and, finally, Moscow.
First port of call in the USSR was the Russian Press Club. Rather than referring to himself by song or band – as in ‘I’m Chrissie Hynde from the Pretenders’, ‘I’m The Edge from U2’ – John simply said, ‘I’m John Farnham and I’m from Australia.’ His very grounded personality registered strongly with the press; despite being the least familiar face at the media conference, John fielded most of the questions. His easy-rolling personality broke through the language barrier.
Australian writer Glenn A. Baker reported on the mission for The Australian magazine. ‘John Farnham, the unknown quantity and the first artist to speak [at the press conference], continued to do so throughout, impressing even the politicos with his unpretentious attempts to inject sincerity and simple humanity into t
he unwieldy forum.’
Basically, John won them over by being himself.
With armed guards nearby at all times, there were record signings and various meet-and-greets during their 72 hours in the capital. Muscovites queued for hours to get an autograph from Farnham and his fellow stars. Glasnost may have changed the Western notion of the USSR, but life still wasn’t easy there. Farnham couldn’t help but notice that the shops were empty and boarded up. Cold-eyed working girls cruised the foyer of the Cosmos Hotel, where the Greenpeace troupe stayed.
One day, when Farnham and Wheatley sat down for lunch, they were told that there was nothing to eat. A sly packet of Western cigarettes and a discretely placed $US10 dollar bill helped fix the food crisis. Vodka, however, was at all times plentiful and flowed during each and every meal.
John did have a moment of genuine concern during his time in Moscow. One night the boisterous group were out and about in Gorky Park, snapping photos and generally enjoying themselves – aided, no doubt, by a shot or two of the local brew. John was in the thick of things, the leader of the pack. Once back and settled on their bus, Farnham made a joke about a Molotov cocktail. Local soldiers boarded the bus soon after and seemed to be headed for John, who’d been the rowdiest of the bunch; maybe they’d heard and misunderstood his Molotov joke. It turned out the local soldat were after a UK reporter, seated near John on the bus, who’d been spotted exchanging money. But it was a sharp reminder of how dangerous life could be in the Soviet Union.
The road trip, however, paid off: the album sold several million copies and raised some big bucks for Greenpeace. Yet for John it marked the end of his time as an international star; from now on he focused almost exclusively on Australia. As the father of two small children, the idea of spending extended periods away from home had little appeal, especially after the grind of LRB. And why try and build a new audience when he had his own ready-made fan base back home? He was Australia’s biggest pop star; that was enough. John also had his charity work, his family, his fishing, his close friends – all in Oz. Why leave?