by Jeff Apter
‘I have no intention of going to America and busting my arse for four years trying to get it to work,’ John said while promoting Age of Reason. ‘I don’t know whether I necessarily want the world. I’m quite happy doing what I’m doing.’
It was around this time that John really embraced horse riding – soon a popular pastime of his. Together, he and Jillian would ride along the Yarra River, through the bush, then settle down for a lunch of cheese and wine ‘and have a kiss and cuddle in the sun’. Then they’d ride home into the sunset as if they were living in some old Western. ‘It was fantastic,’ said John.
Over time, John would become a cutting horse devotee, a practice he described as ‘a bit like riding a bucking horse – sideways. I’ve always been a bit of an adrenaline freak; it gives me a bit of a release.’
Jillian, as ever, was there for him. She too became a keen rider.
‘Jillian is the best thing that ever happened to me,’ John has said dozens of times. ‘She is my anchor and I know I’m hers, too.’ Some pundits, only half jokingly, referred to the Farnhams as the ‘Paul and Linda McCartney’ of Australia. The McCartneys also enjoyed the equine life, so maybe they were on to something.
Now, as a new decade dawned, John finally had time to reflect on how much his life had changed. At the end of the 1970s he had been washed up, as good as finished, lacking a label and ambitious management, resigned to a life of suburban club gigs and ‘good ole days’ package tours. But now, 10 years down the line, with Wheatley guiding him, John was king of the hill, outselling such hot acts as U2, George Michael, Crowded House and INXS in Australia. Whispering Jack was the highest-selling album in Australia across the entire decade, outstripping Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms and Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. Cynics were sniggering that Age of Reason had somehow failed by comparison to Whispering Jack, not having matched its runaway sales, but it was still among the Top 10 bestselling albums of 1988, and would continue to set cash registers chiming. At the time of writing it’s 11 times platinum, inching towards sales of 800,000, huge numbers for an Australian-made record. Together, Whispering Jack and Age of Reason clung to the Oz album charts for some 175 weeks. In a stretch from October 1986 to the end of the decade, John’s albums never left the charts.
Then there were the concerts. During the Jack’s Back and Age of Reason tours John had played to roughly half a million Australians; Jack’s Back had broken all previous box office records for an Australian act. Farnham genuinely loved performing, the sense of communion and exhilaration that a great show could bring.
‘I enjoy that,’ he said, ‘the sweat – you can reach out and touch [the audience].’
It had been an astonishing turnaround, the type of resurrection rarely witnessed in the local music scene, perhaps only rivalled by Billy Thorpe’s transformation in the late 1960s from pop idol to hedonistic acid rocker. But Thorpey couldn’t compete with Farnham’s massive record sales and the manner in which he repeatedly filled the largest rooms in the country. And it was highly unlikely that the wild and crazy Thorpe would ever be a contender for Australian of the Year.
‘I’ve been quoted as saying that if nothing good ever happens to me again, I’m okay with that, this is good enough,’ John said of his rebirth, and he meant every word.
Farnham and Wheatley were reflecting on all this when John dropped a bombshell on his manager.
‘Wheats,’ he grinned, ‘I think I might retire.’
His manager’s face went deathly pale. Was he serious?
‘But I don’t think I can,’ John continued, ‘because I like it too much. Success has made me a happy man and I don’t think I can ever stop doing it.’
Wheatley exhaled. Phew.
Maybe, looking back, the lyrics of John’s hit ‘Help!’ were prescient, but not in a manner he could have ever envisaged. His life had changed in oh so many ways. But could he maintain the momentum?
15
BURN FOR YOU
The past decade had been a heady ride for John. And Farnham never missed the opportunity to praise Wheatley, who he rightly believed had saved his career when Wheatley took over his management in 1980. When they weren’t on the road together, the Farnhams and Wheatleys would holiday together at the Skase-owned Mirage Resort in Port Douglas, where they both owned condos. They were very close friends and unreservedly loyal to each other, ever since the early days when Wheatley handed over a cheque for $50,000 to keep John afloat. Farnham never forgot the trust and belief that lay behind that gesture. But now, their roles were about to be reversed: it was Farnham who needed to believe in Wheatley.
Wheatley’s drama began, as many problems do, in a nightclub – or more accurately, because of a nightclub. In 1988 he’d agreed to a business co-venture with his brother-in-law, Clinton Casey, to convert a building in Melbourne’s Flinders Lane into a club, which they’d call The Ivy, after one of the Wheatleys’ favourite LA eateries. The building cost $4 million, and another $2 million was required for refurbishment. The money was acquired through the Farrow Corporation, part of the Pyramid Building Society. An opening date was announced and then pushed back, as work plodded on with the rebuild and Wheatley butted heads with his contractor. First it was 22 December 1988, then 9 March 1989.
Farnham was on the road in early 1989 with the MSO, and Wheatley, as he always did, ensured he was there to see John perform. But this kept him away from The Ivy worksite. Wheatley was thinly stretched; the cost of the as-yet-uncompleted Ivy renovations kept mounting, reaching $6.5 million in early 1989, as interest rates ballooned to almost 20%. Wheatley had to use his $6-million Toorak home as collateral. John Farnham’s success was now the one thing keeping Glenn Wheatley afloat.
If his life wasn’t complicated enough, Wheatley was also toying with the notion of a tilt at politics, and politicians were starting to gravitate towards John. When Farnham played Canberra’s Bruce Stadium in mid-November 1988, MPs Gareth Evans, Ralph Willis and Graham Richardson, plus members of the Keating and Hawke families, attended the show.
PM Hawke, who’d shared another sly ciggie with Farnham at the Adelaide Grand Prix a few days earlier – now something of a ritual between the two – hosted John, Glenn and their wives at Parliament House after the show. Wheatley, in particular, was impressed with the lifestyle. ‘This was power,’ he’d write of the encounter, ‘and I was loving it.’ John was preoccupied laughing at Hawke’s post-dinner gift – a knock-off watch he’d recently bought from a street vendor in Bangkok – and generously sampling the PM’s best reds. Politics wasn’t his game, but this was the big time, no doubt about it.
That night, Hawke asked Wheatley if he’d consider joining the Labor Party, but Wheatley leaned more towards the right, politically speaking. After much deliberation, he decided to put a padlock on his political aspirations, having learnt from subsequent discussions how lonely Canberra life could be. He had more than enough to deal with back in Melbourne – and he was insistent that John and his career remain his number one priority. There was no logical way he could juggle both being a pollie and managing John Farnham.
Early in 1989 John got a call from Wheatley, asking him to lunch. There was nothing unusual about that, but this time their catch-up would take an unexpected twist.
‘Mate,’ Wheatley said, as they settled down over drinks, ‘I need to borrow some money.’
‘How much?’ Farnham asked, as he reached for his chequebook, just as Wheatley had done for him a decade earlier.
‘$300,000,’ Wheatley admitted.
For the first time in their shared working career, John – or more specifically, his lawyer, Ken Starke – asked that Wheatley sign a loan agreement. Wheatley accepted that under the circumstances it was the right thing to do. But it only served to prove how tenuous his circumstances were – his friend and star client needed documentation to ensure he’d get his money back.
It was also time for John and Wheatley to renegotiate Glenn’s manage
rial contract, which happened every two years and was usually a formality. Wheatley was about to get another surprise: Ken Starke advised that while Glenn could continue to manage John, no formal contract would be forthcoming.
Meanwhile, The Ivy budget blowout reached some $5 million. But finally The Ivy opened to the public on 18 August 1989. John sang for his supper that night, repaying his friend for his many years of devoted service with a few songs. Wheatley named the upstairs area Jack’s Bar in his honour.
But Wheatley’s problems weren’t over, no way, not yet. He and Farnham got the sense that something big, and potentially disastrous, was in the wind when they returned to the Mirage Resort in early December 1989. As usual, they dined with Mirage owner and Farnham supporter Skase and his wife, Pixie. But when the bill arrived, the Skases turned their eyes towards their guests; for the first time, Glenn and John had to pick up the tab. Skase was clearly in financial strife. When John and Wheatley returned to the Mirage in January 1990, the Skase condo had been stripped of furniture and belongings. They’d cleared out.
Wheatley, meanwhile, was forced to put his Toorak home on the market in early 1990 to help cover The Ivy’s bills. He was dining with John at The Ivy when news came through of an offer – $6.1 million. At the same time, whispers began spreading within the financial community that the Farrow Corporation, who’d backed The Ivy, were in financial trouble – and Farrow held the title of Wheatley’s house.
In late June 1990 Wheatley was in New York for a key BMG meeting; for the first time it appeared that a John Farnham LP (his newie, Chain Reaction) would have a simultaneous worldwide release. Even though John was at best a reluctant international artist, this was huge.
On 27 June, Wheatley’s hotel room phone rang, waking him up. It was his wife, Gaynor. She read him a newspaper report.
‘It says the Farrow Corporation and Pyramid have closed their doors. What does this mean for us?’
It meant the sale of their house, the offer they’d received that night while he was with John at The Ivy, wasn’t going to happen, for one thing. And Wheatley’s two-week-long overseas trip, his attempt to take John global, would now have to be compressed into seven days.
Coopers & Lybrand were appointed mortgagee in possession of The Ivy; Wheatley now had no control over the club he’d built. He had quickly joined Christopher Skase in dire financial straits. John’s manager was now in the same situation Farnham had been in when they started working together in 1980: stone broke. Wheatley was forced into a fire sale of his assets – there’d be no more Port Douglas vacations with the Farnhams for the foreseeable future. Effectively homeless, the Wheatleys moved into a friend’s house. They slept on the floor.
This financial turmoil was hardly the best backdrop to the release of John’s new album, Chain Reaction, in late September 1990. Yet that didn’t prevent it racing to number one soon after its release, and sticking to the charts for almost a year. Three singles were lifted from the album – the title track, ‘That’s Freedom’ (a companion piece to John’s other fanfares for the common man, ‘You’re the Voice’ and ‘Age of Reason’) and ‘Burn for You’. Each hit the Top 10, going to show beyond any doubt that John’s hot commercial streak was far from over. He’d scored eight Top 10 hits in just the past four years, outstripping most other local artists. Kylie Minogue came close, with seven; INXS had five in the same period. But John ruled the charts.
Chain Reaction, while it was the third part of a hugely successful trilogy – the ‘Farnham comeback’ phase, if you like – was a strikingly different record to Whispering Jack and Age of Reason. It was also the most musically satisfying and enduring of the three. The first sound heard was a scrubbed acoustic guitar, rather than the whir of a keyboard, and that was true for much of the album. Though contemporary-sounding, it felt more organic, less computer-generated, which gave Farnham even more room to roam with his vocals, especially during songs like ‘In Days to Come’, which came with more than a hint of church. The title track, with its blazing harmonica and knee-slapping melody, was the closest John had yet come to recording a straight-up country song.
And John was much more than vocalist/interpreter here: he co-wrote nine of the dozen tracks, most with producer Fraser and band stalwart Hirschfelder. Phil Buckle, a tunesmith for hire who’d recently struck pay dirt with Southern Sons, also contributed to a number of Chain Reaction songs. Apart from the universal theme of a song like ‘That’s Freedom’ and the anthemic ‘See the Banners Fall’, the prevailing mood of the album was more personal, closer to home. A true John Farnham album.
The new approach was typified by the ballad ‘Burn for You’, a real standout, a spare Farnham composition using little more than a strummed acoustic guitar and his voice. When singing this very sombre and serious ballad on stage, John would play the jester. ‘Burn for You’, he’d explain, was a ‘sucky love song’, written for Jillian while he was on yet another road trip. ‘And it worked,’ he’d sometimes add, with a knowing wink.
Perhaps there was an additional line or two on his face, and his golden locks had thinned ever so slightly since the time of ‘You’re the Voice’, but John still looked great, stepping out in the video for ‘That’s Freedom’ in what would become his new go-to look: a stylish bespoke suit, matching dark shirt buttoned to the collar. He’d finally ditched the Driza-Bone. John looked sophisticated, a man moving into a comfortable middle age. Australia now had its very own Man in Black.
Chain Reaction sold almost 200,000 copies in its first two weeks of release, and powered its way to becoming the highest-selling Australian album of 1990. Yet Wheatley’s problems were never too far away. In the media’s mind, Farnham and Wheatley were intertwined; any Chain Reaction publicity seemingly presented another chance to dig a little deeper into Wheatley’s ongoing business troubles.
John dealt with Wheatley’s situation in typical Farnham fashion. In late September the two were on an Australian Airlines jet to Sydney. As they settled in for the hour-long trip, the flight attendant began handing out copies of newspapers. The headline on the front page of the Financial Review was a shocker: ‘Farnham Caught in Chain Reaction,’ it screamed. The story documented Wheatley’s recent financial woes, and revealed that John had loaned Wheatley money, which was true. As the plane left Tullamarine, it was clear to John that many of those on board were reading the story. Passengers were looking in their direction. Wheatley started to sink into his seat, praying for the power of invisibility.
John’s innate sense of loyalty towards his troubled friend kicked in. He called over the attendant.
‘Could you do me a favour?’ he asked. ‘Can you give me every leftover copy of the paper?’
As soon as the seatbelt sign was extinguished, John strolled down the aisle of the plane, Financial Reviews in hand.
‘Would you like to read about my embattled media-magnate manager Glenn Wheatley?’ he asked, as he distributed copies of the newspaper left, right and centre. ‘He’s just sitting over there with me.’ With that one funny gesture, John diffused a hugely awkward situation. Laughter broke out in the cabin. Wheatley breathed a hefty sigh of relief, easing himself back into an upright position.
‘My embattled manager Glenn Wheatley’ now became John’s standard line regarding his friend. It quickly shut down any speculation about their ongoing relationship: Farnham intended to stand by his man, wherever Wheatley’s problems led.
Soon after that flight, a reporter spoke with John.
‘How do Glenn’s financial problems affect you?’ he was asked.
‘I’m his mate and I’m not going anywhere,’ John said very directly. ‘He was there when I needed help and I’m not about to bail on him now he needs my help. I’m just evening up the score.’
John needed to escape for a while. He had been receiving mysterious, threatening notes, perhaps from someone involved with The Ivy, the same people who were making Wheatley’s life hell. Someone incorrectly assumed that whatever Wheatley owed could be str
ongarmed from Farnham. When these notes started to appear under the windscreen wipers of the crew’s rental cars on the Chain Reaction tour, it was clear that someone knew John’s comings and goings a little too closely. This was scary stuff. On 6 October artist and manager left for a three-week promotional trip, ostensibly to talk up Chain Reaction in Europe, but also to put some space between themselves and an increasingly difficult situation in Oz.
But even in Europe there were reminders of Wheatley’s problems. Old friend Christopher Skase had been in touch, inviting John and Glenn to Majorca, where the Skases were now based, as the investigation into Skase’s crashed company, Qintex, continued apace back in Australia. Their stay was pleasurable, opulent even, but neither John nor Wheatley dared ask the Skases how they could still afford the jet-set lifestyle. Not long after they returned home, authorities tried to extradite Skase back to Australia to face his creditors. He was now officially the ‘failed businessman’ Christopher Skase, a man on the run – not a great omen for Wheatley.
John and Wheatley, wisely, downplayed their relationship with the exiled businessman. For Wheatley, especially, any public awareness of this could only further harm ongoing speculation about his financial future.
While overseas, Wheatley’s former dream club, The Ivy, had been flogged for $2 million. He’d sunk $12 million into the venue. Not surprisingly, he hated the place. The good news was that the threats towards John had stopped. He went back on the road during November and December 1990, and kept touring in January 1991, as ‘Burn for You’ was released, the third charting single from Chain Reaction.
While Farnham filled the venue at Sanctuary Cove in Queensland mid-November 1990, his manager’s personal effects were sold at auction, returning a fraction of their value. An Arthur Boyd painting, purchased for almost $100,000, was flogged for $15K. But Wheatley was prepared to do anything to get his creditors out of his hair, at least for a while.