Why John Farnham was nearly rock-blocked from ‘You’re the Voice’

Far from an instant hit, after initial reluctance from radio to play a John Farnham song in 1986, You’re the Voice took a month to top the charts and set up the release of his comeback album Whispering Jack.

That record is officially the highest-selling Australian album in our chart history. It’s now a remarkable 24 times platinum, marking 1.7 million sales.

You’re the Voice is a timeless classic still being discovered by new generations.

It was also one of the first songs Coldplay played when they formed. Those drums you hear? They’re the sound of a Porsche door being slammed and sampled.

RELATED: John Farnham to headline Aussie rock festival in 2017

However it could have been very different — one of the co-writers of You’re the Voice originally insisted John Farnham couldn’t record the track.

“I got a call from my publisher saying ‘This guy called John Farnham from Australia wants to record You’re the Voice,” songwriter Chris Thompson recalls.

“I said ‘You’ve got to be joking! He’s not doing it’. I’d grown up in New Zealand and all I knew about John Farnham was Sadie the Cleaning Lady. I told my publisher he’s like a joke in Australia and absolutely no way is he recording You’re the Voice and put the phone down.”

Here’s the story of how You’re the Voice went from British protest song to Australia’s unofficial national anthem.

In October 1985 Chris Thompson, singer and guitarist with Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, had set up a songwriting session with two writers from his publishing company. Andy Qunta had written for Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, but the British musician was working with Australian band Icehouse in Sydney. He’d go on to co-write their 1987 global hit Crazy.

Maggie Ryder was a British keyboardist who’d worked as a backing singer for Eurythmics and Marvin Gaye. It was the first time they’d all worked together.

The day they started writing, October 25, was the day 100,000 people marched to Hyde Park to support the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Chris Thompson: “I’d overslept and didn’t make the march. We were watching it on TV. I was annoyed at myself and that’s where the idea for You’re the Voice came from. If you want to do something you have to go out and do it yourself.”

They worked between 1pm and 5pm at Thompson’s studio in the London suburb of Hendon. After Qunta and Ryder left Thompson came up with the ‘Wo-oh-oh-oh’ hook in the chorus. Then Ryder called saying she’d come up with an idea for the chorus, a melody line which worked perfectly before his idea.

Thompson: “After that we never got in the same room again. We spoke on the phone about lyrics but I kept working on it in my studio. As it progressed I got the title You’re the Voice and had verse lyrics and chorus lyrics. I thought it was a good song but the lyrics weren’t as good as the music.”

Songwriter Keith Reid co-wrote Procul Harum’s 1967 anthem A Whiter Shade Of Pale. Thompson knew someone with a connection to Reid and passed on a message to see if he could help with the lyrics of a song he had been working on.

Thompson: “We all agreed by the time it was finished we had something special. Getting Keith to come and help me rewrite the lyrics was a masterstroke. He’s a fantastic lyricist. He was working with something that was 75 per cent finished. He wrote his 25 per cent. That’s how the song came to have four writers. He came up with some very important lines like ‘We’re all someone’s daughter, we’re all someone’s son’. He got rid of what I called the ‘yuck’ lines. It was a sentimental protest song, but with a few yuck lines.”

Chris Thompson — You're The Voice

Thompson was making his own album at the time, for Atlantic Records. He played You’re the Voice for the label boss, planning to use it on his own record.

Thompson: “I said ‘We’ve got a hit!’ I was holding it for myself, really. And the head of the label said ‘Nobody wants to listen to protest songs anymore’.”

Qunta returned to Australia to work with Icehouse, taking a cassette copy of You’re the Voice with him.

Thompson: “Folklore says Andy was with Icehouse and heard someone saying they needed a hit for a record John Farnham was working on so he pulled out his cassette and gave it to them. I’m not sure how true that is but it sounds fantastic. ‘Here’s a hit, John’.

Farnham was indeed working on an album. After 1980s Uncovered he’d started a business relationship with Glenn Wheatley, who he knew from the 60s when he was Johnny Farnham and Wheatley was in the Masters Apprentices. Both shared the same manager, Darryl Sambell. Farnham had been frontman of Little River Band (who Wheatley managed) and by 1985 found himself floundering in a music industry who still freeze-framed him as the voice of Sadie the Cleaning Lady.

Wheatley: “We had to start making an album from scratch. I was talking to David Foster about producing it, he could give us three weeks. That wasn’t enough. We had to make sure we had the right songs. Ross Fraser had been working with Real Life and Pseudo Echo and was able to come off the road and commit to it full time. It took months and months to find those songs, that’s why Whispering Jack still stands up today because there’s no cringe-worthy songs, there’s no filler. Every song deserves its place. It was a process.”

With no record label willing to punt on a new John Farnham album famously Wheatley had to mortgage his house to get the $150,000 to fund Whispering Jack himself.

Wheatley: “That was a lot for an album in those days. We had people on the payroll, people employed to look for songs. It was expensive because it took a long time to make. We were getting over John’s pop star days. We all knew what he had. He’s one of the greatest singers of our time. We just had to find the right songs for him.”

Ross Fraser would listen to up to 50 songs each day, sourced from all over the world. During the culling process he’d found just enough for Whispering Jack, with Farnham involved in writing two extras.

Doris Tyler, who was working for the Wheatley Organisation, heard You’re the Voice and alerted Wheatley.

Wheatley: “We listened to it and just thought ‘What a song’. We passed it on to Ross.”

Fraser: “We were lucky with You’re the Voice. We got it fresh from England. Doris Tyler gave it to me. I was going out to see John in Bulleen where he was living. I put it on in the car and thought ‘Holy shit, this is good’. We were really close to finishing the album, I got to John’s and he loved it. It was literally the last song we looked at for the album.”

Farnham had set up a makeshift studio in a basement of the house he was renting in Bulleen.

Farnham: “I was in significant debt at the time, I’d made some very bad business decisions and I really was in a bit of trouble. I had to sell my house and my car. We were renting this place, I hated it, it was just not me but it had a basement. So we set up in the basement and did all the pre-production on Whispering Jack for 18 hours a day.”

Wheatley: “It was not the most salubrious of surroundings.”

Fraser: “John felt this album was his last shot. He’d sold his house, he was on the bones of his arse. It was make or break. He knew if this album didn’t work he’d probably be back playing at an RSL.”

When he heard You’re the Voice Farnham had an instant reaction.

Farnham: “I knew it was mine. It came in very late in the piece, the last two weeks of recording the album. I just thought ‘This has got to get on the album’.”

Wheatley made a call to acquire the song for Farnham with Thompson’s publishers in London.

Thompson: “I got a call saying ‘This guy called John Farnham wants to do You’re the Voice’ and I said ‘You’ve got to be joking. He’s not doing it.’ The only thing I knew about John Farnham was Sadie the Cleaning Lady. I told them he’s like a joke in Australia, absolutely no way is he doing that song and I put the phone down. Two hours later I got another call saying ‘He really wants to do it, he’s making this big comeback record, he wants this for the album’. They persuaded me to allow him to record it — my feeling is he’d already recorded it — and if I didn’t like it I could say no.”

Farnham and Fraser had worked on a version in the Bulleen basement. As with nearly all of Whispering Jack, they relied heavily on technology over traditional instruments, including the brand new Fairlight synthesiser. The pair also got heavily into the new technique of sampling.

The drums on the demo of You’re the Voice were a car door being slammed in the Bulleen garage. They later upgraded to the sound of a Porsche door being slammed in a fancier garage.

Farnham: “The drums are a car door. Phil Collins complimented me on the drum samples on You’re the Voice once. I said ‘That’s great. Can I borrow some of yours?’

Fraser: “We’d been in the studio for six months, we were experimenting. John was really into sampling the drums. He was up for anything.”

There was one major change from Thompson’s demo of You’re the Voice (which he sang) and Farnham’s version — they swapped a bass solo for a bagpipe solo. Farnham’s favourite song of all time is AC/DC’s It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock and Roll) and borrowed their idea of using bagpipes.

Fraser: “John thought they’d sound good. He thought he could sneak them onto that song and he did and it worked. They’re real bagpipes too.”

Wheatley: “Bagpipes are always slightly out of tune. It’s hard to make them work but they did.”

Thomas eventually heard Farnham’s version of You’re the Voice and was suitably impressed.

Thomas: “It was fantastic. They’d stuck to the original demo, which is every songwriter’s dream. They changed one note on the bass and put in this brilliant bagpipe solo. John’s a tremendous singer, but you can’t blame me for being worried if all you knew of John Farnham before that was Sadie the Cleaning Lady where he’d put on this (UK entertainer) Tommy Steele accent.”

The finished version of You’re the Voice was recorded at AAV Studios in South Melbourne, along with the rest of Whispering Jack.

Wheatley, aware You’re the Voice was ‘the’ song, arrived to hear the completed version, having almost worn out Farnham’s Bulleen demo version in his car cassette player.

Farnham: “I had a bit of a cold. I can usually push through that. I finished the vocal, I thought it sounded a bit weak. I wanted to do it again.”

Wheatley: “My wife Gaynor and I turned up with a bottle of champagne to hear the final version of the famous song we’d been listening to for so long. And to be honest it left me a little bit flat when I heard it. It wasn’t quite right. I’d fallen in love with the demo John had done, I’d listened to his voice on this demo for a month or two. He looked at me and said “You don’t like it do you?’ I told him there was just something special about the demo. He just went ‘OK, turn the lights out’ and went out into the studio and sang that vocal that gave me chills. That’s what I’d missed. Sometimes you overproduce things. They’d laboured so much on the song it had lost the spark of the demo. It was just a small thing but it was a big thing to me. But that night I took the new cassette home, we’d road test everything in the car. And that’s the one, we’ve got it now. And that’s the one on the album.”

Album done, Wheatley then began trying to find a record deal for John Farnham, thinking You’re the Voice would be the ideal carrot. He was mistaken.

John Farnham — You're the Voice on Hey Hey It's Saturday

Wheatley: “Every label passed on it. I had to release it on Wheatley Records because I couldn’t get anyone to take the punt. I knew people at radio would still have a problem playing a John Farnham song, they’d still think of him as Johnny Farnham. I had a few stations straight up tell me ‘We’ll never play a John Farnham song, he’s the Sadie man’. So I put it out on a white label without his name on it.”

Farnham: “The Sadie thing was a problem. We pretty much released the song in a bloody brown paper bag. We got a significant deal of resistance from, for want of a better word, hipper stations.”

You’re the Voice was performed on several TV shows at the time — including Hey Hey It’s Saturday and Countdown.

Brad March was working as music director at 2Day FM in Sydney, which at the time had an adult contemporary format, much like Smooth FM today.

March: “It came into the station on a seven inch reel to reel tape, it hadn’t even been pressed as a vinyl record yet. That was unusual. We’d heard the market leader at the time, Triple M Sydney, said they wouldn’t play it. They were a bit arrogant about pop in general. They thought there was too much of a Johnny Farnham stigma from his early days. I remember playing the song and instantly thought it was a No.1. I’ve always believed in the power of a song. It had a great hook and was one of those songs you sing along to.”

March added You’re the Voice to 2Day FM’s playlist — from the reel to reel tape — the first station in the country to do so.

March: “The station’s receptionist told me it was getting a lot of listener calls and feedback, we were inundated with requests. Within a week or two it was the most requested song on the station.”

A music video was recorded at Melbourne’s Ormond Hall with director Rob Wellington.

Farnham: “I don’t remember much about it. That was a brand new experience for me. I can’t look at it now, there’s a bit of a cringe factor. But it is what it is.”

Farnham’s friends Derryn Hinch and then partner Jacki Weaver appear in the clip.

Wheatley: “The video was done for $5000. I was paying for everything. It was done on a shoestring budget. I called in Derryn and Jacki, some of the guys from Pseudo Echo (James and Vince Leigh) and Greg Macainsh from Skyhooks are in the band, it was pretty much anyone who’d do me a favour.”

You’re the Voice entered the Australian Top 40 at No. 40 on October 13 1986 and took four weeks to reach No.1.

Wheatley: “It wasn’t instant. We really had to work it. Solid TV appearances and finally radio stations started playing it. Once that kicked in there was no stopping it.”

Farnham: “Once it was on the chart the naysayers were almost forced to play it, which I loved.”

March: “It turned John’s career around in a similar way to how What’s Love Got to Do With It relaunched Tina Turner’s career a few years earlier.”

Whispering Jack hit No. 1 in Australia two weeks after You’re the Voice. The album wound up being No. 1 for 26 weeks.

Wheatley: “It became almost boring! The record label would tell me they couldn’t get Michael Jackson to No. 1 because of John. Six months at No.1. No one could knock him off. Week after week after week.”

You’re the Voice started to get international attention. It reached No. 1 in Germany and Sweden, No. 6 in the UK and a major hit in Austria, Switzerland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Canada and New Zealand.

Farnham: “It got me out of debt. It’s enabled me to tour the world. Although the world has never been the most important thing in my life, I prefer being in Australia. Having said that I was happy to go to Europe and the UK to promote it but I didn’t want to campaign as it were. America just didn’t get it, nothing happened there.”

You’re the Voice was released in the US, but peaked at No. 82.

Fraser: “the US record company wanted someone else to mix it. He left the claps off at the front. It went out and didn’t do much. A year later I knew the guys at BMG and they put out my version again, with the claps. It got to No. 1 in about seven states and had a second life. The US was the market that missed out the most but that’s how it is.”

US band Heart recorded a version, released in 1991, which became a minor hit in America and the UK.

Heart’s Ann Wilson heard the song when in a cab on tour in London.

Wilson: “That song is still so relevant, it may as well have been written yesterday. We fell in love with that song, we took it into our world.”

Thompson: “I think there’s been around 15 versions of You’re the Voice. The Chinese version is the most interesting. The London Symphony Orchestra did it. I performed it once in Germany with John on a TV show. I perform it in my own shows, and I’ve put the bagpipes in.”

On March 14 2009 the Sound Relief charity concert held events in Melbourne and Sydney for bushfire and flood relief.

At the SCG John Farnham performed You’re the Voice with the most famous backing band in the world — Coldplay.

Wheatley: “The first time John met Coldplay it was actually in the John Farnham Room backstage at Rod Laver Arena. They told us that You’re the Voice was one of the very first songs they ever used to play as a band. John’s sitting there thinking ‘The biggest band in the world used to cover You’re the Voice when they started out?’ They were fans of the first order.”

Farnham remembers preparing to rehearse the song with Coldplay.

Farnham: “Chris said it was one of the first records he ever bought as a kid, which was nice. I asked him what we were going to do about the bagpipe solo and he just looked at me and said ‘We don’t do bagpipes’. OK, fair enough!”

Coldplay’s Jonny Buckland instead played the solo on guitar.

Coldplay- You're The Voice (with John Farnham) Sound Relief

Wheatley and Farnham remain protective of You’re the Voice — refusing regular requests to use the track (though they OK’d a lucrative Ford ad in 2012 where Farnham sings the track from the back seat of a car) and also expressing their disapproval when the song was used by Reclaim Australia protesters.

Farnham: “It’s not something I want used in a negative way. I keep it away from all those things. I actually don’t have a say with what happens with the song, I didn’t write it. That’s how it got used in a Telstra ad once. I had no say in that. Shit happens.”

Thompson: “It’s been a nice earner. I hope it will continue to be wonderful for my kids. It gets used a lot. I wish I had a few more like You’re the Voice. It’s wonderful for Andy and Maggie. It gives us a (financial) kick in the butt twice a year and makes life a lot easier for us all. I guess Keith already had that with A Whiter Shade Of Pale. But we’re all very happy campers because of it.”

Farnham’s sons regularly send their dad recordings of You’re the Voice being sung like an anthem in bars, clubs, pubs or football matches.

Farnham: “That blows me away. I never started calling it a national anthem, it just happened and it knocks me away every time someone refers to it as that. It’s absolutely amazing.”

Whispering Jack is still the most successful Australian album of all time. A limited edition 30th anniversary reissue boxset was released this week — with just 5000 copies available. There are no leftover songs from the sessions (Ross Fraser says they recorded the 10 tracks on the album, no more) but bonus live material on DVD, a 30 page booklet from the era well as the album pressed on white vinyl and remastered on CD.

Farnham: “When we hit a million sales we were gobsmacked. Glenn said to me ‘I don’t think we’ll see this happen again in our lifetime’. I’m in my late 60s, it’s getting close to that!”

The Complete Whispering Jack (Sony) out now. John Farnham 2017 tour dates here

Chart information courtesy Gavin Ryan

Originally published as Secrets of Farnsey’s ‘You’re the Voice’