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THE LONELIEST NUMBER

Johnny’s first TV special aired on 10 April 1969. The hour-long show, hosted by Jimmy Hannan, also featured fellow pop artists Ross D. Wyllie, The Strangers and Yvonne Barrett. But it was not a success. ‘Channel 0 presented us with a Johnny Farnham special last night,’ noted a reporter in The Age, ‘an hour show which took every minute of an hour to pass by. Farnham did well, but it was a pity he had to mime most of his songs.’ The reviewer went on to criticise the lack of a studio audience, some odd decisions regarding non-musical parts of the show – a skit in which Johnny dressed as Robin Hood was tartly described as ‘almost a comedy spot’ – and the young man’s lack of presence. ‘He looked a little lost,’ the reviewer surmised. It seemed that Johnny wasn’t quite ready for the transition from the pop charts to a TV special, which was all part of Sambell’s master plan.

Johnny learnt another lesson about the harsh realities of a performer’s life when he toured Queensland, soon after, with Johnny O’Keefe. Since his Sydney Stadium heyday in the 1950s, O’Keefe had been on a career roller-coaster. His rocky journey had included a near-fatal car crash, several spells in psychiatric hospitals, a divorce, a disastrous US tour, a fall from public favour – and occasional chart success. O’Keefe’s star was in decline yet again when he and Farnham went on tour, but that didn’t stop O’Keefe from reminding audiences that he wasn’t called the Wild One for nothing. Johnny got to learn why at very close range.

Early on in O’Keefe’s set, the audience grew restless and started booing. ‘We want Johnny,’ they yelled, referring to the other, younger Johnny on the bill. Farnham looked on from side-stage, his concern growing, heckle by heckle, for O’Keefe.

‘Get off, you old fart,’ some members of the audience yelled, spilling their beers. ‘Bring on Johnny Farnham.’

This commotion only inspired O’Keefe to work harder. As Farnham watched, his respect growing by the minute, the old stager pushed his band to play harder, louder, while he urged the audience to get involved. The ripples spread through the room. A handful of songs later, the Wild One had the entire crowd hanging on his every roar, loving him unreservedly. They gave him a standing ovation when he finally left the stage after an hour, dripping sweat, the strains of ‘Shout’, O’Keefe’s big closer, ringing in everyone’s ears.

‘The audience [at first] didn’t care who he was,’ Farnham would recall. ‘It was a tough crowd. But by the third song, he had them. He was unbelievable – a remarkable man, a fantastic bloke.’ And a handy mentor for Johnny, too; he would be inspired by performances like this when his own career started to flatline. Often, when confronted with a surly crowd, Johnny would flash back to this rowdy night in Queensland and channel the Wild One. Never give up, he’d tell himself. Don’t let the bastards drag you down.

Perhaps a little bruised by the tepid response to Johnny’s TV special, Sambell and EMI chose his next single releases carefully. These were songs that would become as much Farnham staples as ‘Sadie’ – although this time they would have quality going for them, something you couldn’t say about the dear old thing with red detergent hands.

Harry Nilsson was an American singer whose wild streak was almost as legendary as his knack for killer melodies. When not running amok with John Lennon, Keith Moon and other large-living rockers, Nilsson was a red-hot performer: his 1969 cover of Fred Neil’s ‘Everybody’s Talking’, a centrepiece of the film Midnight Cowboy, earned Nilsson his first Grammy and a US Top 10 hit.

Nilsson was also a crack songwriter. His song ‘One’, which found its way to Johnny in the winter of 1969, had a curious creative genesis. The song – already a number five hit that year for America’s Three Dog Night – opened with a simple piano note, repeated over and over, not unlike the Bee Gees’ timeless ‘Spicks and Specks’. With it, Nilsson was trying to capture the sound of an engaged telephone line – for the broken-hearted, there’s nothing lonelier than the sound of an unanswered phone.

In Johnny’s recorded version, that sound was even starker, bleaker – somehow more desperate. Johnny then launched into the lyric with real gusto; for perhaps the first time in his career he was testing his ability to deliver genuine, deeply felt emotion. And he did it brilliantly. The production was slick, too, loaded with energy and just a hint of psychedelia.

‘One’ – backed by the truly awful ‘Mr Whippy’, a shameless plug for the ice-cream peddler – peaked at number four on Go-Set’s national chart in early October 1969, below the Rolling Stones’ ‘Honky Tonk Women’, Johnny Cash’s ‘A Boy Named Sue’ and Russell Morris’s great ‘Part Three into Paper Walls,’ another potent slice of homegrown pop.

When Johnny appeared on Uptight to sing ‘One’, the response – even before he opened his mouth – was euphoric. His female fans screamed the house down. Host Ross D. Wyllie did his best to keep things in check, but he might as well have been trying to hold back the tide.

‘As you can hear by all the noise,’ Wyllie half shouted, ‘we’ve got Johnny Farnham coming along for you.’

It was another slightly uneasy appearance by Farnham. This time around he was backed by a long-haired four-piece rock band – there wasn’t a dancing cleaning lady in sight – but Johnny stuck with his supper-club-friendly suit and high-wattage smile. He wasn’t quite ready to let his hair grow out, or lose the formal threads. And any edge the song had was undermined by the feverish response of his fans, who threw streamers and stuffed toys at Johnny, as if he was on the deck of the Oriana, about to hit the high seas. Still, it was a great song and an inspired vocal, and it would stay in Johnny’s live set for several decades. ‘One’ was a keeper.

The success of ‘One’ returned Johnny to the top of the pop pile – only weeks earlier he’d been anointed King of Pop, his first of five consecutive crowns. (Normie Rowe had claimed the crown in 1967 and ’68.) The award, established by Go-Set and Uptight, was fan-driven; readers could vote for their favourite pin-up by clipping a coupon from the pages of TV Week. In 1969, Johnny romped it in.

At the awards ceremony, staged at Melbourne’s Chevron Hotel, Johnny had some trouble with his oversized crown, which kept slipping while he tried to sing. It didn’t help that he had tears welling in his eyes.

The first song he chose to perform as King of Pop was his next hit single, ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’. It was yet another cover, this time of a recent BJ Thomas hit, composed by the highly rated team of Hal David and Burt Bacharach. The song featured prominently in the huge box office hit Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a vehicle for dynamic duo Paul Newman and Robert Redford. With that kind of pedigree, how could Johnny miss? His version was unavoidable throughout the early months of 1970, topping the Go-Set charts from 24 January to 13 March: another massive hit single for Australia’s favourite son. When he took the stage at Melbourne’s Festival Hall, Farnham-mania reached new heights, as his fans screamed, shrieked, threw streamers, waved and cried. Some passed out, overcome by the moment. Once revived by medical staff, they’d leap back into the fray.

Johnny also appeared on Channel 9’s Bandstand to plug ‘Raindrops’. Three years after ‘Sadie’, he was now ‘the man who needs no introduction’, in the estimation of Bandstand’s bookish host, Brian Henderson. This time around, instead of a long-haired rock-band backing him up, the thoroughly wholesome, G-rated Johnny Farnham was surrounded by a team of dancers. As Johnny sang and glowed and broke hearts from coast to coast, their steps looked more like a test for drunkenness – ‘Okay, place your hands on your head while touching your nose, now walk a straight line’ – than actual choreography. At one point, a female dancer exchanged a goofy smile and a laugh with Johnny, as if to say, ‘I know, it’s dumb, isn’t it?’

Bandstand loved Farnham; between 1967 and 1968 he made six appearances, singing all his singles, plus obscurities like the Clinton Ford / Charlie Chester nugget ‘In the Old Bazaar in Cairo’, and Engelbert Humperdinck’s ‘Miss Elaine E.S. Jones’. Henderson was right; after so much exposure, Johnny didn’t need an introduction.

Yet, despite being a big hit, ‘Raindrops’ typified the tendency of Johnny (and Sambell) – during the first decade of his career, at least – to flip-flop between credible songs and safe mainstream choices. This was done, certainly in part, to keep the hits coming, but also to ensure Johnny didn’t alienate any part of his audience. Yet it was short-term thinking at best: eventually his teen fans would move on to someone newer and even prettier – teenager Jamie Redfern was already starting to make waves. If Johnny wanted to genuinely establish himself as a ‘real’ singer he needed to start taking control, yet he seemed to leave the key decisions in the hands of his manager and record company. ‘One’ was a terrific choice, as was ‘Friday Kind of Monday’, but in between there was a mix of clunkers and crowd-pleasers. It was unclear if Johnny was set on becoming a great vocalist or an old-fashioned entertainer.

Johnny’s life was a whirlwind, a situation he’d grown to grudgingly accept. ‘Just point me at the stage,’ he’d wearily tell Sambell most nights. There was hardly a day when he didn’t have a radio commitment, a TV spot or a charity event, another single to record, a concert to play, more hands to shake, cheeks to kiss, autographs to sign. The turnover rate at the time was remarkable; even serial chart-toppers The Beatles and the Bee Gees crafted new singles every couple of months for fear of being swamped by a tsunami of new pop acts. Johnny understood this, but he also had a dangerous inability to say no – to pretty much anything. He aimed to please.

A typical day for Farnham at this time might begin with an early morning flight from somewhere to Melbourne, where he’d be driven straight to the studio. He’d arrive without knowing what he was to sing; he’d learn the songs on the fly. Then by six, with the session done – he recorded his first couple of albums in a matter of days – he’d be off to that evening’s gigs. Sometimes there were two, even three appearances per night. The next day the cycle would start all over again. He’d keep his head down when out in public, trying his best not to be mobbed. It was fantastic to have supportive fans, but he would have loved some sort of normal life.

And in spite of a succession of hit singles, constant touring and the incessant pushing of a very entrepreneurial manager, the King of Pop was hardly raking in the cash. On a good night, he might return home with $30, sometimes $40. As he was resigned to writing nothing more than the occasional B-side, he wasn’t earning much from songwriting royalties either. Johnny Farnham was generating money, but it was for his label and other writers – not so much for himself.

An exhausted Johnny turned 21 on 1 July 1970. Many years down the line, at the age of 50, he was asked about himself as a 21-year-old: What was going on in his life? Who was in charge?

‘I never had much control of what was happening – I tended to be led around a lot,’ he admitted.

When pushed for what advice he’d have given his 21-year-old self, Johnny figured it would have been something about seizing the reins, making some of his own decisions, choosing his own direction. Learning to say no. But that didn’t happen, not in 1970.

‘I was never given the opportunity to sit down and consider my position, my music, what I wanted to do,’ Johnny confessed. ‘I took my advice [only] when I finally grew up enough to take control of my life.’

By contrast, his flatmate Glenn Wheatley had recently fired Sambell and taken over management of The Masters Apprentices. He was calling the shots.

On dark days, Johnny missed his old job with plumber Stan Foster and the guys on the building site: life was more predictable back then.