Listen to any classic rock station in Australia, continental Europe and much of the rest of the world and you’re likely to hear You’re the Voice. John Farnham’s 1986 track is one of Australia’s most enduring global classics – a pop song that’s both sentimental and forceful in its convictions, and seemingly nonpartisan enough for alt-right groups to try to co-opt it. It hasn’t been as heavily memed as, say, Daryl Braithwaite’s The Horses, another Australian hit of a similar vintage but it’s just as ingrained in the cultural memory among people young and old.
As far as immortal hits go, you could absolutely do worse: aside from being a musically strange, ineffably genius work, it’s also a song with a strange history that seems to act as a proof of concept.
By 1986 Farnham was out for the count, according to much of the Australian music industry. The then-38-year-old had been recording under his own name for nearly 20 years at that point, having broken out in the late 60s with a string of dinky but popular hits. As Johnny Farnham he had built a reputation as a gangly, grinning teen idol performing versions of tracks such as Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head and Acapulco Sun on TV shows such as Hit Scene and Happening. By the 70s he had begun to appear in musical theatre and was hosting roles on television, the relative shine of his early success quickly beginning to dull.
In the 80s after changing his stage name to John Farnham, the singer tried to pull off what so many teen idols have tried to do and which most fail at: a pivot to “serious” music. The relative lack of success of his first “grown-up” record, 1980’s Uncovered, confirmed that Farnham’s attempt to move away from the relatively cloistered world of cabaret and musical theatre would be harder than it may have first seemed. Salvation seemingly arrived in 1982, when Farnham was asked to join Melbourne’s successful soft-rock outfit Little River Band after the departure of its vocalist Glenn Shorrock. Rather than revive both careers and kill two birds with one stone, it sent each act into a relative downslide, the group’s two albums with Farnham failing to reach the same commercial heights as their records with Shorrock in Australia or the US.
Farnham found his time in the band difficult, and there was acrimony at the centre of the group for his relatively short time fronting them. In Finding the Voice, a new documentary about Farnham’s life and career, Glenn Wheatley, the manager of Little River Band at the time, describes working with them as akin to “managing world war two” – a perhaps over-the-top but nonetheless evocative descriptor. By the time the band’s final album with Farnham was released, 1986’s No Reins, he had already left the group – not with the resuscitated career he had hoped for but with a drive to create something under his own name that would.
Salvation finally came in the form of You’re the Voice: a huge, effusive and strangely timely single that would single-handedly reorient Farnham’s career. Written by the British songwriter Chris Thompson, Icehouse’s Andy Qunta, Procol Harum songwriter Keith Reid and singer-songwriter Maggie Ryder, You’re the Voice was inspired by a 1985 nuclear disarmament rally in London that Thompson missed; saddened that he hadn’t been there to lend support, he began writing a song that he felt captured the spirit of the massive protest.
Eventually the tape was passed to Farnham and his team, supposedly through Qunta. Although Farnham had previously been trying to hone a more rock-oriented sound, You’re the Voice is the product of mod-cons: producers David Hirschfelder and Ross Fraser used walls of samplers and synthesisers to create the song’s trademark sound – a rich, glossy universe of metronomic blips and synth sighs that sounds like one of Kate Bush’s off-kilter hits given a buff and polish.
Although the track is deeply familiar now, at the time it was considered profoundly off-piste for a centrist pop song, using a sample of a car door slamming to form part of the drum track. (Finding the Voice dedicates much of its – generally quite dull – runtime to talking heads including Celine Dion and Robbie Williams saying why they love the track; the most thrilling sections, no doubt, are when Hirschfelder is mapping out the array of unwieldy synths he used to put the song together.) The song’s most recognisable feature – its bagpipes solo – is still its masterstroke; a downright strange innovation suggested by Farnham that required the entire song to be redone in B-flat, the only key the bagpipes play in.
The track’s graceful, soaring intensity perfectly mirrored Thompson’s guilelessly aspirational lyrics, which are decidedly softer and more amenable than more strident protest songs of the decade, such as Midnight Oil’s Beds Are Burning. And then, of course, there’s Farnham’s voice – for much of the song, it’s little more than a wordless, mellifluous wail, occasionally pushing itself into an outright howl. It’s the embodiment of the song’s striver sensibility – an instrument being pushed, arguably, to its limits.
Listening now, it’s almost funny to think of You’re the Voice as a protest song: capturing the profound individualism of the 80s, history has all but buffed away the track’s anti-nuke origins. Instead, it just feels as though it may have been written as a kind of battler anthem, or a simple call for unity. (In contrast to other hits of 1986, of course – decidedly apolitical songs including Diana Ross’s Chain Reaction or Starship’s We Built This City – you can understand its resonance.) For Farnham, it was a lifeline.
Although it was initially rejected by radio stations because of its associations with “Johnny” Farnham, the track became a huge success, totally revitalising the singer’s career and leading to its associated album, Whispering Jack, becoming Australia’s all-time highest-selling album by an Australian artist. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime success story to match a once-in-a-lifetime anthem.
Finding the Voice is out in Australian cinemas from Thursday
