TAPE Me Back To The Future — MADE For Tape # 1: John Farnham, “Whispering Jack” (1986)
An occasional series here that celebrates the cassette-tape format in all its glory. Wobbles and all…
John Farnham, Whispering Jack (1986)
I first owned this album on tape, shortly after it was released. My memory is usually pretty insane around such things, but I’m slightly guessing to say I was given this by an aunty who won it live on air for some radio phone-in, and then listened to it once and decided she didn’t need it. That definitely happened, but it might have been another album. Anyway, I was just getting into collecting tapes, so this arrived at the right time.
The album was huge by the time I was listening to it. And then my folks filled in some blanks about how he’d had a novelty hit way back when he was a teen, and I heard somewhere that he was briefly in the Little River Band, which was a staple of radio back then, and in the record collection at home, and in the homes of various family members too. Little River Band was the BBQ music of the mid-80s, along with a lot of Australian bands (Midnight Oil, Men at Work, Icehouse, Cold Chisel…)
Anyway, I was into the album for a while. And then I wasn’t. No shame either way.
But I did own this same album on vinyl (and basically never played it — probably gave Pressure Down and You’re The Voice a hoon once at a party, thinking it funny or clever or ironic, or the trifecta, and perhaps it bombed).
I definitely never owned this — nor anything by John Farnham — on CD. And I never really think about him much, but I can recognise he was a super-great singer. And he was everywhere. This album was the relaunch of his career, as he had struggled to shake off being a teen pop-idol and a covers artist, and then that cameo-run in the Little River Band. But after Whispering Jack he quickly released Age of Reason (1988), Chain Reaction (1990) and a live album (1991) as well as that duet with Barnesy for his Soul Deep record in the early 90s. That was Farnham set — and he really spent the next decade, if not two, touring and capitalising on a quite phenomenal comeback run.
The 33 1/3 series of books dedicated to classic albums has gone regional — and the Australian series featured one about Whispering Jack. I read it and enjoyed it, it made me stream the album one time, first time hearing it through in 30+ years. And I dug it. The book did an excellent job of reminding me just how massive he was, and how big this record had been.
Then the recent doco, John Farnham: Finding The Voice, also thoroughly excellent. And I recommend it to anyone, perhaps especially anyone who was absolutely never a fan. It’s a brilliant piece of documentary filmmaking and such a compelling story.
So it all really fell into place, and then I got the tape deck (again) which of course makes me open to listening to cassettes again. Well that’s only and always a nostalgia-hit. I get a copy of Whispering Jack and think it’s the perfect intro to this series. Those chorused guitars. The two anthems per side, and the way the rest of the filler-ish tracks become a crucial juggle. There was something so quintessentially 1980s about tape-listening for me, because of course it was the time and it was the format. But, yeah, as a friend said recently, some things just feel like they were “MADE for tape” — gifting me the subtitle for this series. It’s about the production, the mixing, the way the sound was arranged (both track listing-wise, and aurally).
My friend Richard (and I know, I’ve hardly ever mentioned him in any of my pages here!) had the Chain Reaction tape. Which wasn’t anywhere near as good. But we’d swap them. And share them. And Farnham was there for us on road trips alongside Elton John and Phil Collins as the music we liked, absolutely, but the big reason we played it was because it was acceptable to the parents too. We’d probably be wanting to blast Guns N Roses, Def Leppard, AC/DC, Beastie Boys and Poison as much or more than Phil and Elton and Farnsy. But that wasn’t an option with Richard’s parents. So, yeah, a wave of nostalgia for driving the Napier-Wairoa road hits me when I hear these songs. And that’s both good and bad of course. But it is there. It is noted.
TAPE Me Back To The Future — MADE For Tape is an occasional series here as part of “Sounds Good!” on Substack
