John Farnham with The Little River Band - The Farnham Years (1988)

The call to join Little River Band came one Wednesday morning at 1.40 in a holiday resort outside of Melbourne. Asked if he would interrupt a well-earned respite to attend a 10 a.m. meeting, John consented and a few hours later walked into a room full of LRB members and acoustic guitars. Two hours later he was in a recording studio, making his contribution to the seventh LRB invited to perform soundtrack songs for five American films and had captured the admiration of the likes of Quincy Jones and Stevie Wonder. His career needed the forward movement which LRB, at that time, was unable to provide. Yet, it should not be overlooked that Little River Band did provide Farnham with a vitally important bridge between two entirely different realms of music. In the 60s and 70s, John had largely been associated, in the public’s mind, with pretty pop, musical comedy and variety television. LRB dirtied him up a little, dragged him through a few hundred dingy dives around the world, replaced his velvet with denim, gave him the opportunity to extend himself vocally and emotionally, artd generally outfit him with an aura of rock’n’roll credibility. Without these four and a half years, the massive public and industry acceptance which accompanied the release of Whispering Jack may not have been possible. The first to attest to this is John Farnham himself, who insists that he regrets not a day spent with the Little River Band. “It taught me a great deal” he explains. “It matured me a lot musically and exposed me internationally; which was great because there were no preconceptions about me at all outside this country. I honestly believe that Little River Band was one of the best bands in the world. They were unbelievable players who could get up before any crowd in any country and blow them away. It was a joy to sing with them. But familiarity had bred contempt. We just didn’t excite people, didn’t capture their imagination. “It got to the stage where I had to admit to myself that it wasn’t working. The complete disinterest with which the last album was received was devastating. I gave 110 % to them while I was there. I put myself under a lot of pressure because, rightly or wrongly, I felt a great responsibility. I was the one in the most light; people expected a lot of me after I replaced Glenn Shorrock, and I expected a lot of myself. So I thought seriously about it and decided that if I was going to put myself under that sort of pressure, it might (as well be for something for which I was totally responsible.” There was almost a cruel irony in the fact that, in a live situation at least, John Farnham solo wasn’t all that different to John Farnham with Little River Band. Some of the players were the same, even some of the songs. The major difference was the size of the audience and its reaction. The right album at the right time had seen it increase ten and twenty fold. One can’t help but feel for the members of LRB, then watching from the wings as this phenomena unfolded, contemplating the nature of the ‘game’ in which they have cast their respective lots. A ‘game’ which has, in album, The Net. “I thought about the offer very seriously” he admits, “for about five minutes!” John later revealed: “Glenn’s shoes were hard to step into so I didn’t try. I couldn’t be a Shorrock clone and the guys accepted that. They gave me the freedom to move and the encouragement to develop my own style within the band.” Guitarist and co-founder Beeb Birtles saw the recruitment as “a perfect marriage. Graham and I have always written songs with difficult harmonies and key changes, which are perfectly suited to John’s voice.” It seemed that every LRB song, old and new, was perfectly suited to John’s vigorous, almost ecstatic vocal approach. So much so that the union found almost instant acceptance. The stark, guitar-dominated Down On The Border shot into the top ten (giving the outfit its biggest Australian hit since Help Is On Its Way in 1977), while The Net album performed almost as impressively. In America the LP stopped at #61 but the single The Other Guy reached #11, as it did in Australia. Little River Band were firmly entrenched in the vast American market, with a dozen hits singles and half a dozen hit albums (two of which were platinum certified, and three of which were gold). Given the seemingly smooth transition of frontmen, there was every reason to believe that the fortunes of the refurbished Little River Band would continue on an upward swing, and to this day it is a puzzle of cosmic proportions why they did not. The band was creating some of its most impressive, fully-realised works, and hard-working Famham, having found a comfortable niche, was rendering them with passion and precision. However, when a fiery version of the Easybeats classic St. Louis failed to connect and the second Farnham-era album, Playing To Win, was all but ignored, it was apparent that the train was off the rails. Be it a consequence of public fickleness, or the band’s failure to properly orientate its music and image to the demands of the eighties, Little River Band had fallen out of commercial favour. This state of affairs was particularly galling when the magnificent No Reins album virtually sunk without a trace. To this day, Graham Goble insists that it is the finest Little River Band long player of all; and it is certainly hard to nominate a more impressive Famham vocal performance than When The War Is Over, an unexpected reworking of the shimmering Cold Chisel ballad. John Famham’s departure from Little River Band was as logical as it was inevitable. It was plain that a new approach was needed to be adopted by both camps. John had been the late 80s, once again seen fit to reward their labours liberally. To my mind at least, the most important aspect of this collection is that it may help to dispel the mostly erroneous impressions of Little River Band’s ‘Famham years’. Much of this material was criminally ignored at the time of original release and overwhelmingly deserves a second, less prejudiced hearing. It fits comfortably into the body of both Famham and LRB’s better work and will, I believe, age remarkably well.

Exact Audio Copy V1.3 from 2. September 2016

EAC extraction logfile from 1. November 2020, 22:36

John Farnham with The Little River Band / The Farnham Years

Used drive : PIONEER BD-RW BDR-208D Adapter: 1 ID: 0

Read mode : Secure
Utilize accurate stream : Yes
Defeat audio cache : Yes
Make use of C2 pointers : No

Read offset correction : 667
Overread into Lead-In and Lead-Out : No
Fill up missing offset samples with silence : Yes
Delete leading and trailing silent blocks : No
Null samples used in CRC calculations : Yes
Used interface : Native Win32 interface for Win NT & 2000

Used output format : Internal WAV Routines
Sample format : 44.100 Hz; 16 Bit; Stereo


TOC of the extracted CD

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3 | 5:34.37 | 4:58.20 | 25087 | 47456
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9 | 31:03.50 | 2:44.47 | 139775 | 152121
10 | 33:48.22 | 4:01.53 | 152122 | 170249


Range status and errors

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Filename D:\BlondStyle\The Farnham Years.wav

Peak level 98.2 %
Extraction speed 6.4 X
Range quality 100.0 %
Test CRC A73AF49B
Copy CRC A73AF49B
Copy OK

No errors occurred


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–– CUETools DB Plugin V2.1.6

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Track | CTDB Status
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2 | (11/11) Accurately ripped
3 | (11/11) Accurately ripped
4 | (11/11) Accurately ripped
5 | (11/11) Accurately ripped
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10 | (11/11) Accurately ripped


==== Log checksum ADCCCDDD08051583A75DB9F73876035051C669204F671943D090A8F104053033 ====

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Analyzed: John Farnham with The Little River Band / The Farnham Years
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DR Peak RMS Duration Track
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
DR13 -0.77 dB -16.12 dB 2:59 01-Playing To Win
DR13 -1.37 dB -18.54 dB 2:35 02-Down On The Border
DR13 -0.32 dB -16.29 dB 4:58 03-Blind Eyes
DR13 -0.41 dB -16.57 dB 4:08 04-We Two
DR13 -0.69 dB -16.92 dB 4:23 05-When Cathedrals Were White
DR13 -0.15 dB -15.65 dB 3:29 06-St. Louis
DR11 -1.26 dB -15.54 dB 5:07 07-When The War Is Over
DR14 -1.28 dB -16.64 dB 3:24 08-Don't Blame Me
DR15 -1.16 dB -18.22 dB 2:45 09-The Other Guy
DR12 -1.33 dB -16.08 dB 4:02 10-Paper Paradise
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Number of tracks: 10
Official DR value: DR13

Samplerate: 44100 Hz
Channels: 2
Bits per sample: 16
Bitrate: 916 kbps
Codec: FLAC
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