Glenn Wheatley is skidding around his digs at the Cattleman's Country Motor Inn like a dog on lino. He props his foot up on the sink and rocks back and forth like a distressed child. He roams the room with the latest-model mobile phone and a faraway stare. "F..., f..., f..., f..., f...," he says to no one in particular. He grabs at his straggly sandy hair and beats his head rhythmically, yet gently, against the fridge. He's just flown into Dubbo for tonight's show, and there's trouble in Townsville - and Wheat, as they all call him, is on the job.
"Heartache for Farnham fans," he says, reading the headlines from the Townsville Bulletin, beamed to a laptop teetering on the kitchen bench. "Jesus Christ - give me a break." His glasses slip to the end of his nose as he scrolls through the page-three story, shaking his head in disbelief. One of three shows in Townsville had to be cancelled and a picture of two disappointed fans stares glumly at him from the screen - they lost their front-row seats and think it only fair they be offered backstage passes, to meet Farnham, to compensate for their new seats at another show, now further back. "Blah, blah, blah, blah," says Wheatley, scrolling. "Oh, here we go, that'd be right - Dad had cancer, that's all we need. Blah, blah, blah."
Wheatley stops for a moment, to talk to us, but he can't get Townsville's "heartache" off his mind. "Excuse me," he says, furiously punching numbers into his mobile. "Must stay calm. Must stay calm," he says as he paces, waiting to talk to the Bulletin's journalist. "Must be civil. Prick! Prick! Prick! Little prick ... Hello Danny, Glenn Wheatley here, John Farnham's manager ... Mate, I was a little surprised and disappointed at the article - we notified everyone that show had been cancelled in February. I don't think you realise how big this thing is. This is the largest show ever - ever! - to tour Australia. No one else could put this on. No one else would take the risk. Mate, it's in a big top, a 4000-seat big top, with a stage in the middle - he is in-the-round. There's no bad seats - no one is further away than a cricket pitch. A cricket pitch! No one else would ever attempt this show - I mean, there's 50 trucks. Fifty! It's unbelievable. And 105 in the crew, 50 just to put up the tent. I just don't think you realise how much joy we've been bringing to people right around the country. The joy, Danny, the joy is palpable. They leave having had the time of their lives. John would never contemplate a final tour without saying goodbye to the people in the provinces. I mean, we are in Dubbo tonight, a town ravaged by drought, and we are here, letting them forget that pain, putting joy into their lives - giving them the time of their lives. Danny, this is big."
Wheatley starts to relax as he talks Danny around - tomorrow's Bulletin will carry the yarn "Farnham gig 'a show to remember'".
He beams as he finishes the call, clicking his fingers and dancing an excited jig: "How was that, Dr Kissinger?"
In a room down the other end of the motel, his mate, John Farnham, is holed up, unaware of the problem. Farnham is on his computer, a picture of calm, twiddling with some digital photographs he took in the desert between Whyalla and Broken Hill - his spectacles, too, are perched on the end of his nose. On tour, he rarely leaves his hotel room - he'd be mobbed - and photography is his diversion. And he doesn't like his strict routine to be interrupted: a late rise (after 1pm), mucking around with his digital camera, a 4pm sound check, followed by time alone and a shower in the Winnebago parked at the venue, to be ready for an 8pm show.
Farnham and Wheatley are in Dubbo for the final leg of The Last Time tour, the largest tour ever undertaken by an Australian artist. When it finishes on June 15 at Melbourne's Rod Laver Arena, more than 430,000 people will have seen Farnham perform at 89 shows, and he and his entourage will have spent more than 210 days on the road.
It's not the last time Farnham will record or perform, but it's his last road trip. He wants to slow down while he's at his peak, while he can still pack 10,000-seaters, and spend more time with his wife and two kids. He wants to ride his quarter horses and spend more time fishing and farming on his rural property in Victoria.
There'll be no reflective or tell-all memoir - he's not that sort of fellow. "I think that one of the things that pisses people off most about me is that I am an eternal optimist - they seem to want me to reveal some sort of dark side," he says. "I am just extremely comfortable with who I am. I don't need to put on another persona - the real me is pretty simple, it's what you see." Off stage, this is evident. He makes jokes and gags with the crew, like everyone's favourite uncle - and then delivers the same gags on stage.
Not having a dark side doesn't seem to have held him back. Farnham, 53 - the good-bloke-next-door who can sing - and Wheatley, 55 - the manic but instantly endearing manager - have been the most successful show-business double act in Australia's history. Farnham, in a career spanning 35 years (yes, it began with Sadie), has sold more than 5 million records. Since he burst back onto the scene in 1986, with Wheatley at his side, more than four million people have seen him in concert, a million alone at shows at the one venue, the Rod Laver Arena. His 1986 album, Whispering Jack, is the largest-selling album by an Australian in Australia - 1.5 million copies. For the past 15 years, he has consistently been among the most-played artists, international or Australian, on radio. Like it or not, he's our Mick Jagger, our Elton John, our Bruce Springsteen.
And yet, as Farnham himself says, "No one ever admits to having bought a Farnham album. It's a bit like the smutty old Melbourne Truth newspaper, where no one bought it, they all 'found it on a train'." Despite his success, Farnham has never really been cool - and guess what, he "couldn't give a rat's arse".
In life, as on tour, Farnham doesn't like things to be too complicated. In his long career, there has, it seems, been no great controversy, no love child, no drug problems, no affairs - no public hissy fits, even. He met his wife, Jill, "a great bird", when he starred in the '70s musical Charlie Girl and she was a dancer (hundreds of women turned up to mourn outside the church when they wed in 1973). They have just celebrated 30 years together.
His relationship with Glenn Wheatley goes back even further. They are extraordinarily close. In conversation, they finish each other's anecdotes. When one is telling a joke about the other, the butt of the joke sits excitedly waiting for the punchline, even though he's heard the story a hundred times before.
Their wives and kids are all friends - the two families even holiday together for a month or so every year. Wheatley's wife, Gaynor, told me she was so attached to the Farnhams' first baby, Rob, now 21, that when she was pregnant with her eldest son, she feared she wouldn't be able to transfer the love to her own baby.
"Wheatley just knows me like no one else," Farnham says. "He knows the circumstances under which I am most comfortable and he knows that if he puts me in a situation I can pull it off. I don't think I'd have done the last five or so tours if he hadn't been behind me, pushing me and encouraging me. He says, 'John, you can do this, you can pull this off' ... I must be mad, 'cause I still believe the silly old bugger."
And today in Dubbo, a show day, you see that in action. Farnham is relaxing and Wheatley - well, he's being Wheat. "That's the way of things around here," says Michelle Dundon, the tour manager. "John does all the singin', Wheat does all the stressin' - for everyone. It seems to work quite well." Or as Gaynor, a former soapie starlet from Sons and Daughters and Skyways, puts it: "We are all just constantly amazed that this pair of dorks always manage to pull it off."
Mostly. Across the river from the motel, the massive big top and the 50 trucks dominate the flats of the Macquarie River. It is a drive of only a kilometre or so, yet Wheatley still manages to get lost when driving Farnham to the afternoon sound check.
Farnham bounds from the vehicle. He's running late and five or six women are waiting at the back gate for autographs. He runs over to greet them. One pulls up her shirt so he can sign her bra. "It saves me having to throw it to you tonight," she says. They all laugh. Another pulls up her sleeve - she has a huge John Farnham tattoo on her bicep.
"Did you see that?" says Wheatley to one of the crew, of the tattoo. "Gee, not even I'd go that far. Not even I'd do that." The crewman looks at him with a wry smile and says, "Yeah, Wheat, and you're probably the one bloke who should."
Glenn Wheatley was big in the '80s. Very big. He'd gone from bass guitarist in the Masters Apprentices to managing the Little River Band (LRB) to part-owning and running radio stations, managing sports stars and having a hand in Hoyts. There were pay TV deals, a big house in Toorak and a pad in Port Douglas. He built The Ivy, the biggest nightclub Melbourne had ever seen, was listed in BRW's Top 200 as "one of the most powerful people in the music industry", and was wooed by John Howard and Liberal Party heavyweight Michael Kroger to run for a federal seat. And then, well, the '80s were over. Creditors were banging on his door, demanding millions.
Even Wheatley's share of the 1986 recording phenomenon Whispering Jack didn't put a dent in what he owed. By 1990, he and his family were living on blow-up mattresses at a relative's house. It was Farnham who came to his aid. As well as publicly supporting him, he also wiped private debts of hundreds of thousands.
For Farnham, it was a way of "repaying the debt" he felt he owed Wheatley.
After bursting onto the scene in 1968 at 18 with Sadie (The Cleaning Lady) and reigning as King of Pop for several years, by the mid-'70s Farnham's star was waning. Wheatley takes up the story: "It was Christmas '74. I had just come back from the States after a tour with LRB, and Johnny was on at the Tweed Heads RSL." Wheatley grimaces at the thought. They'd known each other since flatting together in St Kilda in the late '60s, when Farnham was still the King. "I went along to see him and there were only a couple of hundred people in this cavernous room. He was working with the worst four-piece band you'd ever heard. It broke my f...in' heart - I nearly f...in' cried. Here was this man with the most beautiful voice in Australia - my old friend - and the band couldn't even keep time. He was wearing this hideously bad suit and tie and after the show I said, 'Johnny'" - this with gritted teeth and a groan - "'Johnny, we've got to start again.' So I got the suit and tie..." he pincers the imaginary garments with his fingers held at a distance "...and I dropped them in the slops bucket with all the other shit and we just started again. Just started again."
Wheatley managed Farnham as a solo artist, then when he became the lead singer of LRB and through the dark years afterwards. Farnham did not do well out of LRB, and his forays into business - including Backstage, a Melbourne restaurant he owned with the Queen of Pop, Colleen Hewett - were a disaster. "At one stage I was really on the bones of my arse," Farnham says. "I was sitting in his office this day and I said, 'Wheat, I am in deep trouble.
I can't afford to feed my family. I've had to sell my car, my house ... everything.' He just said, 'What would it take to keep the wolves from the door?'" Wheatley scribbled out a cheque for $10,000 and tossed it across the desk.
Wheatley is an instinctive, extremely ambitious businessman, traits that have, in the past, almost ruined him. But this gambler's hunch also led to his smartest business decision: backing Whispering Jack. Farnham hadn't had a hit for years and, like a bad suit, no one wanted to touch him. The album took 18 months to make and was probably Farnham's last throw of the dice. The accompanying Jack's Back tour started in the clubs as Whispering Jack began soaring up the charts - soon Wheatley was cancelling clubs and booking 10,000-seat stadiums. "It [the album] stayed there for a staggering, believe it or not, 27 weeks - at number one," Wheatley says. "That's half a year. That's more than half a year. Imagine the chaos." It was to be a second, very juicy cherry for both men.
With the enthusiasm of a child, Farnham jogs into the big top for the sound check, dressed in an R.M. Williams shirt, worn loose, and jeans. The mullet he sported for a little too long throughout the '90s has been clipped, slightly. His face is boyish and happy - you can still see Johnny in there - but age and a good life are catching up. (He later jokes on stage that he's not really fat, it's just that his mum forgot to pack the fluid tablets.) The band hits its stride and then Farnham's big, powerful voice fills the space - he is giving his all to a tent, empty but for a few sound technicians and roadies, and to the teenage girls outside beyond the barriers. "I can never coast; everything is full on for me," he says later. "Every time I perform, it's like it is the last show I'll ever do. I have played to too many empty RSLs to not know what a lucky bastard I am now - I can't even coast through the sound check."
Between songs, he calls me up on stage: "Greg, come up here, mate. I want to show you something. Look at that," he says, with an arm on my shoulder, looking out at the seats. "I just love it how everything is so close. I really feel connected to the audience. I love this tent. I can eyeball everyone." The front row is only a metre from the stage; the furthest seats are, as Wheat says, only a cricket pitch away, give or take a couple of popping creases. (Wheatley is hovering in the wings. He asks Good Weekend photographer Steven Siewert to be, "you know, a bit kind. He's a bit, ah ... sensitive about the ... ah ... the ... ah [whispering through his teeth] ... the weight.")
After the sound check, Farnham retires to his rented Winnebago, "The Australian Dream", to relax and shower. It is fitted with leather seats and wood panels, a DVD player and stereo. There's a shower and double bed out the back. "It's great, isn't it?" Farnham says. "It's like a luxury boat without that bloody swell." A star's dressing mirror, surrounded by globes, dominates the lounge room. Before it sit haircare products, aspirin, brushes and aftershave. Farnsey's preferred eau de cologne is Tiffany - For Men. We get only a few minutes. Farnham likes this time to prepare for the show and usually talks only to Wheatley. He's calm when Wheatley is around - Wheat soaks up all the stress.
The crew go about their business or while away the time playing darts outside. ("This tour," says Wheatley, "has been so innovative in so many ways, from the sound system to the tent. And the little things, like the dartboard.
It went up two weeks ago and, mate, I tell you what, morale skyrocketed.") Many of the band members and the roadies have been working for the pair for 15 years. One is Bear, a big man. "Farnham," Bear says, "is a bloody good bloke - he never looks down on anyone. He pays good, there's plenty of free piss and we all stay in the same hotel and eat together at the same restaurant - there's no him and us. No bullshit." Farnham is sitting in a leather chair in the $600,000 "Australian Dream", while Bear is sitting on the back of a truck talking to me, and still, Farnsey is one of them.
Come dusk, and the folks of Dubbo are milling excitedly in the foyer of the tent. Even before the show, the joy, as Wheat would say, is palpable. Barry Young, a retired public servant and an MG enthusiast, and his wife Gloria (travel and real estate) have a couple of his CDs, "but I couldn't tell you the name of them". Gloria says that, for her, his personality is as important as his music. They like to get to Sydney to see one "show" a year, like Mamma Mia! or Shout! - Farnham's The Last Time is this year's show and it came to them.
For Kate McCarroll, a 20-year-old chef from Orange, Farnham is an obsession - this is her ninth concert. She is the girl with the tattoo.
"I was three years old when I first heard You're the Voice on television," she says. "I got up and started dancing and have loved him ever since." Her mum had loved him from her teenage years, when he was Johnny.
Backstage, the band lines up for shots of brandy, a pre-show tradition. "Kiss my little clacker," says Farnham after he downs his drink. "Well, I'd never say arse in front of the press." Someone laughs, and with that he bursts through the tent and onto the stage. Dubbo goes wild. For the next three hours, he has them in the palm of his hand.
I have never owned a Farnham album (truly), but as I listen, I find I know the words to every song - Age of Reason, Burn for You, Touch of Paradise, You're the Voice, Pressure Down, Sadie - songs that have seeped into my memory, like the sound of cricket in the background at Christmas. Farnham's jokes take almost as long as his songs. He works blue, but never goes over the edge. He makes gags about his mother-in-law, the size of his penis, about that song (Sadie). He's a man who knows his audience as surely as the Wiggles know theirs.
And the audience all feel they know Farnham. There's no barrier between him and them, no security people. There is something very special about the relationship. They are in on all the jokes. They feel they know this bloke and here he is, up on stage, having a ball. Throughout the concert, middle-aged women pluck up the courage to sneak up to the stage to steal a kiss - he turns none away. One woman clasps the back of his head - trying to force her tongue down his throat - almost pulling him from the stage. He breaks free and laughs and the crowd laughs with him.
All the while, Wheat watches from the wings, dancing to a beat that only dogs can hear. "Sometimes," Farnham tells me during the interval, "when I look over and see Wheatley dancing, I have to stop singing 'cause he is so bad and makes me laugh so much that I just can't sing."
This is Farnham's touring swan song and nothing has been done on the cheap. In You're the Voice, two women kitted out in kilts come on the stage for an eight-bar bagpipe solo. That's all they play in the show but they're along for the whole tour. Oh, and by the way, Farnham has got a good voice. A very good voice. The old fella can still belt out a tune. Dubbo has got its money's worth.
After the show, Farnham and the band and the crew all have a few beers backstage and then it's on to the bar of the motel. Farnham has polished off several Cooper's and has moved onto vodka and tonic - he's shouting in turn, but Wheat goes to the bar. "I get this feeling that someday someone is going to come up and tap me on the shoulder and say, 'Oi, sunshine, this is not your life,'" Farnham says. "I know what a lucky bastard I am."
Farnham is passionate about the importance of putting on a good show, and angry about international acts coming to Australia on the cheap - he makes mention of the recent Bruce Springsteen concert in Sydney, where the power cut out and there were other technical difficulties. "It is thumbing your nose at the people by doing it on the cheap," he says. "This game is not all about the buck - I mean, the money is wonderful - but if it's all about the buck then ... well, that's f...ed. When I was playing to empty RSL clubs, I still enjoyed it while I was up on stage and still wanted to put on a good show. This is gunna sound trite, but f... it, here we go. There's something about the songs and the singing and getting up there on stage that hits me right here." He thumps at his heart. "That's what matters, what it does for me right f...in' here ... Another vodka? It's your shout, Wheat."