Loud and clear: Whispering Jack the greatest Aussie album

As far as our readers’ ears are concerned, the best chart-topping Australian album is John Farnham’s pop-rock classic Whispering Jack.

John Farnham performing in Adelaide in 1991.

We asked and you answered: as far as our readers’ ears are concerned, the best chart-topping Australian album is John Farnham’s pop-rock classic Whispering Jack.

Since The Weekend Australian launched the poll a week ago, the 1986 release immediately pulled ahead of its nine competitors and never came close to losing. With 29 per cent of about 2000 votes, Farnham bested his closest contenders in The Swing by INXS (23 per cent) and Midnight Oil’s Diesel and Dust (15 per cent).

Between them, the three titles accounted for more than two-thirds of the votes in the poll that asked readers to pick their favourite from a short list of bestsellers. The 10 options — including albums by Delta Goodrem, Kylie Minogue and Jimmy Barnes — were selected by The Weekend Australian on the basis that they had spent five or more weeks at No 1 since ARIA began calculating chart data in 1984.

“Clearly Jack is the one. Why need to ask?” wrote a reader named Keyser, but judging by the lively online discussion that followed, it’s a question that prompted plenty of heated debate — particularly from those who reckoned that AC/DC’s Back In Black was the real answer, even though it was released in 1980, well outside the 36-year span of popular music we’d decided upon.

Best of the best sellers

With Farnham unavailable for interview, it’s worth briefly retelling the story of the poll winner, as the curious circumstances that led to its creation make its enduring success even more remarkable.

The former teen pop idol was 37 at the time of its release, and if the singer’s career wasn’t quite on the skids, he wasn’t particularly in favour. After 11 solo albums followed by several years fronting Little River Band, Farnham wasn’t thrilled with his career trajectory.

Having sold his house and car due to debts from bad business decisions, the singer was living at a rented house in the Melbourne suburb of Bulleen with his wife and their young son when the album began to take shape in his garage. The first and most important part of the process was to pick the songs, and as strange as it sounds today, Farnham had spent his entire career up until that point singing whatever the record producer reckoned he should sing.

Autonomy was a foreign concept, but for album No 12, Farnham and first-time record producer Ross Fraser holed up in the garage and assiduously listened to hundreds of potential songs before whittling them down to a very short list, which they recorded with a band — minus a drummer, as all percussion was programmed into drum machines.

The album’s first single arrived late in the recording process, yet You’re The Voice — co-written by four people in England — would go on to become Farnham’s signature song and an alternative Australian anthem whose impassioned chorus never fails to thrill.

Soon after its release, Whispering Jack became the pivotal moment in Farnham’s career. It went on to spend 25 weeks at No 1 and has been accredited 24x platinum by ARIA, indicating sales in excess of 1.68 million copies.

As our poll shows, its popularity persists even 34 years after its release. All the hardship that preceded it has long faded in the memory of its creator; all that remains is 10 well-chosen songs that made the man.