John Farnham leads the voices against domestic violence
One epic Australian anthem, 5000 domestic violence reports a week … and 2500 voices soaring in glorious defiance.
Strange rattle in the brakes on the Toyota. Seal busted on the fridge.Doctor wants a bowel scan because my aunt died of cancer in the 1990s. Kids coulda done better on NAPLAN. Gay brother can’t marry. Straight mate can’t afford alimony. Login password doesn’t have enough caps and digits. The only people who speak nice on the phone wanna sell me solar panels. Terror has risen, Pringles have shrunk. Bowie’s gone. Prince has gone. Daniel Day-Lewis has retired. The Smiths are never getting back together. Sitting down is slowly killing me. Standing up is dangerous. Dodgy priests. Humourless zealots. Too much whine. Not enough wine. Fireworks in Canberra. Waxworks in Washington. The good people of Guam runnin’ for their lives. Marching Neo-Nazis preaching the power of white men. Overworked Australian police attending to 5000 domestic and family violence matters every week. One DV incident in my country every two minutes.
But for the next five minutes and 23 seconds on Earth I’m singing my lungs out with John Farnham and nothing’s gonna wipe this smile off my face. Oh, how this bloke moves me with this song. Dame Quentin Bryce feels it. The Classiest Woman in Queensland — official title — clenches her right fist, pumps the Brisbane sky like Iron Maiden fans did in 1983. Katie Noonan feels it. She shakes her head in disbelief, wondering how she made all this happen. How it came to pass on this brisk winter evening in late July that a choir of 2500 people wearing yellow scarves could be singing in full and united voice behind Whispering Jack himself. We can write what we wanna write, he sings. We gotta make ends meet, before we get much older.
When he’s not talking peace and Third World debt and The Troubles, Bono talks about songs like this. He talks about how the very best popular songs take us to emotional places we need to go to but only realise we need to go to them once we arrive. The great songwriters place musical notes not where they want them to go but where the universe declares they must go. One note finds another along a song’s true north and the universe maps a masterpiece. Case in point, this epic Australian anthem written by four English songwriters currently soaring from the lips of 2500 choristers lining the amphitheatre seats of Brisbane’s South Bank Piazza. Ooooh, Farnham broods. We’re all someone’s daughter, we’re all someone’s son!
Katie Noonan was born in Brisbane but her voice was born in New Orleans and Carnegie Hall. She is convinced her family was the only one in suburban Brisbane in 1986 that didn’t own a copy of John Farnham’s Whispering Jack, the highest-selling Australian album of all time. She was nine years old and only had ears for Crowded House and Annie Lennox, so it wasn’t until she was a teenager that she really tuned her musical ears into the wonders of You’re the Voice.
“It’s got this incredible sense of momentum, right from the beginning of the song,” she says. “You just go, ‘Oh, something is about to happen here’, and then you go, ‘Oh, something’s happening’, and you feel that way the whole way through and then you get to the chorus and you say, ‘Oh, wow, it’s happened!’”
You’re the voice try and understand it, sing the 2500 choristers representing 145 choirs from across the country. Make a noise and make it clear … then, the choir finds the song’s great release moment. The “close your eyes and clench your fist” moment. The sound in my ears and in my suburban Australian 1980s soul. Written in letters, that sound reads like, “Oh-wo-wo-wo, oh-wo-wo-wo”. In images, that sound looks like the Nullarbor Plain at dusk or a hundred wild horses charging through High Country. That sound is love and hope and family and Farnsey.
Oh-wo-wo-wo, oh-wo-wo-wo, the choir roars in jubilation. There’s community in that sound. There’s meaning in it. There are 85-year-old women in this choir. There are eight-year-old boys with learning disabilities. There are survivors. Women who found their singing voices in small choir groups formed in Brisbane domestic violence shelters they fled to with their kids when they had to escape the flailing midnight fists of the men who’d vowed to love them.
Trish is in this choir. One year ago, Trish was living homeless with six children after fleeing from a violent partner. Tonight she leads the Freedom Train community choir, a “no audition” all-inclusive vocal group based in Logan, 30km south of Brisbane. We’re not gonna sit in silence, Trish sings. We’re not gonna live with fear … a-woooaahhh a-woooaahhh a-woooaahhh.
Katie Noonan toured Australia with John Farnham in 2010. By then she’d established herself as one of Australia’s finest singer-songwriters through her work in Brisbane bands George and Elixir. She thought she knew a thing or two about captivating an audience. Then she saw Farnham singing You’re the Voice. “He played You’re the Voice every night I toured with him and every single night I wept,” she says.
It was the connection he made. The unashamed earnestness in his delivery. It wasn’t music he was making on those stages every night. It was alchemy. “An indefinable magic,” she says.
The man in the black suit tapping his foot, side-of-stage, remembers the first time he put a cassette recording of Farnham’s You’re the Voice into his tape player as he drove home to the house he’d remortgaged to finance the $150,000 recording of Whispering Jack in 1985. “I knew instantly my life was going to change,” says Glenn Wheatley, Farnham’s long-time manager. “I had goosebumps. I remember when we first found the song. It was powerful but it wasn’t too preachy. Good, strong lyrics. I played it for John and he said, ‘Mate, I can own this’.”
It was penned as a protest song, inspired by 100,000 people marching to London’s Hyde Park in 1985 to support the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. One of its co-writers, Chris Thompson — a former singer and guitarist with Manfred Mann’s Earth Band — was staunchly against Farnham recording the song because he knew him only as the cheese-pop prince Johnny Farnham, who gave us Sadie the Cleaning Lady .
“I couldn’t get a record deal for John,” Wheatley says. “The record companies just thought he was yesterday’s man. But I didn’t. I made him a promise that I was going to do an album and when I couldn’t get a record deal I thought, ‘Well, sod it’, I went and put the house on the line. Thank God I did.”
The mass choir moves into the song’s third verse. The choir master, Jonathon Welch, the man behind the celebrated Choir of Hard Knocks, waves his arms gracefully, directing honey-smooth three-part harmonies amid vocal flourishes that stand in for Farnham’s rhythm section. This time, we know we all can stand together, the choir sings. With the power to be powerful. Believing, we can make it better.
The choir sounds sometimes like an African tribal group singing from the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. Sometimes they sound like they’re 20,000 voices lining a stairway to heaven. Some sections make dramatic runs up and down the vocal scales. Other sections reach for notes so high and climbing they might take flight. Yet it all fits together, locks into itself behind Farnham’s earthbound and sure lead. “He doesn’t know how to sing out of tune,” Wheatley says. “He’s going off. They’re going off. It feeds off itself.”
As artistic director of the 2017 Queensland Music Festival, Katie Noonan was determined to stage an event that was purely for the community, a free event that would unite the state of Queensland through the issue of domestic and family violence. For almost two decades she has been an ambassador for DV Connect, a support line that receives 55,000 calls relating to domestic and family violence and sexual assault every year.
She re-read the groundbreaking Not Now, Not Ever report, written in 2015 by the woman currently pumping her fist in a canary yellow skirt-suit in the front row of the VIP seats, former governor-general Dame Quentin Bryce. The report called for a complete overhaul of the Queensland justice system’s approach to prosecuting DV offences. The numbers swam through Noonan’s head — 64,246 DV occurrences in a single year; 17 domestic and family homicides in the reporting year; an estimated annual community cost of $2.7 billion to $3.2 billion — and the same three words reached the tip of her tongue. You’re the voice. You’re the voice. You’re the voice.
In February, she took her 11-year-old son, Dexter, to see a show John Farnham was playing with James Reyne and Daryl Braithwaite at the Sandstone Point Hotel near Bribie Island, on the northern edge of Moreton Bay. Backstage, she pitched a vision to Australian music royalty. “A choir of 2500 people singing You’re the Voice in the name of ending domestic violence,” she said.
“I’m in,” said Farnham.
“He gave me a verbal agreement then and there and I had to keep it secret for six months,” Noonan says. It was a handshake contract. The same he’s had with Wheatley for 30 years.
South Bank management were concerned the announcement of Farnham leading a 2500-strong choir in a one-off free concert rendition of You’re the Voice might cause a social media-driven stampede across the city of Brisbane. Choir members knew they would be vocally supported by Noonan and her friends, the peerless Kate Ceberano and powerhouse indigenous Eurovision songman Isaiah Firebrace. It was only at midday rehearsal today that Noonan, through “Chinese whispers”, was allowed to inform the choir that Farnham himself would be taking the lead vocal. “People were screaming when they heard he would be here,” Noonan says. “Really losing it in the most lovely way.”
It’s only in the last round of the chorus that you catch the three young sisters in the upper-middle section of the west wing of the choir. Three girls aged 15, 13 and 10, hollering You’re the Voice for their late mum, Allison Baden-Clay, who was murdered by her husband Gerard in 2012. Everybody’s wearing yellow scarves tonight because yellow was Allison’s favourite colour, the spirit colour of the Allison Baden-Clay Foundation, which provides support and awareness for domestic and family violence victims. We’re not gonna sit in silence, the girls sing. We’re not gonna live with fear.
Allison’s sister, Vanessa Fowler, sings beside them. “We’ve been rehearsing every Sunday,” Fowler says. “I’m humbled by this. It’s just so uplifting. I look around and I see this sea of yellow and I hear everybody raising their voices. If you listen to the lyrics of this song, it really does apply so well to violence in the community. We all have a voice and we have to use it to stand up against violence.” She casts her eyes across the piazza. “I hope Allison’s looking down right now,” she says.
The choir softens and two harmonies thread together beautifully.
We’re all someone’s daughter.
We’re all someone’s son.
We’re all someone’s daughter.
We’re all someone’s son.
And Farnham cuts through like a train.
You’re the voice try and understand it, he sings. Make a noise and make it clear.
Then the clapping starts and the whole piazza echoes with a single chant.
You’re the voice.
You’re the voice.
You’re the voice.
Then it all ends with a single reverberating sound that speaks of magic and hope and unashamed optimism in the face of overwhelming adversity. That sound, written, reads like, “Oh-wo-wo-wo, oh-wo-wo-wo”. That sound in images is the Baden-Clay girls finding their place in the world. It’s Dame Quentin Bryce stomping her heels in exultation. It’s the smile on Katie’s Noonan’s face. It’s the tear in John Farnham’s eye. It’s the sound that echoes in your brain long after your five minutes and 23 seconds inside this perfect moment is up.
Call DV Connect on Womensline 1800 811 811; Mensline 1800 600 636
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