For my parents, the AKAI home stereo system they bought new in 1981 performed the same basic function as a large clay vase or a modest collection of regional squash trophies.

For my twin brother and I, the AKAI CS-M3 (with record player component piled neatly on top) was both hidden door and seething altar.

 

It squatted at the far end of the ‘family room’, an eerie, semi-titled room that yawned suddenly off the house’s main hallway. Next to the player leaned a slim rack of records. Chicago, Carole King, a couple of Beatles, Beach Boys, Thriller. Everything you’d expect. Including, most notably, John Farnham’s Whispering Jack. Quite often my twin brother and I would vaporize an afternoon listening to Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, burrowing into a haggard den of couch cushions during it’s more terrifying strains, then exploding from safety during the incredulous triumph of its conclusion. Other days we’d listen to ‘Gotta be Startin’ Somethin’ on repeat. But regardless of how we chose to dissolve our day, it almost always ended with Whispering Jack, repeated at a volume that disregarded the existence of anyone else in the house.

And with around 1.7 million copies of Farnham’s magnum opus spinning inside family turntables during the 80s, a lot of Australian households probably ended the day in much the same way. But being kids, we were listening to the album in a different way. We didn’t confer the cultural history of Johnnie Farnham to the sound pouring out of the AKAI’s black, plinth-like speakers. We had no idea who the Little River Band were. Whispering Jack didn’t carry with it the vicarious victory of a national monument remade, as it did for my parents. My brother and I had no idea Farnsy was in debt, that Glenn Wheatley had mortgaged his house to finance the record or that it was tracked over a year in Farnham’s rented Melbourne house. To us John Farnham was unanchored sound, it was the subterranean ricochet of Reason’s bassline, the searing velocity of Pressure Down, the almost celestial altitude of You’re the Voice. And we danced so blindly to it that shaking our limbs loose from our bodies seemed, to less enamored Farnsy fans like my mother, a real threat.

  

The obsession with John Farnham (both national and personal) continued unabated through to the Chain Reaction tour of 1990. Confusion was mounting inside Rod Laver Arena as we stood/yawned/gargled Fanta as a family and watched The Southern Sons drawl through their support slot. By the time John Farnham and his legion of session players and backup singers had swarmed onto the stage, the confusion I’d felt earlier had curdled in Rod Laver Arena’s thickening murk and transformed into outright nausea. The feeling worsened during You’re the Voice, where a stadium full of ageing Whispering Jack acolytes wailed toward the stage, eyes filmy with barely retrained vehemence (except for my brother, whose eyes remained fixed to the familiarly plinth-like black speakers suspended above the stage). He turned to me, eyes widened through the huffing percussion of Pressure Down’s opening bars: “The speaker’s playing the Pressure Song”. I’d held on as long as I could. By this stage I was a roiling, shuddering shadow of my normally dancing self. I lurched towards Dad, who instinctively hoisted me into a hug, my head hanging over his shoulder. The sudden elevation, coupled with the sheer excitement of Pressure Down’s keytar solo, spelled instant doom for my Dad’s light blue shirt. Half a litre of Fanta - still in its original colour - was evacuated all over his back.

 

The echoes from John Farnham’s cultural impact over the following decades continued to register dully in my perennially nostalgic mind. His cringing chain of ‘Last Time’ tours, his endlessly repackaged greatest hits, his son Robert Farnham’s nu-metal band Nana-Zhami, his six minutes with Coldplay during Sound Relief, singing You’re the Voice, which, I have to admit, crackled through my nervous system like an electric storm. But all were just echoes. Until one day about a year and a half ago in the industrial gloam of a storage facility in North Melbourne. I was a removalist, hulking the twisted remains of someone’s life into a house two suburbs away. That someone was at the other end of a phone in Los Angeles, spinning a complex web of incorrect instructions to a lackey, who then bestowed the crooked instructions onto us. The someone at the other end of the phone was Jack Jones, lead singer of the Southern Sons. As we dug through Jack’s trove of iron statues and damaged wicker chairs, I saw a pair of road cases, a slow heave of recognition passing through me. On their black exterior in white stencil was printed: John Farnham Chain Reaction Tour. The day’s job was impossibly big, hopelessly under quoted, almost killed me and my partner twice and was instantly forgotten by employers and clients alike.

But I still went home and ended my day listening to Whispering Jack, this time on headphones.  I didn’t know if my housemates were home.