Little River Band "Please Don't Ask Me" with John Farnham video.
John Peter Farnham (July 1, 1949) is an Australian pop singer. He has remained one of Australia's best-known performers over a career spanning more than 30 years. He is the only Australian artist to have a number one record in five consecutive decades.
Born in Dagenham, Essex, United Kingdom, Farnham spent the first years of his life in England before migrating to Australia in 1959. An undistinguished student, he began a plumbing apprenticeship before taking leave from that to pursue music.
His first commercially-successful recording was a novelty song entitled "Sadie the Cleaning Lady", in 1968, which sold 180 000 copies in Australia, the largest-selling single by an Australian artist of the decade. The clean-cut pop star made several more successful albums, but by the 1970s his recording career began to dwindle and he turned to television, appearing in a situation comedy and narrating documentaries, whilst singing in clubs. He also performed in a number of musicals and in the Australian television comedy series Bobby Dazzler as the leading character of the same name. His one recording hit in this period was a reworking of the Beatles' "Help!" in 1980. In his early career he was known as Johnny Farnham. Farnham married Jillian Billman in 1973. They had two sons, Robert and James.
From 1981 until 1984, he fronted the Little River Band after Glenn Shorrock departed. This was a move away from cabaret and into rock music. John Farnham joined LRB knowing that all that he would get out of it was experience and the chance to perform in the USA. The problem was that LRB were not selling any records. They had to get continuous advances from Capitol Records just to tour and make new albums hoping that this would bring them a hit. Capitol Records brought out a "Greatest Hits" album, which caused even more financial problems for the current band.
It was during this time that John Farnhnam did vocal tracks for movies just to earn some extra money. He did tracks for the movies "Fletch", "The Slugger's Wife", "Savage Streets", "Voyage of the Rock Aliens", and "Hell Tracks".
With John Farnham, Little River Band recorded three albums, which had some modest success, though not enough to pay back the advances the record company had given the band. The first album, "The Net," was already written and John Farnham had no say in the songs, he just had to harmonise and sing the lead vocals.
They recorded a concert in Melbourne that aired in America on HBO. The concert video was only one hour long, and it highlighted some of the songs from the "The Net" as well as reworked versions of LRB classics such as "Cool Change" and "Reminiscing". "Please Don't Ask Me", a song written by Graham Goble, and a hit for John Farnham almost three years previously, was played during the Australian opening of the show. Despite positive Australian and US reviews, this performance has never been officially released on VHS or DVD.
"Please Don't Ask Me" Live in 1983 with the Little River Band. Extremely rare footage from the "Live In Melbourne" show that aired on American TV. Only the audio from this clip was used for the introduction of that show but this video portion was never released.
Beautiful voice!
Posted by: Tony | July 04, 2006 at 04:13 AM
Incredible voice...hope John finds the right songs in USA. We still miss the original singers from LRB...but John is fantastic.
Posted by: Tim Roe | February 22, 2007 at 03:57 PM