Before TikTok, before MTV, before the Australian recording industry had found its feet as an international export operation, how did an English expat girl from the suburbs of Melbourne become one of the biggest pop stars on the planet?
Before the great levelling of the internet age, cracking the American pop market to the tune of Olivia Newton-John’s 1970s success was incredibly rare. Helen Reddy and Men at Work made it, but fleetingly. Kylie Minogue was famously dropped by Geffen Records due to low album sales at the height of her phenomenal success at home and in Europe.
Olivia Newton-John, pictured in 1976, took the world by storm.Credit:Getty
But even those who found some success in the US never reached Newton-John’s heights. With an estimated more than 100 million records sold, she’s Australia’s most commercially successful woman artist.
In many ways, Newton-John’s unique, sustained victory can only be explained in the same terms John Lennon used at the height of Beatlemania: “If we knew, we’d form another group and be managers.”
But history does record the fingerprints of a secret society of managers, songwriters, producers and other backroom players that paved our Olivia’s way from Melbourne TV talent quest at just 16 all the way to the Grammy Awards for record of the year (I Honestly Love You) and best pop vocal at 25.
The “gumnut mafia”, as defined by music historian Clinton Walker, was a crafty league of Australian entrepreneurs in 1960s London, most prominently represented by Adelaide expat Robert Stigwood, whose record label RSO Records hit its straps when the Bee Gees sailed from Sydney into his open arms in 1967.
But in his latest book, Suburban Songbook, published by Goldentone in 2021, Walker identifies another key Aussie infiltrator of that golden era. The late Peter Gormley remains something of a “mystery man”, the author says, who had taken Australian-raised yodeller Frank Ifield to the UK in 1959 and made him a star.
Gormley also managed pop king Cliff Richard and his band The Shadows. Soon enough, his Savile Artists stable would include Judith Durham and Newton-John, who would become engaged to The Shadows’ guitarist and songwriter Bruce Welch.
“In pre-Beatles British pop, the bosses were Australians,” Walker says. “I don’t know how Gormley picked up on Olivia, but he took her in, and then of course, when Pat Carroll and John Farrar went over there, Farrar formed a band with those Shadows guys [Welch, Hank Marvin, and Farrar].”
As a duo, Carroll and Newton-John made small waves on the UK TV and cabaret circuit but after Carroll returned to Australia, her husband Farrar became the key songwriter and producer in Newton-John’s story. It was he and Welch who arranged the traditional murder ballad Banks of the Ohio, and produced her debut studio album in 1971.
Olivia Newton-John at the G’Day USA gala in Los Angeles in 2018. Credit:AP
“Farrar was guitar player and singer in the Melbourne band the Strangers,” explains Melbourne music historian Ian McFarlane, author of The Encyclopedia of Australian Rock and Pop. “They were massive in the ’60s and they were the house band for The Go!! Show ” – the Channel 10 pop show hosted by Ian Turpie, a former boyfriend of Newton-John’s.
Bizarrely, it was a British shoe salesman named Lee Kramer – “he made millions of pounds importing cowboy boots into England,” Walker says – who managed her crucial leap to Los Angeles to capitalise on her deal with MCA Records in the early ’70s.
But the gumnut mafia connections would continue. Farrar was Newton-John’s producer until 1989, teaming with Stigwood’s RSO to produce the Grease phenomenon, and writing a string of No. 1 hits including Have You Never Been Mellow, You’re the One That I Want, Hopelessly Devoted to You and Magic. It was Steve Kipner, a Bee Gees associate from way back, who co-wrote Physical in 1981. By that time, Newton-John was managed by Australian powerhouse Roger Davies, in the midst of his epic journey from Sherbet to Pink.
Still, great business connections can only explain so much in the rise of a fair dinkum global superstar. “I don’t know,” says Walker. “I don’t know how they marketed her, how they made it all work. I guess they had some good songs. I suppose it’s just that incredible breath of fresh air that she was.”
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