Roger Whittaker – The Last Farewell
Any successful relationship almost certainly requires that the participants change. It’s just simple logic: if all people are unique – and I believe we are – then the work of fitting your life into your partner’s and vice versa means, at a minimum, that there will be edges to be planed down. Or maybe it’s more about appearances, like applying a fresh coat of paint, or something more substantive, like ripping out the plumbing or adding a room. (Can you tell we’re going through a renovation right now?) Whether it’s a job that a Tim Taylor can handle, or if you really need an Al Borland, what matters is that the work gets done.
Of course, this applies to all unsuccessful relationships, too. And that is how I ended up at a Roger Whittaker show circa 1991/1992.
Fandom doesn’t really have age categories. While we probably think of the fans of Sir Tom Jones as ladies in their golden years, a work colleague who is probably (a gentleman never asks) not yet or at most barely 30 somewhat sheepishly professed her love for the silver Welshman to me when admitting that she was accompanying her mother to his show for her own reasons. So it is no comment on my 12 years older then-girlfriend’s musical tastes when she dragged 26/27 year old me to the Whittaker show. Except, of course, that it is.
I heard Whittaker on the radio a lot while growing up, so I was surprised to see he’d only had a single song hit the Billboard top 40. As it turned out, while he had multiple chart hits in the United Kingdom, Ireland and the Netherlands, Canada may have been his biggest market. In 1982, he even charted a song called “Canada Is” in a classic bit of sucking up to the already converted. He had only two “pop” hits here, but between 1970 and 1990, no less than 18 songs reached the top 20 of the adult contemporary chart, including two #1s. But not “The Last Farewell”, which peaked at #3 on the AC chart, as well as at #9 on the pop chart. But its chart performance doesn’t really tell the story of “The Last Farewell”: with roughly 11 million physical copies sold worldwide, the 45 is in very lofty company. Also at that number is a song from Cher, but more impressive is the next group in the 10 million range: Bing Crosby, George Harrison, Elvis Presley, The Monkees, Toni Braxton, ABBA, Paul Anka, Britney Spears, Procol Harum and, umm, “My Sharona” by The Knack.
I don’t remember much about the show. It was at Massey Hall, so the audience was well-behaved and quite elegant, at least by my standards of the time. Everyone remained seated throughout – it was more like going to the theatre than a concert. I recognized an awful lot of the songs, as if I needed more proof that Whitaker had been a big part of my subconscious aural life. And I had a reasonably good time – Whittaker was an amiable and relaxed performer, and the dude could whistle, a skill which never fails to impress me since I am, sadly, most inept when it comes to turning that part of my body into a musical instrument. (Drumming on pretty much any bit of my anatomy that I can reach is a different story.) His whistling was one of the things my girlfriend had been looking forward to – she was actually excited about it – and he did not disappoint.
On listening to “The Last Farewell” now, I was initially sort of boggled by how well the song did until I looked at the rest of the top 20 from its peak week of June 21, 1975. It fits in rather comfortably with a lot of the tunes ahead of it: Michael (Martin) Murphey’s “Wildfire”, Jesse Colter’s “I’m Not Lisa”, “Sister Golden Hair” by America, John Denver’s “Thank God I’m A Country Boy” and “I’ll Play For You” from Seals & Crofts. And radio playlists of that era always had room for the occasional folkie, no matter how truly old fashioned his style might be. Whittaker was probably fine with that – he just kept doing his thing for close to another 40 years.
As for this record, well, I just cannot connect with it in any way. I never paid attention to the verses, so I didn’t know that it’s about a sailor who heads into battle and, even as the possible end of his days looms darkly, he is remembering the great love of his life, and dreaming of the day when he returns to her. The lyrics – written by a silversmith who sent them to Whittaker for a radio contest – are quite poignant, but the whole thing is made unbearably mawkish by the music. It begins with an orchestral swell, before settling down to sappy strings, gently strummed guitar, tinny piano and poser martial horns. A few piano keys struck at the 31-second mark are a lovely note, but the rest is just a bombastic overproduced mush of sound with nothing distinctive about it, save for Whittaker’s warm vocal. Done live, and possibly off the cuff, without the orchestra or a faux attempt to recreate one, it’s just a whole lot more palatable to these ears.
Whittaker retired around 2012, and took that retirement seriously: he didn’t release any music nor, as best I can determine, perform publicly in the last decade of his life. But musicians never really stop making music, and he was still touting his continuing whistling ability in late 2014. He passed away in September 2023, aged 87. I hope he went out whistling.
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