Music journalist David Farrell, with his partner, Joan Ralph.Suzanne Schaan/Supplied
David Farrell started his career as a 17-year-old music fan, conning his way into a hotel room occupied by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. He went on to chronicle the Canadian music business, writing in both Canada and the United States. Mr. Farrell started The Record, a weekly publication that tracked everything from record reviews and industry gossip to charts of the hits.
“The Record … became a crucial trade voice for the music industry in Canada over the next two decades,” Billboard Canada wrote in its tribute to Mr. Farrell, who died in Amherst, N.S., on Dec. 19 at the age of 73.
Mr. Farrell started an annual event that became Canadian Music Week, where in 2018 he was inducted into the Canadian Music Industry Hall of Fame. He was a one-off, an eccentric who became the voice of Canada’s music industry.
“He was a great man and a force in the Canadian music scene,” said Bruce Allen, a manager who worked with artists such Bryan Adams and Michael Bublé. “I loved his passion, admired his writing and he was always my first call if I wanted to get my message out to the industry.”
David Charles Farrell was born Jan. 25, 1951, in Ladysmith, B.C., on Vancouver Island, the first child of British immigrants, Ann (neé Belinfante) and Edward (Ted) Farrell, both journalists. They had met in the late 1940s in postwar occupied Germany, where they were writing for a British armed forces publication.
Life was bleak in Britain, with wartime rationing of food and other goods, so in 1948 the couple moved to Canada. David was born a few years later. In 1954, the year rationing ended, David was three years old and they went back to Britain. A decade later the family returned to Canada permanently.
“My brother was the only one of the five of us who was born in Canada and the only one of us who kept his English accent,” Dominic Farrell, David’s younger brother, said.
David studied journalism in Toronto at Centennial College, though his brother said he dropped out two weeks before graduation. While still a student, he sold freelance articles to the Toronto Telegram and entertainment papers such as Tribal Village and Beetle Magazine. He later had pieces in Maclean’s magazine, then a monthly, and TV Guide.
His first full-time job in journalism was as a copy boy for The Globe and Mail.
Mr. Farrell showed some early reporting chutzpah in 1969, when John Lennon and Yoko Ono were staying at the King Edward Hotel in Toronto as part of their peace tour. Reporters were camped out in the hotel hallway. Seventeen-year-old Mr. Farrell rode up in the elevator with novelist Jacqueline Susann and her entourage. He melded in and got past security and into the hotel room. The writer handed Mr. Lennon her latest book, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and left. The young reporter stayed behind and Mr. Lennon took a shine to him.
“David remembers seeing Lennon throw the book across the room, where it landed in the garbage. David stayed for a bit, asked a few questions for his fictitious media organization, and then he very generously asked for an autograph for his younger sister [me], and that piece of newsprint with their scribbles and animated picture of the two of them has stayed with me to this very day,” Mary Ann Farrell said.
Mr. Farrell’s family was full of writers and editors, from his parents to some of his siblings.
“I worked at The Record in the early days in the mid-eighties,” Ms. Farrell said. “It was a heady time. There were new record companies and labels emerging with exciting musical talents. We all had one thing in common: a desire to discover and share new and inventive musical influences, and to stimulate musical beginnings over the airwaves, the record stores, music magazines, clubs and stages across the country.”
Before he settled in to writing full time, Mr. Farrell had a few other jobs, including working at the Banff Springs Hotel, where he met his future wife, Patricia Dunn. And for about a year and a half, he was a crew member on yachts sailing in the Caribbean.
“On one of them they were hit by a hurricane and when they finally emerged, they had lost their communications and had no idea where they were so they just set sail and eventually landed in Jamaica on New Year’s Eve and had a wild time,” said his brother Dominic Farrell, a well-known literary editor. “Later he came to my grade school for a show and tell about his adventures in the Caribbean.”
David Farrell said he always wanted to be a political journalist, but he discovered he was good at writing about the music business, not just the stars but the people behind the scenes as well. He was a freelancer most of his career.
He wrote for two big American music publications, Cashbox and Billboard in the 1970s. Then in 1975 he was hired as the editor in chief of Record Week, a short-lived Canadian trade publication. He also became the Canadian editor for Cashbox and then Billboard, the bible of the music trade. He did that for four years.
In 1981, David and his wife, Patricia Dunn-Farrell, co-founded The Record, along with Richard Flohil and Larry LeBlanc.
“In a first for the Canadian industry,” Kerry Doole wrote in a tribute to Mr. Farrell in Billboard Canada, “The Record set up a chart system that gave an accurate read on what was happening in the Canadian music market from an independent source that used weekly call-out research to radio and retail to tabulate the charts in various formats. The Record’s sales charts for singles and albums became the benchmark domestically and internationally.”
Though not someone to often use his influence in the music biz, he did once find tickets for his late sister, Judy Farrell.
“It was August of 1984, and Bruce Springsteen was in Toronto to play three sold-out shows at the CNE Grandstand. Our sister Judy was a huge Springsteen fan, and she had bought a tickets/bus tour package in London, Ont., where she was living and attending university. The big day arrived, but no bus, no Springsteen tickets, and she was left high and dry. She was crushed, and was out of money, and the opportunity to see The Boss,” Mary Ann Farrell said. “David got wind of this and made a few calls. By that time, he was publisher and editor of The Record, and he had a few contacts in the business, and he was able to arrange tickets for her for the third and final show.”
There were other family benefits.
“Every year at Christmas, we could expect a big haul of CDs from David,” his sister Siobhan Farrell said. “My husband, Murray, was an extremely devoted music lover and a collector of many types of music, so he was especially thrilled to see what kind of collection David had assembled for us. It usually included a few well-known artists, but also included a number of unknown gems.”
The last thing Mr. Farrell worked on was the electronic newsletter FYI. It dealt with the same things he wrote about all his working life, Canadian music industry news, artist profiles, sales charts and job postings.
Mr. Farrell loved the water from the time he crewed on yachts as a young man. He had learned about sailing on a training ship called the Pathfinder operating out of Toronto. Though his writing life was about rock and pop music, and his brother, Dominic, guesses that at one stage he owned more than 10,000 albums, there were other things he liked to speak about.
“Oddly he rarely talked about music,” Dominic said. “I don’t remember him ever recommending a record or a musician to me.”
David Farrell was a colourful, outgoing man with a quick wit who was also fond of off-colour jokes.
“I remember an afternoon in the old Museum Bar on Bloor Street slurping oysters – we ate 48 of them – and knocking back pints,” his brother said. “We talked about politics, people he liked and people he detested. And about books. He loved the great mystery writers, like John le Carré and Philip Kerr.”
Mr. Farrell leaves his partner, Joan Ralph; his children with Patricia Dunn-Farrell, from whom he was separated, D’Arcy, Brendan and Lewis; his sisters Siobhan and Mary Ann; and his brother, Dominic. His sister Judy predeceased him.
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