Ian Warden: Good luck finding a 'no' song to match John Farnham's You're The Voice 'yes' anthem

The sentiments of You're The Voice are actually a bit banal and nebulous when one studies them. But one shouldn't study them and overthink them. One should instead enjoy the song's moving, hymn-like feel and sing along with it to trigger the same feel-good pheromones the audience gets from bellowing out Elgar's Land of Hope and Glory on the Last Night of the Proms.

A little carried away by catching up with John Farnham's 1986 You're The Voice (readers, why not go to YouTube now to see and hear and revel in it?), I think I am about to become the first writer ever to admiringly mention our John Farnham and the legendary Swedish operatic tenor Jussi Bjorling in the same sentence.

Yes, here it comes, for I want to say that just as fine music writers have always marvelled at the "silver trumpet" qualities of Bjorling's voice, our John Farnham's heyday voice had trumpets (and sometimes trombones too) sounding in it.

Bjorling's Nessun Dorma (and how one wishes John Farnham had recorded a pop-concert Nessun Dorma while Farnham's voice was a planetshaker!) is even more thrillingly planetshaking than Pavarotti's.

And at its heyday best, Farnham's voice had effortless power too, albeit warm and lovely power (like a foghorn heard from a great distance). And so the Farnham-enriched "yes" campaign ad is a thing of nostalgia-stoking sonic loveliness irrespective of what one feels about its political message.

It wouldn't surprise if (although there will be no way that political scientist and pollsters will ever be able to measure and prove it) the ad will convert some to a "yes" just through the subconscious association of so excitingly lovely a sound (Farnham's 1986 voice).

The "no" campaign will struggle to find so perfect a popular musical accompaniment for a No sentiment. I am doing my best to help the Nos in this. Here are some half-suggestions.

The title of Ringo Starr's No-No-No-No Song (1974) seems at first to offer promise.

But going to the song, one finds Ringo's voice is a poor, thin, impoverished, uninspired thing with none of the evangelical power of John Farnham's sonic booming.

Then there is the problem of the song's unsuitable theme of the polite No No No No refusal of intoxicating drugs "because I'm tired of wakin' up on the floor".

Still trying to assist the "no" side in this, one thinks of George and Ira Gershwin's classic No, No They Can't Take That Away From Me.

From its title and from the way that "No, No" sentiment crops up in the song, it does seem to have some resonance with the "no" campaign's fearmongerings about how the Voice will wrench away non-Aboriginal Australians' precious rights and give them to undeserving Aborigines.

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And yet I am ashamed of myself for even thinking of this use of this great, great song. Can it be that the sheer nastiness of the referendum campaign, of referendum politics bringing out the worst in our nation, the worst in all of us, has disturbed the balance of my mind?

The dear song, brilliantly composed and wistfully lovely, is far too excellently lovely for the brutes of the "no" case to be allowed to misuse sully and brutalise it.

Of course, still half-minded to help the "no" side with its music, one must point out that the most powerful Nos in all of music are found in JS Bach's church cantatas (and Bach has all the best tunes). In the cantatas, believers are constantly instructed to say No No No No to Satan's temptations.

Bach's brief, melodious little cantata BWV 54 Widerstehe doch der Snde (Just say No to sin), as tuneful in its way as You're The Voice, is a little ripper of a musical No No No No.

And yet one doubts there are many classical music enthusiasts on the "no" side. Surely they are mostly uncultured philistines?

And in any case, Beelzebub (if he exists - Bach never doubted it for a moment and this columnist only doubts it half the time) in this referendum is bound to be on the evil "no" side and a force for the good "yes" side to have to fight.

Surely one sees Beelzebub (believer Scott Morrison's "The Evil One") everywhere in the worst malignancies of the "no" campaign.

He is there in the circulation by the fearmongers of lies (artfully designed to alarm simple-minded Australians) about what the Voice will do to Australia as we have known it.

He is there in the Nos' sinful raising from the mummified dead of John 'they threw their children overboard" Howard to urge Australians to "rage" against the Voice.

Referendums bring out the worst in us and our worst is Beelzebub's natural habitat, his playground. We are hearing his voice everywhere right now. Do try to understand that.

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