Weeks before music industry legend Glenn Wheatley passed away from Covid, he co-incidentally decided to record at audio book version of his 1999 best-seller autobiography ‘Paper Paradise’.
Unknown to Glenn at the time, the new audio version gives his friends and family a chance to hear about his life in his own words.
“‘Paper Paradise’ is his entire life up to when he wrote it (1999),” Glenn’s son Tim Wheatley tells Noise11.com. “Following a little stint away he got writing on the last 20 years of his life which I will argue is probably more eventful. There is a second book. We are completely that and putting the final touches on that and hope to deliver that to the rest of the world imminently”.
Watch the interview with Tim Wheatley:
Glenn got the idea to turn his best seller into an audio book after listening to some pretty impressive ones in recent months. Tim tells us, “In his last couple of months, my old man was listening to Springsteen’s audio book and then he went straight into Keith Richards’ audio book, which I think Johnny Depp did and then he did Matthew McConaughey’s. It was Dad just being Dad without any foresight, he just loved it. He sees himself as somewhat of an entertainer and I heard that he tried to ham it up a little bit too much at the start. The motto was ‘less is more, Glenn’. He sat in there for 14 or 15 hours in total in the vocal booth and got to it”.
The warts and all autobiography is a great way for Tim, who recently became a father, to pass on the family legacy. He says some of the stories that fascinate him are the ones how Glenn could mediate a business crisis. “The bit that fascinated me the most was the mediation within LRB and his role in Little River Band. That’s the bit that fascinated me because as mediator he was the middle-man. He was the keeper of the peace. Those five gentlemen and the every revolving door of lead singers and musicians sounded like an absolute nightmare to me. Then to pick it up and go back to work with one of the people he had to fire was just phenomenal. I don’t know how he had the metal to do something like that”.
Get Paper Paradise audio book here
Before Glenn Wheatley ventured over to the business end of the music industry he was a rock star in his own rite. Tim recently recorded The Masters Apprentices best known song ‘Because I Love You’ as a tribute to the 50th anniversary of the song. His recording became a tribute to his father.
Tim and Glenn were also working on the resurrection of Glenn’s record label Wheatley Records. We will be hearing more about that soon through Tim.
Tim’s latest song is ‘Shiny Tacoma’.
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