Longtime bandmate Sid Limbert knew. “Everyone talks about Mike as a guitarist,” he said, “but he was one of the best singers I’ve ever heard. I learned more about singing from Mike than anybody. He was a wonderful singer.”

From the mid 1980s until his untimely death in 2000, Farrell was intermittently working on an album of his own, repeatedly thwarted by an incessant search for perfection. In the words of Neil Hannan, another bandmate: “He just wouldn’t let anything go. He’d do these endless takes, and you’d go back to the first one and that was the best one.”

“It used to be so frustrating at times,” Sid Limbert said. “He used to say, ‘Great, we got that. Let’s just do it again, I’ve got another idea. Let’s try it like this.’ He used to call it exploring the possibilities. He’d say, ‘It’s not finished until you’ve explored all the possibilities!’”

Exploring the possibilities meant studio versions of Farrelli Brothers live staples such as ‘Don’t Wait Up’ and ‘Four O’Clock In The Morning’, ballads like ‘Wings Of Love’, ‘Let Me Drink Your Wine’ and ‘Bobby O’, and renderings of ‘Burning Rain’ and ‘Little Ray’, were never completed to his satisfaction and ultimately robbed of an audience.

As a session man he added lead and/or slide guitar on singles or albums by Phil Bowering’s Low Profile, Sonny Day, Pātea Māori Club, Ross Mullins’s Last Man Down, Ray Columbus, Missy Teka, John Grenell, Tom Sharplin, Brendan Power, Suzanne Prentice, and Hello Sailor. He produced two albums for fire-belching rhythm-and-blues crusader Ted Clarke.

Unknown to most who met him, Farrell lived with epilepsy and it influenced his career decisions, especially around travelling abroad. He was put on lithium as a teenager, but it made him drowsy and unfocused, so he stopped taking it and learned to manage the condition with corrective breathing.

“His main fear was having a seizure with other people around and not being able to take himself away to somewhere private,” his wife Fiona Farrell told AudioCulture. “He never swam in the cold sea because that’s where he had his first seizure and almost drowned. He really hated that he couldn’t go swimming with his kids. However, in the last few months before he died, we would take the kids swimming at a heated swimming pool, at 6am when there were very few people around. This is a really precious memory for our children and for me.”

Mike Farrell’s most enduring contribution to the New Zealand music landscape remains his work on Midge Marsden’s Burning Rain album in 1991. Besides providing guitar and backing vocals, he wrote the opening three tracks and co-wrote a further two. “Mike came along and played everything on it and arranged it,” Marsden said. “It was very much him. I think he was a bit chuffed that I was the first person to be singing his songs.”

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This is the introduction to a two-part profile of Mike Farrell by Glen Moffatt, which can be read at these links: 

Mike Farrell, part one: Hip Dude to Hot Pepper

Mike Farrell, part two: Farrelli Round The Flag