Paper Paradise

Paper Paradise: Do what you want to do is a roller coaster ride through the sex, drugs and rock and roll of the ’60s and ’70s to the high-flying business world of the ’80s and into the ’90s and beyond—with someone who lived it all.

It is a book about ambition, hunger, desperation, success and the fruits thereof. Oh yes, it is also about failure and fighting back.

Charting the extraordinary life and times of Glenn Wheatley, from working class boy to rock star of the 1960s and 1970s as a member of one of Australia’s most successful early bands, the Masters Apprentices, now immortalised in the ARIA Hall of Fame. In their heyday, the Masters drew bigger crowds than the Beatles in Australia.

 In the 1980s he soared from rock star to star manager of the Little River Band and Whispering Jack, John Farnham. He also pioneered the FM Radio industry with the first FM radio station to go to air in Australia, EON FM in Melbourne. He then went on to build the foundation of what is now the Triple M radio network.

 It is a narrative littered with casualties and is an actual account of a self-protective society that has its own Kings and Queens, its own iconography, its own language.

 After a meteoric rise in the fast lane, and an equally spectacular fall, he made it back to the top. Glenn was the ultimate rock and roll survivor.