He may have had medical intervention to stop him being so tall, but the treatment Adam Harvey had as a young boy ensured his country music career reached great heights.
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Harvey endured a year of painful fortnightly injections into his thighs to stop him from growing to a projected height of seven-foot-three or four. He now stands tall at six-foot-four.
“Back in my day, the treatment was these bloody awful injections like this real thick serum they used to inject into each of your thighs,” he said. “When you left the doctor’s surgery it felt like you’d just copped a corked thigh from playing football or something.”
Harvey’s mum had taken him to an endocrinologist at The Royal Children’s Hospital when he was just 10. “I was unusually tall, heads and shoulders above all the kids right through primary school,” he said. “Thanks to mum, they did a bunch of x-rays and tests and they measure the growth plates in your wrists.”
After a year of monitoring his growth, doctors worked out he would grow to seven-foot-three or four. “People say: ‘but you could have been a basketball player’. Yeah, but you can’t fit in a normal doorway and you can’t fit in a normal car and you have to have shoes specially made and you can’t fit in a normal bed,” he said.
“I think it can have other complications too, with muscle tissue and your heart. There can be all sorts of things once you get up near the seven-foot range. I think there are some health complications.”
His son Conway – who is named after famous country singer Conway Twitty – is six-foot-six with a size 15 shoe at age 14 and has just finished the same treatment his father. He was projected to be seven-foot-two.
It was while visiting his son’s specialist at Sydney’s Westmead Hospital recently that the endocrinologist revealed why Harvey was the only one in his immediate or extended family that could sing. “He said ‘All those horrible needles you had, it was all worthwhile because that’s the reason you’ve got that deep voice.”
The testosterone treatment pushed Harvey through puberty early to sped up his growth spurt. “So by the time I was probably 12 going into 13, I’d already gone through puberty and had my growth spurt and so I was done and dusted.”
Advances in medicine meant Conway was spared the injections and just had to take tablets. “It’s strange now we’ve got this six-foot-six, fully grown man who has a size 15 shoes and he’s 14 years old,” Harvey said.
And while Conway is starting to develop a deep voice, he has no plans to follow in his father’s footsteps and pursue a country music career. “He doesn’t like country music at all. He loves rap and stuff like that.”
Harvey grew up on country music. “Dad used to brainwash us as kids,” he said. “I went through a stage for a couple of years there where I liked a bit of rock stuff. A bit of AC/DC and Guns N’ Roses, or whatever was coming out at the time. I always played country music. It was always my first love. I used to get teased a lot at school.”
He started his first band – a rock cover band – when he was 15 and secured a residency playing at a pub in Geelong. Harvey would open the shows with a solo country set because his bandmates were “too cool” to play country.
“It’s so funny, now my son when he’s badly behaved or makes his mum cranky, she makes him come to me with my shows and he has to sit through country music. So that’s his punishment. We don’t take his iPad off him, he has to come and listen to country music,” he said with a laugh.
It was while playing at pubs in Geelong that he met his wife, Kathy. “My beautiful wife used to bring a group of people down from all around Camperdown. They were in a rock’n’roll dancing club and they used to dance at the gigs in Geelong.”
The couple moved to Terang about 18 years ago and bought a house opposite the gold course.
“We spent some of our best years there. We’ve got fond memories of Terang. We’ve made some lifelong friends. It’s a shame when we had to move but I had no choice,” he said.
“They wouldn’t give me a record deal unless I moved to Sydney.
“It was the standard deal back then, unless you were willing to show enough commitment to move to Sydney, they wouldn’t sign you up.
“I think they want you close to the record companies and managers and booking agents and all the people that make a quid out of you.”
He said he would probably still be living in Terang if it wasn’t for the record companies.
And while he is now based just north of Sydney, he visits the south-west regularly. Every Christmas he visits his old friends in Terang and family at Allansford – his wife’s sister runs Pearson’s nursery.
“When we left Terang. All of our friends said you’re mad. What the hell are you doing? You’ve got a baby on the way, you’ve quit your jobs. What? Do you think you’re going to make a living being a country music singer?
“Luckily my beautiful wife, she was great. She said ‘well, we’ll go and give this thing a go. If it all falls over we’ll just come back and start again.”
Harvey was nervous about the move and his wife give him a plaque which still sits on their bedside table which says ‘As long as we’re together, the rest will fall into place’.
“I wrote a song called Falling into Place which was all about basically my wife and I leaving Terang and moving up to Sydney,” Harvey said.
“I wrote that song with Troy Casser-Daley and that was exactly about our life down there and leaving Terang and taking the risks that we took.”
It was the title track of the album which won the Country Music Awards Golden Guitar Award for album of the year in 2014.
“Must be something good about Terang,” Harvey said.
Harvey has won eight golden guitar awards and over the years has collaborated with artists including Guy Sebastian, Wendy Matthews, John Williamson and Troy Casser-Daley.
One of his first big country gigs was supporting Lee Kernaghan at the Brucknell Scout camp for the Brucknell Bash New Year’s Eve concert about 17 years ago.
“I can still remember sitting out backstage with Lee having a few drinks while he gave me lots of good advice about the music business,” he said.
“I’m just lucky. I’ve been able to get a few lucky breaks and be able to do what I love for a living. Not many people can do that.
“I remember my dad used to tell me ‘mate, you chase that music thing as far as it’ll take you’.
“He said don’t end up like me and dread every morning at 5am when the alarm goes off and you’ve got to go and work in some stinking factory. It was good advice.”
Before he got his big break in country music, he had many jobs that required many hours on the road.
“I got a job in the earthmoving game after my very unsuccessful stints with Kmart as the layby boy – I got the sack because I wouldn’t wear a tie – and I was packing spuds in Geelong for a while.”
He also used to drive from Terang to Fyansford in Geelong to work in the cement factory quarry.
“Then I got this job at Timboon which was fantastic. I worked at Timboon for a while building the settling ponds for one of the treatment plants, doing the earthworks,” he said.
“It’s amazing when you stop and think. I was working in Terang and we weren’t making much money.
“We would never be able to travel all over the world like we have, and we’ve taken my wife and the kids over to America many times.”
He has performed in China, at the Grand Ol Opry in Nashville and on board a number of cruise ships.
“I get paid to sing and I get to take the family with me, so that’s pretty amazing. Next year our 10th cruise is Canada and Alaska and I get to take my wife and kids. It’s incredible. It’s not a bad job.”