By the time she’d finished her documentary John Farnham: Finding the Voice, film-maker Poppy Stockell still hadn’t met her subject. While the film has plenty of old footage of Farnham – as a little boy, as a teenage heart-throb, as an older star belting out hits on stage – the singer didn’t want anything to do with it. His brief, quiet narration in the film was recorded not by Stockell, but by Gaynor Martin, wife of Farnham’s longtime manager and friend Glenn Wheatley, who had gently pushed Farnham to allow the film to be made. But as Stockell spoke to more members of Farnham’s inner circle – the Wheatleys, then his sons Rob and James, then his wife, Jillian – it was fed back to Farnham that Stockell was, in her words, “alright”.
Months later, Stockell got a surprising call. Her famously private subject now wanted to write a memoir, and he wanted her to write it with him. Having already spent years poring over his life, she finally found the Voice in his home in Victoria, sitting in an armchair and ready to spill.
But even though Farnham was finally willing to talk, it was harder for him than ever. In late 2022, he was diagnosed with mouth cancer and underwent surgery that involved removing all his bottom teeth and scraping his jaw bone. “I was told later that someone from the medical team called Jillian a couple of times while I was in theatre – apparently I was very close to dying,” he writes in the memoir. Then, while recovering from surgery, he broke his back and had to return to hospital. A subsequent course of radiotherapy left him uninterested in food and his weight dropped to 63kg.
When Stockell and Farnham finally sat across from one another for the first time, he’d truly been in the wars – but she found he was determined to crack on. “Sometimes he would have a giggle and then wince because he’d stretched his mouth and the scarring made it hard. But he’d want to keep going,” Stockell says. “He’s a workhorse. I always think of him as a bit of a boxer. He will go and go. And he was often really perky. He can be silly, he’s really fun.”
The cancer diagnosis “gutted” him, Farnham writes in the memoir. Being unable to open his mouth means he may never sing again: “My facial disfigurement from the surgery means I can’t open my mouth wide enough for a strip of spaghetti, let alone to sing a top C. At this stage I can’t get the movement to make the sounds I want to make, and that’s where the vibrations and my voice come from. It’s still a very disconcerting thing. And trying hurts.”
But the radiation treatment hasn’t yet damaged his vocal cords, which leaves him hopeful. He’s still having a go: “I can barely open my mouth but I still wail in the shower.”
Farnham spoke to Stockell in marathon sessions over several months; she estimates 50 hours in total. He had watched her documentary “through his fingers”, she laughs. “In some ways, I feel like I know his life better than he does now,” she jokes. “He really liked it, because he thought that I got him. There’s no way I would have been a part of the book if I hadn’t made the film.”
During their fourth session, she recalls, Farnham “looked me straight in the eyes and said, ‘OK, I trust you’.” . Many times, while covering particularly traumatic memories, they were both in tears: “We both cried heaps, but we laughed a lot too,” Stockell says. “He’s not afraid of being vulnerable, which I really admire, and I think that’s a similarity between us.”
The memoir charts the heights of his celebrity, with some fabulous anecdotes: Bob Hawke crying with him at his Australian citizenship ceremony; Diana, Princess of Wales telling him that she likes his leather pants; or US actor Raquel Welch propositioning him at the 1989 Logies – in front of Jill. “Sorry, my wife said no,” he told her, which made Welch “laugh her arse off”.
But there is also a lot of pain and hardship. There were the years after his twee hit Sadie the Cleaning Lady, when he was still seen as Johnny Farnham (or a “pretty-boy puppet” as he puts it); the lack of work meant, by the 1970s, he had to open tabs at the local shops to buy groceries for his family. Then there was his unhappy spell as frontman of Little River Band, struggling against “undercurrents of animosity, jealousy and petty peeves”. And then the dark, fallow period before Whispering Jack became the highest-selling album in Australia, when he fell into depression, believing he’d never make it.
But the most difficult part was revisting his entry into the music industry as an innocent teenager. “It is a very predatory industry” says Stockell. “John would turn up after some sessions and say, ‘I didn’t sleep at all.’ He’d have pretty bad nightmares after we spoke about certain things. Several times he’d rush through periods, and I’d have to gently take him back, without torturing him. It’s tricky – [as a memoirist] you’re wearing a few hats and probably some you’re not really qualified to wear.”
“I don’t enjoy talking about myself, I really don’t,” the memoir opens – but Stockell thinks he did by the end. “He’d grumble about having to talk about himself, as he’s not that kind of a guy, but I think he did [enjoy it]. It was also hard going over a lot of what’s been. There’s some complex emotions there – shame, guilt. So it wasn’t easy, but I think it was ultimately cathartic.”
Of all of Australia’s most beloved songwriters – Jimmy Barnes, Peter Garrett, Paul Kelly – Farnham is the last to write a memoir, and has held his cards close to his chest for a long time. “He’s very private,” Stockell says. “But I also think, for so long we thought of him as a dag, so this cracking story has just been sitting in front of us and hasn’t been really told before. I was like, ‘Oh my God. How did this come to me? Twice?’”
And what does Farnham think of the memoir? “He went, ‘You spelled my brother’s name wrong!’” she laughs. “I’m just giving him time. He’s probably biting his fingernails, worried about how it’s all going to be received. Actually, I know he is. But I also know that that comes from a lifetime of being exposed. You really don’t want to be famous.”
The Voice Inside by John Farnham and Poppy Stockell is out on Wednesday (Hachette, $49.99)
