One of Australia’s most highly-anticipated music memoirs, The Voice Inside by John Farnham, is making headlines this week thanks to multiple candid accounts.
Released today in both physical and audiobook formats, the memoir delves into Farnham’s rise to fame in the 1960s, his career struggles and comeback, his personal life and family, and most notably, the recent health challenges, which saw him undergo a marathon 12-hour surgery to remove a cancerous tumour in late 2022.
The procedure, which followed his diagnosis with oral cancer in August 2022, involved the reconstruction of part of his jaw and required intensive care and an extended recovery period. Surgeons removed all his bottom teeth and scraped his jaw bone.
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Farnham’s recounting of the experience in The Voice Inside marks the first time the music legend has talked publicly about the surgery and his recovery.
“I was told later that someone from the medical team called Jillian [Billman, Farnham’s wife] a couple of times while I was in theatre – apparently I was very close to dying,” he said.
In 2023, Farnham’s family announced he was cancer-free, and while his son Robert told this journalist he is back singing again, he continues to recover and regain strength.
Farnham wrote about regaining his voice in the memoir.
“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,” he wrote.
“It’s still a very disconcerting thing. And trying hurts […] I can barely open my mouth but I still wail in the shower.”
Elsewhere in the memoir, Farnham claims his first manager, Darryl Sambell, drugged him with sleeping pills to make him rest, and with amphetamines to keep him awake. He also claims Sambell manipulated him, and was “sexually aggressive”.
“I caught him one day,” Farnham wrote. “I was drinking from a cup of coffee and there was a pill only half-dissolved in the bottom. When I asked him what it was, Darryl replied, ‘That’s just to keep you awake’.
“For years, Darryl controlled where and when I worked, what I sang, what I wore, what I ate. He isolated me from friends and family, he tried to keep me away from Jill, he drugged me, and he made me believe that all my success, everything I had, was because of him.
“I still don’t know why I didn’t react more,” Farnham added. “I put it down to being young, under stress, tired and feeling unsure and insecure about my own instincts.”
In the same chapter, Farnham detailed Sambell’s unwanted sexual advances: “At the time, in the early years, he was aggressively sexual toward me. He would ‘try it on’ and I would say, ‘Darryl, no. Just leave me alone’, or, ‘It’s not going to happen’.”
Farnham also touches on he and his wife Jill’s personal struggles to start a family. He noted the pair considered adoption and “got 99 per cent of the way through the adoption paperwork”.
“The adoption process in Australia back then was very difficult … so we went with an agency that helped Australian families adopt Indian children,” he wrote.
“[We] were close to having a child placed with us when Jill found out she was pregnant. It was a wonderful moment, but we then had to decide whether we should continue adopting. It was something we really agonised over, but in the end we decided not to proceed.”
The Voice Inside was co-authored by Poppy Stockell, the award-winning writer, director and producer behind the tell-all biopic, John Farnham: Finding the Voice.
The biopic became the highest box-office grossing Australian documentary of all time last May, at $2.2 million.
Speaking of co-authoring the memoir, Stockell told The Guardian: “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 also added, “In some ways, I feel like I know his life better than he does now. 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.”
John Farnham is one of Australia’s most decorated and highest-earning artists. He was named Australian of the Year in 1987, he has won 19 ARIA awards, and his 1986 album Whispering Jack remains one the highest grossing local albums, having sold more than 1.6 million copies.
Farnham’s memoir, The Voice Inside, is out today.