John Farnham’s memoir The Voice Inside gives fans more insight into his life than ever before.

TO Dan CondonABC

“Sitting in that garage… for the first time in my career, I was able to sing and be myself the way I wanted to sing and be myself,” John Farnham writes in his recently released memoir. Voice inside.

It’s 1985, the singer is broke and ready to take the last step towards big success.

Eighteen years earlier, he was a pop superstar and teen heartthrob. His song “Sadie, The Cleaning Lady” sold more copies than any other Australian song of the 1960s, but it also painted him into a corner. For years he was known as the kid who sang “Sadie.”

After being pressured by managers such as Darrell Sambell, old enemies such as the Little River Band (which he led despite hostility to its creative core), and industry skeptics who saw him as an unsuccessful newcomer better suited to games in semi-full leagues. clubs than modern rock concerts, it was in this garage that he finally began to support himself.

This lack of self-confidence is one of the unexpected lines of Farnham’s first memoirs.

We discover how one of Australia’s most popular entertainers spent the first two decades of his career out of control, subject to the whims of people he trusted but who didn’t always have his best interests at heart.

Anyone who has seen Poppy Stokell’s 2023 documentary Finding a Voiceknows what came out of that garage. A final attempt by Farnham and manager Glenn Whitley to make the singer a superstar resulted in the release of the 1986 album. Whispering Jackthe best-selling Australian album of all time.

But there’s a lot Voice inside that didn’t make this movie. Farnham’s reserved nature means that much of this book may not have been heard outside of conversations with his family or his close circle of friends.

For example, we heard that a cat once bit him on the penis, that Bob Hawke once offered him a fake watch, and that he almost fell off the boat that brought his family to Australia in the late 1950s. We learn that he has a terrible sense of direction and that he performed Lleyton Hewitt’s wedding for free.

Some of the findings are even more sinister: he was drugged, coerced and abused by his former manager. He faced financial ruin many times. He and his wife, Jill, had been trying to have children for years. During the darkest months of Covid, he drank up to three bottles of wine every night.

For Farnham fans, this is all entirely convincing. This is the glimpse into his life that we always dreamed of but never thought we’d get.

For Stockell, who co-wrote the book with Farnham, it was a chance to finally meet the man she had been studying closely for years.

“I didn’t actually meet John while filming the movie,” she told ABC.

“I spent a good three years of my life reading, watching and listening to everything I could about John. I felt like I knew this guy inside and out without even meeting him. I first met him when we sat down to write a book.

“He came in, I came in. We both had tears in our eyes, we hugged each other tightly and we were done from there.”

It was earlier this year that the now 75-year-old Farnham and Stockell had the first of a dozen long conversations that made up much of the book’s content.

These conversations weren’t always easy. When your guard has been on for decades, thinking about the most difficult moments in your life is quite challenging. Knowing that the world will soon read about this must be gut-wrenching.

“It was definitely difficult for him,” Stokell says. “There were many years of really difficult experiences, he was out of favor for a long time.

“I didn’t actually meet John during the filming of the film,” she told ABC.

“I spent a good three years of my life reading, watching and listening to everything I could about John. I felt like I knew this guy inside and out without even meeting him. I first met him when we sat down to write a book.

“He came in, I came in. We both had tears in our eyes, we hugged each other tightly and we were done from there.”

It was earlier this year that the now 75-year-old Farnham and Stockell had the first of a dozen long conversations that made up much of the book’s content.

These conversations weren’t always easy. When your guard has been on for decades, thinking about the most difficult moments in your life is quite challenging. Knowing that the world will soon read about this must be gut-wrenching.

“It was definitely difficult for him,” Stokell says. “There were many years of really difficult experiences, he was out of favor for a long time.

“But he is the master of his story. He is the owner of his narrative. We carefully looked through it and sort of designed it. I think he was really, really generous.”

His generosity is welcome, but after decades of near silence it’s a little annoying. The loser guy who dominated Australian pop culture for decades is really human after all. He loses his temper, has a fat ego, and doesn’t like being around crowds of people.

He also seems genuinely gracious, grateful to the public who supported him (he doesn’t like to call us fans) and happy to be alive. He’s not sure if he’ll ever sing again, but as his wife Jill writes in the book, he “still has a lot to live for.”

Voice inside This is probably the closest look at John Farnham’s life that we will ever get. It was worth the wait.

Voice inside out now.

– This story was first published ABC