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 to 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.
