John Farnham’s much anticipated new memoir, The Voice Inside, was published last Wednesday, revealing details about the abuse and deceit of Farnham’s first manager, Darryl Sambell.
In the memoir Farnham sheds light on his experience as a young musician, and the control and abuse he endured at the hands of Sambell, accusing him of being “sexually aggressive”, as well as controlling what he ate, wore and sang. “At times, in the early years, he was aggressively sexual with me,” he writes. “He would try it on and I would say, ‘Darryl, no. Just leave me alone,’ or, ‘It’s not going to happen.’ I said it often enough that I can see now that this rejection turned his attraction into jealousy, hatred and a desire for control.”
In the book Farnham describes the moment Sambell noticed him. Farnham, 17 at the time, was performing at a bar in Cohuna, Victoria. Sambell, who was 21 at the time, started controlling Farnham when he rose to fame after his hit Sadie the Cleaning Lady, stating he controlled “where and when I worked, what I sang, what I wore, what I ate. He isolated me from my friends and family, he tried to keep me away from [Farnham’s now wife] Jill, he drugged me, and he made me believe that all my success, everything I had, was because of him.”
Farnham also goes on to detail how Sambell would drug him with amphetamines to keep him working through the night, then sleeping tablets to knock him out in the morning. “He drugged me for years, and I had no fucking idea,” Farnham writes, adding that he had only discovered what Sambell was doing when he found a half-dissolved pill in his coffee.
In his new memoir is the first time Farnham himself has spoken about Sambell’s abuse on record.
“I still don’t know why I didn’t react more. I put it down to being young, under stress, tired and feeling unsure and insecure about my own instincts.”
