It looks like it’s the end of the performing road for Australian singer John Farnham. Extensive surgery for oral cancer has left the 75-year-old unable to sing.
Back in 2022 Farnham was diagnosed with cancer and later went through a 12 hour operation to remove a tumour. During the complex procedure - which involved no fewer than 26 doctors – a portion of the singer’s jaw was removed and had to be reconstructed.
The good news is that Farnham has now been declared cancer-free. The downside is that the surgery has left him unable to summon up the power in his voice to sing.
In the UK Farnham is best known for You’re The Voice, a 1987 Top Ten hit, but down under he’s regarded as music royalty. That hit is a virtual national anthem, heard regularly at sports arenas, indeed at any outdoor public event. Its accompanying album Whispering Jack remains the biggest selling album by an Australian artist in their home country, going a gob-smacking 24 times platinum.
Now the singer has written a memoir, The Voice Inside, which reveals his current frustrations – since the operation he has been unable to open his mouth to sing or even eat properly: “My facial disfigurement from the surgery means I can’t open my mouth wide enough for a strip of spaghetti, let alone to sing,” he writes.
“I can’t get the movement to make the sounds I want to make, that’s where the vibrations and my voice come from. It’s a very disconcerting thing. And trying hurts.”
Farnham hasn’t given up hope just yet of being able to perform again once more: “I was given a gift and to be able to get out there and affect people in some way was special, I would like to continue doing that. Though I am not putting all my hopes into it, we’ll see.”
The singer was a long term smoker, a habit he says he now deeply regrets. “Cancer doesn’t discriminate, but as soon as I was told the results, I couldn’t help thinking it was my own fault, I smoked very heavily all my life.”
At present it looks like his long career – his first Aussie hit came way back in 1967 - is over, but in an Instagram post announcing the news that he was cancer free last year, he said just glad to be still around: “I’m home now and I’m a very grateful and happy man. I’m sitting here in my living room lapping up the attention from my beautiful wife, Jill, my boys Rob and James and my mini Schnauzer, Edmund.”
