Sunnyboy Jeremy Oxley’s salvation detailed in Here Comes The Sun

Sunnyboys frontman Jeremy Oxley’s recovery from alcoholism and mental illness is set forth in Here Comes the Sun.

Jeremy Oxley and Mary Oxley Griffiths have written a touching tale of salvation. Picture: Jamie Hanson

One of the best Australian documentaries in recent years was The Sunnyboy, directed by Kaye Harrison and screened on ABC television in 2013. Its focus was Jeremy Oxley, singer, songwriter and guitarist of the great Sydney-based pop band Sunnyboys, which burned brightly for a few years — its 1981 self-titled album is among the strongest debuts by any Australian band — before petering out amid the demands of 300-plus shows a year and a pair of less resonant follow-up releases.

The Sunnyboy provided an in-depth look at Oxley’s life since the band’s break-up. The intervening decades were not kind to him: afflicted by schizophrenia, which was diagnosed at 22, he became a socially isolated alcoholic. The film had a happy ending, however: in 2008, Oxley met Mary Griffiths, a kind nurse who helped transform his life and return him to the stage for a series of reunion gigs.

Here Comes the Sun offers the couple the chance to tell this story in their own words. Harrison’s film was a touching, sensitive and objective portrait of Oxley’s mental illness. This book is written in an iterative fashion, with Oxley and Oxley Griffiths taking turns to drive the narrative forward, chapter by chapter, from their childhoods through to the present day. Some overlap is to be expected with this stylistic decision, but it’s well-handled by the authors, and their differing perspectives on events and emotions becomes fascinating in later chapters, once they meet and their relationship begins in earnest.

Oxley Griffiths’s training as a nurse means she is well-equipped with the vocabulary and mindset that medicine and healthcare demand. Conversely, Oxley refuses to accept his schizophrenia. In the parlance of psychiatry, he has little insight into the reality of his condition; a lifelong illness that can’t be cured, only managed — which, with his wife’s help and patience, Oxley has been doing successfully for years now.

This unwillingness to accept his situation first appears in the book’s introduction, where he introduces himself as “musician, artist, painter, writer, poet and, apparently, schizophrenic”. It becomes a narrative tension — perhaps ­unintentionally — throughout: even in the final chapter, following a wildly successful Sunnyboys performance at the Sydney Opera House after the launch screening of The Sunnyboy, Oxley writes “I still wasn’t convinced that anybody would want to watch a documentary about an illness that I really didn’t have any more.”

However, perhaps it’s indicative of the insidious, pervasive, tricky nature of the illness itself that Oxley can still think and write in these terms. Many times, he writes of how he doesn’t wish to be perceived as a “lunatic” — and to be fair, who would? One wonders how much easier his path might have been if he had accepted the psychiatrist’s diagnosis at 22: “I’m sorry, you have schizophrenia. You will need to be on medication for the rest of your life.” Instead, Oxley shunned his prescriptions for years, preferring to self-­­med­icate with alcohol in order to drown out the negative voices that plagued his mind, occasionally landing in trouble with the law as a result.

Like the documentary, this book has a happy ending, and it is wonderful to read of Oxley’s complete transformation from awkward outcast to committed family man. We’re left with the impression that he truly couldn’t have done it without Oxley Griffiths, a woman of remarkable strength and tolerance, whose previous two relationships ended in her partners’ severe illness and, in one case, premature death. For a time, both authors resigned themselves to living without romantic attachments: Oxley Griffiths mourned for her dead husband while singlehandedly raising her two young boys, while Oxley was so socially isolated that he barely had friends, let alone a partner. As advertised in the subtitle, theirs is a love story, above all else, and while occasionally moving — especially towards the end, when Oxley Griffiths describes their wedding day and reconstructs the emotional journey of her husband’s return to stage with his original band — the story is told plainly, in an almost conversational manner, as if these are transcripts of the spoken word.

It shows that neither author is a writer, and while this straightforward manner of factual, chronological recounting suits Here Comes the Sun, I did find myself wishing for tighter scenes and more detail. Still, this is a churlish complaint, for the point of the book’s existence is that these are two ordinary people who were seemingly destined to be together, no matter the odds stacked against them and despite the warnings of concerned family members and friends.

Ultimately their mutual love wins out and Oxley’s remarkable musical talent persists, as Oxley Griffiths observes with pride while watching her husband prepare for the Sunnyboys reunion shows. All the years of drinking and mental illness may have chipped away at many of his skills, but his musical ability appears untouched and ready to bloom once more.

Andrew McMillen is a Brisbane-based freelance journalist and author of Talking Smack: Honest Conversations about Drugs.

Here Comes the Sun: The Love Story That Saved a Man From Destruction and Reunited Sunnyboys

By Jeremy Oxley & Mary Oxley Griffiths

Allen & Unwin, 328pp, $29.99