Most people, at least in Sydney, have a story to tell about ‘Singo’. As Gerald Stone comments towards the end of this independent but enthusiastic biography: ‘Anecdotes about John Singleton, even the most affectionate, tend to swing between total admiration and head-wagging disbelief. He leaves no one feeling neutral.’

It would be impossible to write a boring biography of John Singleton, as the rather breathless subtitle of this book suggests. With six wives, a history of outrageous exploits at the pub and on the racetrack, considerable wealth and a career that has spanned advertising, the media, and even circus and rodeo promotion, Singleton is a captivating biographical subject. Stone, an accomplished television journalist and magazine editor, has made a good fist of his subject. The writing is easy and engaging, and the research base – both print and oral - solid.

 In a curious way, this book is as much autobiography as biography. As readers of Singo are told more than once, the author emigrated to Australia in 1962. This has given Stone the opportunity to follow Singleton’s career from a junior position in advertising in the late 1950s to the head of the largest Australian-owned agency by the late 1990s. While hardly in the vein of Brian Matthews’s Louisa or Drusilla Modjeska’s Stravinsky’s Lunch, Singo is partly about the biographer’s own journey. Stone guides the reader through the process of writing the biography: meeting Singleton’s devoted mother and wading through her copious scrapbooks; being refused an interview by Singleton’s first wife; learning of his reluctance to be dissected; and, finally, being granted an interview with the man himself.