| Larry Schwartz |
| Deborah Conway has often provoked strong reaction. Her new album is likely to be no different. Larry Schwartz reports. `HEYYY, bitch! The bitch-of-pitch!” Deborah Conway uses the B-word in the nicest possible sense. She says it has been redefined to include women who refuse to fit narrow stereotypes or expected roles. It’s almost a compliment, the singer-songwriter insists. `Bitch Epic’, the title of her latest album, came to her when seeking inspiration by drawing words on bits of paper from a hat. It “wasn’t something I felt easy with,” she says. “This title came up in January and at that point I said, `No … I just can’t do it’.” Undaunted by the likelihood she is encouraging others to tag her a bitch, Conway laughingly dismisses the way she is sometimes presented in the press _ one report attributes to her a “legendary coldness”, short fuse and unsparing intolerance of fools. “Nasty piece of work, aren’t I?” she says. Paul Kelly’s misgivings on the use of the word “epic” had her reaching for a dictionary for a definition, a tale of courage through adversity, she says. “I mean I haven’t lived through Bosnia and I haven’t starved through Somalia and my fairly prosperous upbringing and sheltered upbringing … my version of adversity is obviously different to other people’s.” Conway talks of adversity, in one sense, in the competitive music scene, in another “the darker side” confronted in the creative process. “I think if you are going to write songs that touch other people … you have to plumb the depths within your own soul … and write from there.” A modelling career (The Southern Comfort Girl, The Cool Charm Girl, The Big M egg flip girl) paid her way out of the parental home in Toorak and through an arts degree. Sleeve photographs on the new album feature her bared torso, smeared with two jars of Nutella spread, preparing to gorge a cream pie. She says the shoot was part of a promotion on the ABC television program, `The Seven Deadly Sins’. She was one of seven people asked to represent a sin. “Guess which sin I was? Gluttony!” In the drizzle outside the Mushroom group of companies building, in a laneway in Albert Park, she shows a professional’s ease in front of the camera. SHE says she modelled only for the money. “I mean you could earn $6 an hour waitressing. You could earn $60 an hour being a model.” It had been a relatively easy job despite the complaints, “because I didn’t want to shave my armpits or my legs or brush my hair, things like that”. She modelled between the ages of 18 and 23. Later came a move to Sydney, where she and drummer Dorland Bray established Do Re Mi. The band had success with singles such as `Man Overboard’ and `Idiot Grin’. Big things were expected after its debut album, `Domestic Harmony’, but the band split up. Conway was off overseas with a late 1988 solo deal with Virgin Records. An album was recorded but not released. She has backed Pete Townshend on `Tin Man’, the 1989 concept album based on a story by the English poet, Ted Hughes. “I got a phone call when I was on tour in Perth with Do Re Mi. I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone. Pete Townshend wants me. It was just so bizarre. “He had just signed to Virgin Records and he had been watching a bunch of videos and Do Re Mi had come up. And he had said, `Oo, I like her. Let’s have her’.” Through a friend, she secured the operatic role of the goddess Juno in Peter Greenaway’s `Prospero’s Books’, a film based on Shakespeare’s `The Tempest’. “I was living in Portobello Road, funded by Virgin and I became friendly with Michael Nyman. One day he asked me if I would sing this aria. He said he didn’t want to offend me but he had asked Annie Lennox first and she couldn’t do it …” The soundtrack was recorded at Abbey Road, the film shot in Amsterdam. She has since had a role in a production by John Clarke and Geoffrey Rush of Aristophanes’ `Frogs’. Back in Melbourne after the Virgin debacle _ she was courted by the record company then dropped without an album when it lost enthusiasm _ she signed with Mushroom. The 1991 solo debut, `String of Pearls’, was applauded by the critics and sold close to 70,000. Winner of the best female performer category at last year’s ARIA awards, she says Mushroom boss Michael Gudinski was unimpressed by her failure to capitalise on her looks in the video clip for the single from that album, `Only the Beginning’. “People want me to make some kind of sexy-looking video,” she said after the release of the video in which she appears in tartan golf pants a la Katharine Hepburn. “And when I don’t, they tell me I’m my own worst enemy …” She says the cover of the new album has been better received in this regard, though it “wasn’t done to please Michael”. `Alive and Brilliant’, the single from the album features a picture of the Hindu deity, Krishna. The day we meet, her belt buckle has images of Jesus and Mary. About her neck is a chunky Star of David. “Hey, I have an each way bet on,” she laughs. Conway’s family originally comes from Russia. She thinks the surname was Podnow, though she is not sure of the spelling. Her forebears changed it to Cohen when they migrated to England _”we’re talking way back, pogrom time”. IN Edinburgh, she found the grave of a great-grandmother, Rebecca Silk, nee Cohen. “Anyway the name was changed to Cohen, I suppose to anglicise it. And then my father emigrated to Australia with his parents when he was 19 or so and wanted to start a law practice and decided there was too much anti-semitism and changed his name to Conway.” Before the release of `String of Pearls’, she was considering a name- change, to Cohen. “So I could have been Deborah Cohen and the Leonards as my band,” she laughs. “Anything for a cheap gag”. Conway has taken a pride in her singing ability since she was a child. “When I was very young. Five, six, seven or eight. I remember belting out songs in the shower and screaming to my mother what a fantastic singer I was.” Her lawyer father was into Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Liza Minelli. At 16, Conway discovered Joni Mitchell. Then Bob Dylan. She can enthuse about a little known recording of a 1964 Dylan concert or the 1965 D.A. Pennebaker film of his British tour, `Don’t Look Back’. Conway has said: “I don’t think that I have much in common with Kylie Minogue or Wendy Matthews or Kate Ceberano … I would compare myself according to style, not according to gender. We’re talking music here, not what sex I am.” Where then does she place herself? “Who do I aspire to be? Is that what you’re asking? Well, Paul Simon? I love Paul Simon. I think Neil Finn is a fantastic songwriter. I think Paul Kelly is a magnificent storyteller.” She was listening to and loving Suzanne Vega’s latest and most extroverted album around the time she recorded `Bitch Epic’. She says she sometimes composes the title first. Sometimes a song develops from a series of strummed chords. Very rarely does she compose the music to fit a lyric written first. She says the new album eschews the debut’s country influence and the music, co-written with guitarist Willy Zygier, is far more adventurous. “Choosing the album title is always an important, sometimes fraught decision,” she has written in a promotional note on the album. “… Well between thinking `Jimmy Barnes’ would be an interesting marketing ploy and settling on `Bitch Epic’, `The Times They Are A Changing’ was tossed around …” She says she seriously considered giving it the name of one of its songs, `Madame Butterfly is in Trouble’, which has the lines: “Call me diva/ Call me princess/ Put me on the stage/ Let me sing high take my clothes off/ And watch you be outraged …” Conway confirms that when she first decided to join a rock band, her dad sent her off to a psychiatrist. She says he offered no comment on the Nutella-smeared torso on the `Bitch Epic’ cover. Instead, he quickly flipped to the back and asked the meaning of the name of a song. “Couldn’t you be more mysterious?” was her mother’s response. THE SUNDAY AGE, 07-Nov-1993 |
Larry Schwartz Writer 