Imbruglia imbroglio

By Larry Schwartz

She tucks thick, rubber-heeled trainers beneath her on the couch. A fleecy tracksuit obscures the orange lettering on a faded black T-shirt. “I wear my own clothes, you know,” says the woman recently hailed by a British music paper as among the sexiest in the world.

Natalie Imbruglia has made the big time. And she wears her own clothes. “Starting in the industry very young and doing the job that I did, very often I wasn’t allowed to be myself. I had to wear clothes that weren’t my clothes. A lot of it was out of my control. I like to be comfortable in what I wear.”

You’d never guess this was the 23-year-old singer who is emerging as the biggest international pop sensation from Australia since Kylie Minogue a decade ago.

Imbruglia, too, has graduated from the cast of Neighbours, but her success seems likely to eclipse the achievements of others from Ramsay Street – Jason Donovan, Craig McLachlan, even Minogue.

Move over the Spice Girls. Imbruglia’s debut single, Torn, soared into the top five in Britain, Europe and Australia last year. It’s now edging up the US radio charts, and her second, Big Mistake, has just entered the UK charts at number two. The first album, Left Of The Middle, released here this month, has already sold more than two million copies worldwide with an additional 600,000 pre-sales in the US.

She’s been booked to perform on the David Letterman and Rosie O’Donnell TV talk shows and is about to become the first Australian since the late Michael Hutchence to make the cover of Spin magazine .

Fame has come at a cost. “There was a period of time when I wasn’t working so there was nothing to write about,” says Imbruglia, asked about reports linking her romantically to a clutch of possible partners, from Robbie Williams, of the English band Take That to Friends star
David Schwimmer to Tory constitutional spokesman Dr Liam Fox.

Imbruglia’s public profile has careened from the sublime (lavish praise, with comparisons to artists from Alanis Morissette to Sheryl Crow) to the ridiculous.

“Nobody knew I was making a record. I wasn’t doing interviews. So they made it up. If they want to talk about you and they’re not getting anything from you, then they have to make it up.”

Imbruglia is determined to pull the veil over at least part of her world. “I’ve been a lot more protective of my private life and my family.” She walked out of a Sydney radio interview after repeated questioning over her relationship with Schwimmer. DJ Keith Williams says they were “getting on famously” in a countdown session on 2Day-FM after he had played a live version of Torn; he asked about Schwimmer because their relationship had been widely reported, Friends was a high-rating program, and it “would have been remiss not to have brought it up”.

Although Imbruglia “froze” at the question, leaned back in her chair and was obviously uncomfortable, she didn’t say she did not wish to respond; and so Williams persisted with his questioning.

While introducing the new single, Williams made a point of conceding that perhaps, like the title, he had made a “big mistake”. Imbruglia left abruptly as the song started to play; Williams switched it off.

BMG’s national publicity officer, Anouk Van Meeuwen, who accompanied Imbruglia to the station, insists that the singer told the DJ that she did not wish to discuss the matter. Van Meeuwen says that although Imbruglia tried to change the subject, Williams became increasingly aggravated at her unwillingness to respond. Finally, Van Meeuwen intervened.

Along with the Minogue sisters, Imbruglia is rated high in the “sexiest woman” category in an annual survey published in the English music paper, Melody Maker. “It makes me laugh,” she says. “It’s not what I’m doing my work for. It’s very two-dimensional. I wouldn’t change it tomorrow. Don’t get me wrong. I love doing photo shoots and I’m not trying to make myself look unattractive by any stretch of the imagination.”
But despite all her talk of wanting to be seen as is, the record company, BMG, called on the morning of our encounter to announce that we need not bother with a photographer: they’d provide us with a photograph. Van Meeuwen had told us that instruction not to make her available for photographs had come from the London office of RCA, subsidiary of the German company, BMG. Such is the care with which the label handles the portrayal of a star.

It’s been a longer road to pop stardom than you might guess from Berkeley Vale, north of Sydney, where Imbruglia enjoyed childhood in a family she has likened to the Brady Bunch. She is the second of four daughters; her father, Elliott, is a parking inspector and her mother, Maxene, a primary school teacher.

The first of two career phases began early. Imbruglia took dance lessons from a young age, and acted and sang in her early teens. At 14, she auditioned for an all-girl group and turned down an offer to sign as a solo act.

Within months of leaving school at 16, she had roles in commercials, including a Twisties ad shot at Sydney’s Taronga Zoo in 1992. Soon she was in Neighbours. It may well have created a window of opportunity but it can be a daggy drawback if you’re trying to pitch yourself at the alternative rock scene. Imbruglia now sees herself as liberated from the kind of constraints she felt in two years as Beth Brennan in the TV soap, during which time she said she felt her life was Beth’s, not her own.

“OK, this is not the debut album of the year,” a reviewer recently opined. “But it could stand as the best ex-soap star debut album for quite a while.”

Imbruglia dismisses a comment that might be construed as backhanded with a little laugh. “It doesn’t really bother me,” she says. “I was so prepared to be up against a backlash that (compared with) what I imagined would be said, that’s nothing.”

Though she has been strident in her criticism of Neighbours, Imbruglia has made peace with the show that first brought her to prominence.

“I think it’s something that I’ve now accepted as a part of my history and I wouldn’t really be where I am without it. I did go through 12 months after we finished the show, being a little bit bitter and twisted because there were a lot of things I guess maybe that I wasn’t happy with … But now I actually have quite fond memories of it. I learned a lot. It was a very good growing experience.”

She was still with the show when she travelled to London in 1994. “I went over there doing a promotion for Neighbours and then loved it and decided to stay.”

She had hoped to establish a career in theatre. And, waiting for that to happen, revelled in the nightclub scene that raged with an intensity she had not known in Australia. Then she enjoyed getting dressed to the nines, wearing high-heels, “trying to be like the English”.

There were visa problems and, for months, she languished in rented accommodation with fast-dwindling savings.

“I didn’t really make a career decision for 12 months after that. I didn’t know what to do. I was a little bit full of false confidence, I think, and just went out a lot and tried to have a good time. I think I was actually quite scared about my career. I didn’t know how to fix it and didn’t want to go home. So I just took a year out, you could say, and probably was hoping that something would fall out of the sky and save me.”

That something turned out to be a passion for music as diverse as the Violent Femmes and early Shawn Colvin. She thought back to the offer she’d received at 14. “I asked myself why haven’t I done it and what am I scared of…”

She sat in a house outside London and penned her first lyrics. “Doesn’t really matter where you take me,” she sang in one of the first, City, “Away from the city/ I wanna start again”.

Then came a chance meeting in a pub with manager Anne Barrett and an introduction to former Cure bass player Phil Thornalley, who has produced Duran Duran and mixed Ash. “He said yes, to do it,” she recalls. “I was a bit taken aback that he would want to do it, to be honest.”
In Melbourne, en route to Japan to promote not just the album but what she calls “the second phase” in her career, Imbruglia is trying to assert her credibility as a singer who pens lyrics and collaborates on the melodies of most of her songs. In the meantime, she is withstanding the charge from some quarters of grunge posturing, with collaborators hand-picked to help her pitch at the alternative rock crowd. Her aim, she says, is to “be myself as much as I possibly (can)”.

Despite the sales, there has been a cautious critical response to the album, mixed by Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich and produced by Phil Thornalley. “Imbruglia carries crunchy melodies and her lyrics have a salty bite,” Matthew Hall recently wrote in Rolling Stone magazine. “But she appears to be trying too hard and – and this is her downfall – it’s all a little bit too cutting edge join-the-dots …”

Join the dots? “It’s an opinion,” says Imbruglia. “I don’t think it’s accurate. I was just trying to be creative and experiment as a writer. I wanted to sound like myself. I knew I didn’t want to make a cheesy pop record. I wanted to have depth … Those were the goals that I set myself.”

The Sunday Age, 29-Mar-1998