Larry Schwartz
She swirls a black cape about her and laughs huskily. She wants the lights dimmed in the glassed-in record company office because she’s beginning to feel as if she’s “in an interrogation room”. And she winds up comment on a sensitive issue with a simple, “next!”.
Even if Renee Geyer can’t resist the temptation to suggest a story ending here, caution against a headline there, she’s a charming interviewee, as forthcoming on a topic you might think taboo – a heroin habit several years back – as on the foibles of
the Australian music industry, in which she’s been involved for at least the 25 years celebrated on a new greatest-hits compilation.
“We’re all a part of it and you know what it’s like,” she says of the business. “It’s deeply shallow, shall we say. And that can be good and that can be bad and that’s my life. I’m in it. I’m part of it. I’m deeply shallow.”
The big voice of Australian rhythm’n’blues has returned to her native Melbourne. She has come a long way since her first hit in 1974 – an old James Brown track, It’s A Man’s Man’s World.
Any career summation that is not posthumous is inevitably premature. And the failure to include her extraordinary rendering of I Scare Myself from last year’s delightful Where Joy Kills Sorrow collection highlights the limitations of trying to shoe-horn her work into a best-of.
At a time when she might have lost ground to the Kylies, Danniis and Natalies of Australian music, Geyer has continued to grow artistically. She’s found her place among creative spirits more preoccupied with the music than the glitz or the bucks.
She’s had an up-and-down career in which she’s toured or recorded with the likes of Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, Chaka Khan, Buddy Guy, Sting, Joe Cocker, Julio Iglesias and Neil Diamond without ever quite achieving the level of international success her talents promised.
She counts her blessings for emerging relatively unscathed from heroin use several years ago, having “dabbled to take away darkness but in the end it (heroin) is the ultimate darkness”.
“Look, it was a long time ago and I had quite a go with it,” she says. “But I don’t talk about it too much because it never featured in my life … I’m one of the lucky ones that ended up getting through it …”
Heroin use lowered her voice, making it difficult to sing. “Octaves go down low,” she says, in a deep voice, “and you slow down. I only ever used to do it on my days off. And they weren’t that plenty. So I was lucky to be saved by that fact. But yeah. Next!”
The daughter of Jewish migrants from Hungary, Renee Rebecca Geyer spent her first years in South Yarra. The family moved to Sydney when she was a toddler. Though she loathed Melbourne when she lived in Toorak in the 1980s, she has a different appreciation of it “now it’s St Kilda”.
“Since I left my management in 1983, I’ve done my own shows, built my own friendships … It’s a community feeling that I never had before. I have much more to do with writers and musicians than I ever did.”
A new album due out this year was recorded in March 1997 and produced by Paul Kelly and Joe Camilleri. I’m The Woman Who Loves You, co-written with Ross Wilson, is on the greatest hits.
Back in the Mushroom fold after several years, Geyer was frustrated when told the label had decided to set aside the new album to release The Best Of Renee Geyer 1973-1998. “It’s not about being embarrassed about my career. I think it’s been fine. It’s just that I didn’t want to trudge all over
it again when I’m still kind of moving on.
“So the initial idea was a bit odious. And then when I started listening to the stuff I hadn’t listened to for so many years, it was endearing because I’ve got enough years on my belt now to look back upon it fondly as opposed to cringing.”
She has an uneasy relationship with an industry she entered as a teenager when she first got the nod at a band rehearsal, singing, “You don’t know what it’s like, to love somebody …” – lines from a Bee Gees hit – at a rich kid’s house in Sydney.
“It’s a horrible business,” Geyer says. “The business of music or the business of art or the business of acting or the business of anything that you can’t put your finger on. It’s someone’s talent. It’s hard when you’re selling it and making a living out of it …
“There’s lots of lows. You’re constantly seeking approval. It’s a horribly egotistical life in a way because your success is measured by people liking what you do … It’s very narcissistic.”
Her experience has not made her value her vocation any the less. “I think being a singer is a wonderful, wondrous thing,” Geyer says. “But a horrible thing to have to market all the time. And therein lies the problem.” At times when she’s tempted to quit, she’s buoyed by the audience
reaction. “You get up and sing a song and someone’s jaw will drop. I have always been amazed at whatever they’re amazed at.”
Once she was a rebel. She made life difficult for her parents and went her own way. But they’ve come to accept and enjoy her work even if they find live performances too loud and “yelpy”.
“My father is a Mahler man. Dark, dark, dark. My father is proud of what I’ve done. But it’s not his cup of tea. This yelling stuff. But they know when they hear other yellers who are making all this money that, hey, if you’re going to have a bunch of yellers out there, my yeller is the best.”
The Sunday Age, 24th of May 1998
Larry Schwartz Writer 