Max Sharam is the latest hype in Australian pop. What’s so special about her? Larry Schwartz reports.
MAX SHARAM traces her surname back to the Berber tribes of North Africa. “Apparently they were green-eyed, fair-haired Algerians or something,” she says.
Max was an early nickname. Six years younger than her brother Maxwell, kids called her Little Max. She says that her real Christian name is a secret.
Green eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses, she is wearing a silvery coat from an op shop south of Sydney when we meet in the foyer of a city hotel. Sharam has the look of some ’60s-era hippie waif, exuding the nervous charm of a fledgling pop star not yet blase with the press.
She talks of “good karma”. “You might put 100 per cent into something and get 50 per cent back, but I think everything ultimately is regenerative in a strange way.”
She must have done something right in this life or another. Her career appears set to take off. Signed by Warner Music Australia, Sharam has recorded a CD the company hopes will make an international recording star of the singer-songwriter who grew up in a valley near Beaufort, western Victoria, that she says took its name, Musical Gully, from the echo of miners’ picks and shovels during the gold boom.
Sharam has had a promising start. Her debut single, an unnerving tale of revenge entitled `Coma’, has sold 30,000 copies, just 5000 short of gold.
With eerie, careening vocals, she sings a jilted lover’s ominous threat: I’ll creep ’round your garden till daylight.
I’ll look through your window till dawn.
I’m hoping to catch me an eyeful.
Of your love and you doing porn.
An idiosyncratic hit, it made her feel less out of step than when growing up in a rural community where she first discovered the joys of song while soaring through the skies on a farmyard swing.
“I remember the first thing that really struck me living in the country was that TV stations and radio just weren’t catering for my needs. I thought, `This is outrageous. There’s got to be something’. I didn’t know what it was. But I knew that there was nothing that was appropriate for me and my taste.”
The success of `Coma’ reassured her there were like-minded people somewhere out there. “I felt this sort of discontent and restlessness of young people in Australia and I thought, if `Coma’ does anything, then it confirms to me that . . . there’s lots of people that feel the way I do about music and media in Australia.”
The day we meet, she confides that a new song, on the porn industry, is “floating around in my head”.
Warner Australia’s A & R (artist and repertoire) and marketing director, Mark Pope, who signed her after seeing her perform in Sydney two years ago, has just returned from an overseas trip to flog her first album, `A Million Year Girl’.
He says he encountered keen interest in the CD and three-song video, and the album is likely to be released later this year in Germany, France, Britain, Sweden, Poland, Denmark, Finland and, possibly, Spain.
THE vibrant CD sleeve opens to reveal a castle in the clouds. She concedes that it reflects her interest in fantasy and fairy-tale.
The videos enable her to indulge a fascination with theatre and performance that she attributes to the influence of her mother, a cook and horsebreeder. “I think I have always been expressive. I think it has had a lot to do with having a gregarious, extroverted parent in the country.”
It was her mother who painted her black when she was just four, had her wear a wig and took her to a fancy dress party as an Aboriginal Shirley Temple.
Early influences included Electric Light Orchestra, a David Bowie album, Freddie Mercury. All but two of the tracks are self-penned, the music reflecting an eclectic taste. “I love orchestras. I love opera and I love pop melodies.”
One of the covers is Melanie Safka’s `Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)’. She has long been a fan. The other, `Is It Okay if I Call You Mine?’ is from a scene in the movie `Fame’, in which a young homosexual man reflects on his aloneness. The sensitivity and vulnerability appealed to her. “It was the nicest moment in the movie: the least pretentious and the most underrated, I thought.”
With a big-selling debut single and her first album getting plenty of attention, Sharam is starting to reap rewards for efforts that include a stint of busking in Europe. “With my limited guitar skills, I managed to attract really sizeable crowds and get heaps of money,” she says. “I never touched my traveller’s cheques. I’ve got a really loud voice, and in those piazzas the acoustics are amazing.”
The trip culminated in a lead role with an Italian rock opera, `Forza Venite Gente’, and acclaim at the Cole Porter Festival in Geneva.
Sharam is looking forward to returning to Europe. The last trip was liberating after a youth spent in the Victorian countryside around Musical Gully and even despite a final year’s schooling at Ballarat where she made good friends.
“It was freedom,” she says. “Because I always felt a bit restricted and inhibited and didn’t really feel I’d found my peer group. I didn’t feel that hunger to progress or to develop or make things better. I’ve always had that.”
THE SUNDAY AGE, 25-Jun-1995
Larry Schwartz Writer 