Deborah Conway: The Weekend Australian
Playing with ireMotherhood has not dulled Deborah Conway's sense of rage. Just get her started about radio. Iain Shedden reports.For every Australian music fan who thinks Bardot's chart-topping success is a great leap forward for the local industry, there's another who bemoans the shrinking play lists of the commercial radio stations on which such pop stars thrive.
One of the latter is Deborah Conway, no stranger to the charts in the 1980s and early 90s but who, since then, has found it increasingly difficult to get her music on the airwaves -- this despite a string of critically acclaimed albums and singles since her commercially successful debut solo debut String of Pearls nine years ago.
Not that such things will stop her. The Melbourne singer is as well-known for her feisty character as for her music, which has earned her a loyal following since she emerged into the mainstream with the band Do Re Mi in the mid 80s. With an album, Exquisite Stereo, due next month and touring with a new band, City of Women, she's determined to do what she does best for whoever wants to listen.
Get her started on the state of radio, however, and her message is clear.
"Radio's got to change," she says. "I can't believe people aren't up in arms about the limited radio diet that they're getting. It's just delivering listeners to advertisers and everyone's so scared. I don't think they owe me a living but I think they're making their own job more difficult. There was a time when it was a lot more exciting."
The first single from Exquisite Stereo, the overtly commercial and ironic Radio Loves This, has failed to grab the attention of the big networks or Triple J. It would be so easy to cry "sour grapes" at Conway's protestations or suggest her material just isn't good enough anymore, but the truth is -- just as she points out -- she is just one of hundreds of local artists who no longer fit the mould of modern radio programming.
"Radio is scared of me," she says. "There's a lot of people like me, artists like me. We don't conform to conventional playlists by making really poppy music. It's getting narrower and narrower. And I'm getting a bit old for Triple J. It's stupid and it's incredibly frustrating. I've got a lot to say and I know if I got to the right crowd out there, if people could hear what I was doing, that they would really like it. I feel completely convinced of that. That's what makes it so blindly annoying. They keep playing It's Only The Beginning and I've been stuck in this time warp."
It's Only The Beginning, almost 10 years old, is Conway's benchmark song and her biggest solo hit. Since then much has changed in her life and career, although certain events appear to be running parallel. With her partner and musical collaborator Willy Zygier she has delivered three albums -- Bitch Epic, My Third Husband and and the new one -- as well as three daughters, the latest of whom, Hettie, is just four months old.
"I don't know how unusual it is," she says of her and Zygier's personal-professional partnership. "It's good to be in a relationship with somebody who knows so intimately what you're going through and can share it."
Juggling family and career is another obstacle. When we meet in Sydney, she has had just three hours' sleep after a Newcastle gig the night before and an early rise with Hettie. With her other daughters, Syd and Alma, aged 5 and 2, it must make the rock 'n' roll lifestyle more of a challenge.
"It's harder, but you just organise childcare. I've never been an organised person, but you have to be, there's no way around it. The great god, routine, has walked into my life."
Exquisite Stereo is a departure from Conway's usual work routine. "My Third Husband was a really insular project," she says. "We just got ourselves a computer and a desk, and sat around in London trying to figure out what to do with them. I think it's a good record, but it's a small, quiet record."
Despite its grasp of modern technology and a contemporary Portishead-type feel, My Third Husband sold only 6000 copies.
This time she got a band together and tested the songs at a handful of gigs before going into Joe Camilleri's Melbourne studio to record them.
She admits that, to write songs, she often has to get "hair-tearingly angry with myself. I seem to need some element of self-flagellation before I can really produce. I don't wnat to do it, I don't enjoy it, but it seems I have to do it to get something happening."
"I wanted a wilder record this time, and that's what we've got. You react to what you did last time, regardless of whether it's successful or not. I think that's why I've become rather an eclectic artist. Rather than build on what I've got, as with String of Pearls, I just sort of break off and do something else."
Another of her collaborators this time is Neil Finn, whom she thinks has "the most beautiful voice in pop music." The title track was written as a duet. "When we did it live I sang both parts, but it was obvious it needed another voice. There's only a few singers I really adore and one of them is Neil. He's a prince. So I rang him up and sent him over the track and he said yes, he'd do it. I sang my stuff in Melbourne and he sang his at home in Auckland."
After a lengthy association with Mushroom Records during Michael Gudinski's reign, Conway has signed a new contract with the country's largest independent distributor, Shock. She decided when Mushroom integrated with Festival she "didn't want to be moved around like a chattel."
This year will take Conway throughout Australia, particularly if the album fails to catch the mainstream.
"If radio isn't going to play it, you just have to get out there and take it to the people," she says. "You just have to keep working. I figure I'll just keep doing what I do amd at some point, someone will say: 'Shit. She's still doing this and it's actually really good.'"
And the alternative?
"I can't imagine the ANZ employing me at this point," she jokes. "I'm completely untrained ... an unskilled worker. There's nothing else I want to do."
added Monday, 23 August, 2004
