The pandemic gave singer songwriter Deborah Conway the chance to reflect on her life and to write a book and some new songs.
Drawn from memories of her 40-year career and essays written about each of her songs during Melbourne’s long covid lockdowns of 2020 Conway’s Book of Life is a boldly self-revelatory memoir. Now she’s taking it on the road as a show – Songs from The Book of Life with Deborah Conway & Willy Zygier – sharing the stage with her musician husband.
Conway is an iconic Australian artist whose work has always been engaging and highly individual. She has crossed genres, by turns post-punk, ebullient pop, dark electronica and winsome folk. Her uncompromising career has seen her embrace a multiplicity of musical identities.
Stuck at home in Melbourne during the long lockdowns Conway stared down her long-held dream of writing a book-length work, slowly crafting an autobiography that is passionate, honest, readable and admirably frank.
Indeed, frankness and forthrightness are the qualities on which the musician has built her career. From her earliest days with 1980s outfit Do-Re-Mi, who found acclaim with their 1985 single Man Overboard and subsequent albums Domestic Harmony (1985) and The Happiest Place in Town (1988), she has always been unwilling to compromise her personal or professional principles or goals for a quick buck or overnight success.
Nor was she willing to find the middle-ground when legendary Australian music figure, the late great Michael Gudinski, founder of Mushroom Records, suggested she “wasn’t making the best use” of her “physical assets” when she donned plus-fours and set the video for her 1991 debut solo single, It’s Only The Beginning, on a golf course. But Conway has always done things her way and it has given her career longevity and credibility.
Since the release of her multi-platinum debut album, String of Pearls, Conway has written and released eight records, all of them on her own terms. When her 1996 sophomore album, Bitch Epic, boasting a cover image of her smeared in Nutella and furiously stuffing cake into her mouth, went gold, she and her husband and frequent musical collaborator, guitarist and songwriter Willy Zygier, decamped to London on the promise of record company support to record and promote her third album.
Not long after arriving in England, Mushroom found itself on the verge of bankruptcy and withdrew financing. Juggling life in a foreign city with newborn daughter, Syd, the couple decided to stay and created 1997’s darkly layered electronica offering, My Third Husband.
Over the ensuing decade, Conway wrote and recorded, and gave birth to two more daughters, Alma and Hettie. She also created and toured the long-running Broad, a revue in which she shared the stage, sang and swapped songs with other female Australian singer songwriters as diverse as Kate Miller-Heidke, Liz Stringer and Katie Noonan.
Conway also spent two “incredibly engaging and fulfilling” years as the creative director of the Queensland Music Festival, portrayed country crooner Patsy Cline in the critically acclaimed stage show, Always … Patsy Cline, and put out several more albums with Zygier. Looking back on her career to write her memoir and stage show was, she says, “absolutely fantastic.”
“I felt like I was writing for my daughters, to share my experiences,” Conway says. “I felt like I was watching my life in some kind of widescreen, Technicolour film in my head for a couple of years and I was having a marvellous time. There was no angst.
“Songwriting can be very angsty because I don’t know that there’s any one blueprint we tend to follow. Songwriting is difficult, I’ve found, and I feel I can say that with some degree of experience now.
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“Writing a song, you have to be very concise and very layered and you’ve got no real room to stretch out. Writing the book, I felt like I had room to stretch, to really flex and move, room to tell my stories. Songwriting is solving a puzzle and writing the book was nowhere near as frustrating.”
Book of Life is published by Allen & Unwin ($34.99). Deborah Conway appears at Brisbane Square Library at 6:30pm on October 20. Songs from the Book of Life with Deborah Conway & Willy Zygier is on at HOTA, Surfers Paradise, on October 21 at 7.30pm.
hota.com.au
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