 Clive Simmons chats to Vanessa Amorosi about life, music and her new album.
“It’s music that drives me,” Vanessa Amorosi says. “It’s my passion. I feel satisfied when I sing, and that’s why I keep going back for it. Nothing else gives me that.”
It’s been a tough week for Amorosi. After a comment on Nova FM about performing at the christening of Carl Williams’ daughter, and doing gigs for other gangland figures, the press has focused - rather predictably - not on the launch of her terrific new album, but on her being ‘married to the mob’, to quote one newspaper headline.
It’s unfortunate timing for Amorosi, who grew up in Emerald, the youngest daughter of two stage performers.
“My upbringing was 24/7 music” she says “Our lives were bedlam. Everything was a floorshow; there were dance-offs in the kitchen. It was just a wild and crazy existence.”
By the time she was a teenager, Amorosi was already a wedding singer, but she secured a weekly residency at Matriushka’s, a Russian restaurant in Carnegie, when her mother decided that she didn’t want to sing there.
“It was a sheer fluke” she says. “My uncle was doing the floorshows there, and they needed a singer. He called my mother and asked her to sing, and she said she didn’t want to do it. And then she said ‘But you can have Vanessa.’ That’s how I fell into that.”
It was there that she met Jack Strom, a manager who, along with his partner, Mark Holden, was looking for a new act.
“Somebody was fixing his fax machine,” she says, “and they knew that he was looking for people to sign. The person fixing it said ‘If you’re looking for a singer, go and see Vanessa Amorosi.’ He came up to me after the show and gave me his business card and asked me to call him.
“I just threw it in my bag. I didn’t believe him… My mother found it in my bag three weeks later and she called him up. I got into such trouble for that, I can tell you.”
She was signed to Holden’s Transistor Music Australia label, and he started writing songs for her, including the anthemic ‘Absolutely Everybody’. The song reached #4 in Australia and made Amorosi a star in Asia and Europe.
“I have a great appreciation for that song” Amorosi says. “It represents my childhood to me. I’ve sung it before different audiences in so different countries, and I’ve had to revamp it a number of times to keep it interesting for me. But some songs activate a memory, and it certainly does that for me.”
Holden was also responsible for the success of her next single, ‘Shine’, which she wrote for a friend from high school who committed suicide.
“He changed a line in it. He said the song didn’t work, or that one particular line in it didn’t work. The line went ‘Everybody you see, everyone you know is gonna die’ and Mark didn’t like the word ‘die’. He thought it was just wrong. We were all sitting around trying to find a substitute, and we were all stuck on the word ‘try’. But he came up with the idea of changing it to ‘shine’ and it all came together.
“That’s Mark’s magic. He has a great ear for music. He knows exactly what makes a hit.”
The success of both singles and a subsequent number one album helped secure her a gig at the Opening Ceremony of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. The song she sang, ‘Heroes Live Forever’, was beamed to 4.5 billion people.
“It’s a pretty hard song to sing. There’s a note in it that goes for a minute and thirty seconds. There are three octaves in that song. It goes very high, then very low, and there’s no break where you can take a breath. But, you know, it was a special moment singing that for such an occasion. It really means something to me.”
But then came a lull. Holden’s career went into overdrive when he was cast as a judge on Australian Idol, and Amorosi began writing songs for others.
“People must have thought I’d run away and joined the circus” she says “but I was doing a lot of production work. I spent four years doing that. I probably have 1000 songs on my hard drive. People were asking if I would like to write for other artists, so I started doing writing sessions.
“But I realised that I really missed singing. I was singing for hours in the studio, but that thirst, that hunger for a crowd and winning them over started to come back. I decided I wasn’t ready yet to put the microphone down. I started seeking out people who could inspire me; people who could push me to a level that I hadn’t previously been pushed, to give me something to fight for.”
The results of that labour are evident on Amorosi’s new album, Somewhere in the Real World.
“The album is a real mix of things” she says “and I’m very pleased with it. I think this album represents me, finally. When I listen to ‘Absolutely Everybody’ and ‘Shine’ now, I sound like a baby, and I was a baby. This album represents who I am now. You can’t change your soul, but I have matured, and the life experiences I’ve had brought forth these songs.”
Somewhere in the Real World is out now through Universal Music.
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