She made her name in 80s punk band Do Re Mi, dabbled as a model and actress, and built her reputation exploring new sounds and styles. Ask her to condense the last, oh, 30 years into a few sentences and Deb Conway cuts right to the chase, but then again, she’s never been one to hold back her opinion, as OUTinPerth’s Megan Smith found out when she chatted to Deb Conway before her show at Mundaring Weir this month.
‘Do Re Mi was a very spiky kind of a band. We were fully immersed in the 80s sound, where the bass took the melody and the guitar just made very weird strangled chicken noises in the corner. Everybody was very earnest and a bit stiff, but very enthusiastic, nonetheless. From that my first solo record String of Pearls was real farmer’s corner type chords, very straight and simple, three chords and the truth type songs. Then, I wanted to explore much more wacky productions, more synthesizers, odd time signatures. That was when I met Willy [Zygier, her husband] and we galloped off in that direction fast and furiously together. Ultrasound pushed the envelope even further away from anything remotely resembling pop music. My Third Husband tracked off down the Portishead style, late night, dark, miserable, just had a baby and decided to move to London with no family sort of thing. Exquisite Stereo came back with a vengeance and a bang with a band and lots of distortion and rock guitars…’
And so on, until Deb Conway’s tale and her career arrive at her last album Summertown, which she calls her ‘best record to date’ because it was the ‘most honest’ with every sound ‘absolutely essential to be there.’
Since releasing Summertown in 2004, Conway has stayed out of the recording studio, focusing her energies on organizing Australia’s answer to America’s Lilith Fair – Broad. Like its American counterpart, Broad brings together female musicians from across the spectrum of musical genres. For the first Broad show in 2005 country singer Sara Storer, acoustic lyricist Clare Bowditch, jazz-influenced george lead singer Katie Noonan and indigenous artist Ruby Hunter joined Deborah Conway on the stage. While for many the concert has been an instrumental (pardon the pun) platform for female musicians, for Deb Conway, the all-female aspect of the show is secondary to the cross-genre collaboration.
‘For me the main idea of it is not that people are women, but that people are coming from extremely different genres. It gives it that stark contrast if you’re taking five women doing five different genres, as opposed to a stage of mixed sex doing five different genres because then you immediately could compare them as men and women. The comparison I wanted to make was how people who are reduced to a voice and a guitar when they write come up with such incredibly different sounds.’
That those musicians are female has nevertheless been a powerful statement about the diversity of female singer-songwriters, whom Deb says are often ‘nailed into one monolithic category’, though in reality, that category ‘can be broken down and explored as a fragmented mess of thousands.’
Despite the critical acclaim of Broad in its first three years, it has not found much commercial success. As a result, Deb told OUTinPerth there may be no Broad in 2008.
‘I don’t believe Broad has run its course at all, not even for a moment do I believe that. I think Broad is a fantastic idea that needs a little bit more money than I have to keep it floating… I certainly haven’t given up the idea of doing it in the long run,’ she said.
Instead of a Broad tour, Ms. Conway has returned her focus to the recording studio and plans to craft a new album with her partner Willy Zygier that picks up where Summertown left off. That is, with two talented songwriters left to their own devices.
Or as Deborah Conway would ever so bluntly put it – ‘two guitars, two vocals.’
