- 1 year ago
Jeannie Lewis - Long Play Series (2019)
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00:00Well, I've never seen any separation between what people call politics and art or politics
00:06and life, because that's what life is, not the sort of politicking that politicians do,
00:11but politics, which is about issues.
00:31I'm Jeannie Lewis and I started singing in the toilet when I was about nine and I used
00:37to spend hours out there singing in the toilet with poetry books and putting music to them.
00:42I've been a singer professionally for about 50 years.
00:47I've started as a folk singer and I've crossed into every genre that are possible for me,
00:54because I think no one questions a bass player who goes from orchestral to rock to jazz and
00:59the voice is an instrument, so that's what I like to explore, is that instrument.
01:05When I was about three, my dad went to the first conference of UNESCO in Mexico and in
01:11Paris and brought back 78s of instrumental and some revolutionary music from both places
01:20and when I was three, one of my first songs was the Ballad of Joe Hill.
01:24Joe Hill was a very famous labour leader and he was Swedish and he came to the States and
01:30he eventually was killed, but the last verse of the song says, Joe Hill ain't dead, he
01:37says to me, Joe Hill ain't never died, we're working folks, defend their rights, Joe Hill
01:41is at their side.
01:42So for me that was Joe Hill, but it was also my dad.
01:45I don't know if I started listening in earnest, things just came into my life, there was lots
01:49of folk music, folk songs were what came to me and a lot of those were Australian folk
01:55songs and Australian folk songs means Irish folk songs in a lot of ways, or at least the
01:59tunes are, sometimes the stories are, so that was probably some of the first music I heard.
02:05I didn't start singing publicly until I was 18, so that's 63.
02:09I was in second year at university doing, majoring in French, but I'd also started singing
02:14and so there was quite a bit of conflict between the two lives and it actually took me five
02:19years to do a three-year degree, so there was some, and I'm an only child, so there
02:23was a lot of conflict at home about the hours I was out and I do remember crawling out the
02:30front bedroom window one night and returning the next morning before anyone else had woken
02:35up and I'd actually broken, I'd broken my ankle and I don't know how I explained that
02:41that had happened in bed, but it had.
02:43To live in the 60s with the positive feelings that there were was great and feelings of
02:54hope for change, I think that was great, but I think like a lot of teenagers at that time
02:59I actually had a lot of conflicts with parents who, although they were very, I would call
03:08outright and forthright in their politics, were a little less keen for their only child
03:14daughter to be as morally loose as she possibly was.
03:2063 to 65, 66 in the States was sort of the folk boom began to open up and hit and whatever
03:26happened in the States hit here, so there were a lot of folk places in Sydney and there
03:32was a circuit and quite a lot of us worked that circuit and so for $10 pounds, what was
03:3963, we were already on dollars, I think it was dollars, we would do three places a night
03:44in Sydney and there were some really wonderful singer-songwriters in that, so it was mainly
03:49folk music but it was also where I started to get interested in singing blues, which
03:54is folk music, but that's where my bent for blues started to, was initiated.
04:00Some of these places that opened up, like in Greenwich Village, were coffee houses,
04:04well there wasn't any alcohol except possibly backstage, and so they were the venues, but
04:14at the university we had concerts, we had folk concerts, some of those, and a lot of
04:18us who were in the folk scene were also in the anti-war scene, we were also, some of
04:23us helping raise funds for the 1967 Free the Bus Ride, so there was that crossover between
04:33politics or working for change in the world and music. Well, I've never seen any separation
04:40between what people call politics and art or politics and life, because that's what
04:45life is, not the sort of politicking that politicians do, but politics, which is about
04:51issues, is about rights for people to get education, et cetera, go on and on and on,
04:56et cetera, so I didn't ever see any separation, which if I stepped ahead slightly, it's
05:02only slightly, why I actually, part of my strong draw to Latin America and to Latin
05:09America music is that there is no separation. If you care about something, whether it's
05:15a love song or a love song that's a political song, which some Latin American songs are,
05:20then there's no separation. So at the university, there was a labour club, there was, which
05:26not Labour Party, just left sort of ideas, there was a CND, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament,
05:33that was the anti-war at that stage, and then Charlie Perkins was at our uni, and so
05:40there was a lot going on about the Freedom Ride and what it meant, and we did concerts
05:47to raise funds for the Freedom Ride. I didn't go on the Freedom Ride, even though Charlie
05:52credits me being there in his biography, because my mum finally, being the fifth year I'd been
05:58doing a surgery degree, actually said that was it, and for once I took notice and didn't
06:04go on the Freedom Ride. The Freedom Ride was pro-rights for Indigenous people. It went
06:13to northern New South Wales mostly, and it was just trying to work in with the communities for
06:19Indigenous, First Nation people, with things like getting, like them to be able to go to the
06:23swimming pool and swim. We at the university, and I suppose other places, not lots of other places,
06:27but at Sydney Uni, we did, yeah, we did fundraising concerts for Aboriginals to be included in the
06:33census, to be as people. 67. From when I was 18, I was making a living as a singer,
06:47and I did a little spot of office work when I was about 20. It was nepotism. I was in the
06:52teachers' union's offices doing filing, but I worked as a singer, yeah, and from the time I was,
07:02so that was 63, I started working with the Jeff Paul Trad Jazz Band in the Orient Pub,
07:10no sound system, and I started working more with jazz bands, yeah, but traditional to start off.
07:18I don't think anything's changed between now and then, except that in the folk scene,
07:27and this is Sydney, the folk scene, there were venues opening, because we copy whatever
07:33comes from the States, and there were quite a few folk venues. There was the folk festival,
07:39the National Folk Festival started in 66. There weren't so many festivals right now.
07:49In the late 60s in Sydney, wine bars started opening up with music. I think, certainly in
07:57Sydney, I think Melbourne's different, there were more venues for you to get up and try out,
08:02and pay to try, and not only, and the other thing is, in those days, whatever, even if it was a
08:08pittance, you were paid a pittance. Now, I'm just going to get cranky, nowadays it's a door deal,
08:16and in fact, I was talking to one of our,
08:20of a musician who I think's one of our leading musicians in what his field is,
08:27about six festivals ago at Woodford, and he just said, Janie, I'm earning, in real terms,
08:33what I earned in the 70s, and I said, oh thank God, it's not just me, but I wanted him to be in
08:39that as a gym, because yeah, it's exactly that. We're not earning any more, talk about adjustments
08:44of income, what a load of something, yeah. I think I always liked a bit of theatre around
08:56what I did, I never felt very secure, I always thought I was funny looking, which I am,
09:01and so I've had a real complex about that. The musical, it was more I started to put together
09:09my own shows, yes, I did, I was in Hair for three months, and I did Reg Livermore's musical
09:14Lasseter, then I came to Melbourne, and I did, I played the field mouse in Winnie the Pooh at the
09:20Metro, and Harry and Mila was so worried about our health, we used to get, was it salt tablets
09:28every day? It was only because we were running around in costumes designed for the London
09:32Winch, it was a pantomime, and so I think you might worry we might have passed out on stage
09:38rather than anything else. Hair, the first thing when you tell people you're in Hair, oh you took
09:43your clothes off, and then, or it's about the drugs and sex, and people forget that one of the
09:49biggest issues in Hair was the Vietnam War, and people just, it's like the whole of the 60s,
09:56what people say, they talk about the drugs, the sex, and there was a lot of political activity,
10:01and that usually gets under the carpet, and it's just about psychedelia, and there was a lot more
10:08happening, and a lot of great songs happening out of that too. In Hair, the band was Tully,
10:14I can't remember now whether I met them before Hair or not, but then Peter Sculthorpe wrote a
10:20piece called Love 200, 1970, Beethoven's birth year, I mean bicentenary, and also it was a time
10:29of the transit of Venus, so it was Love 200, and it was written for rock group, symphony orchestra,
10:36female voice, and I was a female voice. No, I've even got the score at home where it's got for
10:45Jeannie, so it was very nice, and I was terrified, and absolutely terrified. John Hopkins was the
10:53conductor, and he was so lovely, because I think all of us were a bit terrified, well not the
10:58orchestra, but not the band, the two singers were terrified, Tully's singer, Terry Wilson, and me,
11:04so Terry just, he put his arm around me, and he said, Jeannie don't be nervous, and I could feel
11:10his arm going, I thought, thanks Terry, that was great, and the band, the orchestra, because the
11:16third, like the first song was me with the orchestra, the second was Tully doing a particular
11:21song, and then the third one was a, you know, free for all, literally, and improvised, and the
11:26orchestra had earplugs of any sort in their ears, because they weren't used to working with a rock
11:31band, so that was sort of, yeah, that was funny, actually, yeah. The second song, which was more the
11:37rock piece, I actually recorded on my first album, yeah, and Michael Carlos, who was the
11:44the MD of Tully, really, all that, and it was all of them, but he became, he MD'd my first
11:50three albums, yeah. Sydney, it was part of the proms, the Sydney proms of 1970, the prom concerts,
11:58the prom series. We did it in Melbourne, and I did it with Geoff St John. I didn't do it, I did the
12:04performance with Geoff St John, and then we went to Adelaide, and I can't remember a thing about it,
12:10but everyone's very impressed that I sang with Bon and with Fraternity. Bon Scott didn't mean
12:17a lot to me then, like Tully did. Tully, for me, was one of the most amazing bands
12:23in Australian music, popular rock history. They were so far ahead of anything that was
12:31happening here at that time, and actually internationally at that time, and I didn't
12:36know much about Bon. I mean, since then I have, but I didn't, so we did the gig. I was probably terrified
12:42again, and that was it, not because of him, I was just terrified seeing him in the orchestra, so
12:47that was it. Recently, my goddaughter's husband, he was, Ginny, did you sing with Bon Scott?
12:55And I said, oh yeah, I think I did. I said, I have to find the program, and I found it. I think I
13:00photocopied it, so I've gone up in esteem there, that's good, so there you are. I hope Bon went up
13:06in esteem singing with me, probably not. I'd been performing for 10 years before I got to record,
13:18was it 1063? Yeah, 10 years, and people kept saying I should be recording, and I'd been
13:27around to recording companies. As I said, I wasn't exactly a beauty queen, and
13:37I never really got any response. In fact, I took this fantastic song by a folk writer, but you
13:43know, you arrange things, but the record company is so, they were so stupid, they couldn't hear
13:49another arrangement in that, so they just laughed, and then by chance, with some two string players,
13:56friends of mine, I think that's how it happened, were friends with one of the A&R people at EMI,
14:04and just took them something of mine, and I recorded my first album, and that album had,
14:09well, Michael Carlos's EMD, I picked all the material, it had a theme, I like working with
14:16themes. Most of my shows that are my own shows, or that I've recorded, have thematic issues, or
14:25musical, and or, I don't know, what do you call it, just themes. Well, the first album was Free
14:32Fall Through Featherless Flight, and that was the theme, it related to a point to the story of
14:39Icarus, and my mum was a classics teacher, and so we sat in the kitchen and wrote that song together,
14:47she, my, yeah, my dad was still alive, yeah, and the album got, won the award for best album of
14:58the year, female album of the year, it was before the ARIA Awards, unfortunately, it was called the
15:02Australian Radio Awards or something, yeah, so doing the recording was good, but I had been on
15:09about three other records before then, of course, which usually don't get mentioned, but they're
15:13collections of other people's, that was my first solo album, yeah, and it was a joke, the day they
15:19rang, EMI rang me to tell me, the guy, Les Hodge, who was the A&R guy, he called and told me about
15:27winning the award, and I was with Ted Robinson, we were working, and Ted Robinson's directed
15:31everything I've done, theatrically, or nearly everything, and we just both sat there laughing,
15:36I mean, I've been, had rejections for so long, and then the album gets the best, well, good, right.
15:42Oh, I did what I wanted to do, yeah, I had a good band, I had string quartet,
15:47myself, we only did, we did in a week, I've never sort of spent, you know, six months in an
15:52idol, but I had prepared it a lot, and Michael had prepared it, we had a week with the superstar
15:58band, you know, Jesus Christ Superstar, so we did it, I came down to Melbourne to rehearse, they were
16:03here doing Superstar, we were recording in Sydney, we must record in Sydney, and the mix was one day,
16:0924 hours, we went in, we come out, it's 24 hours later, and it was mixed, so it was never, you know,
16:15like, these people talk about being in the studio forever and ever, I think, but I don't know whether
16:21it's any better anyway. In 1970, there was a moratorium concert against the Vietnam War at
16:33the Roundhouse, New South Wales Uni, I worked, I was doing improvising with a dancer in my,
16:38and my band, and I went back, and the backstage was a screen, there was no backstage, and this
16:44person came around, quite shy, and just said, look, I'm just, I'm going to be doing this gallery or
16:49something, wondering if you, wondering if you'd like to sing, and I thought, here goes another freebie,
16:54and I said, who are you? And he said, Martin Sharp, and then a lot of the Sochi girls at our high school
17:01used to go out with those boys, like Martin and Richard, etc, I never did, you know, but they were all,
17:06so I thought, oh, maybe it's for real. Anyway, that was the Yellow House, so I used to sing at the
17:11Yellow House, you, once, once a week for a while. Well, there were a lot of artists involved, so each
17:16of them, some of it was touchy-feely stuff, and some was painting, some was, I suppose, what we'd
17:23now call installations, but there was a lot of tactile, tactile experiences, and some performance
17:30was very good, and at the end of the period, Martin used to pay me something each week, and I used to
17:35pay the musicians, it wasn't a lot, I just used to give it to my band, who included Alan Lee, who now
17:40was back in Melbourne, very good vibes, a marimba player, and so at the end, Martin said one night, he said,
17:46just take whatever you, any one, you know, one, but he said, take any one, and I picked the one I wanted,
17:51and he said, but Jenny, it's a poster, I said, no, it's not, it's a collage. Anyway, it was that, that particular
17:56one was used for the retrospective of, 25th retrospective of the Yellow House at the New
18:03South Wales Art Gallery, and that was the image, and then things got a bit tight for me, so I talked to
18:11a few friends, including Martin, but I rang around to see what I could get for it, and I got the same
18:16offer from the New South Wales State Library, or the National Gallery in Canberra, so I rang
18:21Martin and said, well, which one do you want it in? And he said, New South Wales State Library, because
18:26they've got a lot of his things, so that's where it is.
18:34So, Tears of Steel and The Clown in Calaveras, for those of you who have the CD and the album,
18:40which you should, had three starting points. Sometime in 1974, I went to see the film
18:48about the, September the 11th in Chile in 1973, and Pinochet's rise to power, and what that meant
18:58to a lot of people, and I heard the voice of a singer I had met in Cuba in 67, on, and I came
19:07out of that film so angry, not crying, and then I got so angry. Margaret Rodenite, it's the three
19:13things, Margaret Rodenite sent me a book of the poems of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, with
19:22liner cuts, that had been, she was in California, and had been produced in California,
19:28and there was a poem, which I'll come back to, and then,
19:35my dad had a stroke on November 12th, 1974, and he never spoke again, and he'd been a trade union
19:45leader, so it was a bit, I mean, everybody that's important to, but communications, once you're,
19:50your life and your work, so that album's dedicated to my father, but I used, so the first half,
19:59The Calaveras, Clown in Calaveras, in Mexico, the Calaveras are the symbols on the Day of the Dead,
20:06and they're often political, or they're just funny, but making fun of death, or, and
20:12there's some very famous Mexican artist, Posada, who did, who began, I think, I suppose, the idea
20:17of the cartoons of the Calaveras, so the first half of the show is about Calaveras, who were
20:23performers in our time, and so Martin borrowed costumes from Leonard Park for The Clowns,
20:29borrowed, they went back, and they, they were the Calaveras, well, so was I, but in the second half,
20:36we used this poem that was in the book Margaret gave me, Pablo Neruda, it said,
20:40I learned life from your death, my eyes had begun to mourn, when I discovered within me,
20:46not tears, but undying arms, wait for them, wait for me, and that was the basis of the second half,
20:52and I, and I did, a guy called Dennis Kevins wrote some, that was one work, it was only about 25
20:58minutes, I wrote a couple of poems, Dennis Kevins wrote them, and I wrote a couple of poems,
21:04Dennis Kevins wrote them, Michael Carlos did all the music, and, but in the first half, I recorded
21:11Victor Jara's song, Te Recuerdo a Amanda, I Remember You Amanda, and Victor Jara was the singer
21:19who was killed in, in 1973 by the Jota, in Chile. 1967, there was to be the first
21:29international festival of protest song, topical song, in Cuba, and an Australian woman and her
21:37husband, who was quite famous in England, were working in Cuba, and the Cubans went to them
21:45and said, do you know any Australian singers that might, could come, because they were paying the
21:50fees, and she'd been out of Australia for years, and she didn't know, but she wrote to her mum,
21:55and her mum then spoke with some other people within concentric circles, and there was a list
22:00made of singers, and the first one was Glenn Tomassetti, and Glenn had just come back from
22:05China, she also had a baby, didn't, and I was the next on the list, yes please, so I went,
22:11and there were 52 singers there from all over Latin America, from Africa, from,
22:19two came from the United States with great difficulty, two from England, Peggy Seeger and
22:23Ewan McCall, quite well-known people, and it was five weeks, we travelled around, all around the
22:28island, we sang in factories and schools, and we'd do these beautiful open-air concerts, and it was,
22:34it was a training, teacher's training college, with thousands of young people outside,
22:39in like, and it was a cool night, and it was mist, and you just, these people,
22:43what, it was amazing, I'd never sung before or since such a big, big audience, and yeah,
22:51I fell in love twice, what else would you like, and, and, but I've got, what did you sing, what
22:55one song? I think All the Time to be Singing, which was by Michael Layden, oh god, I can't
23:02remember, there's an album, there's a double album, which I have of it, yeah, but the great thing was
23:07meeting all these other singers, and several of whom I've remained, or maintained, remained friends
23:12with, yeah, and contact with, I got to hear more Latin American music, and so it was an inroad into
23:18here, opening up, yeah, open doors to listening, and, yeah, and getting to know people, you know,
23:24listening, yeah. I don't see them as that different, my, like, Tears of Steel, and
23:33Looking Backwards to Tomorrow, well, the album of Free Fall is different, but those shows
23:38were, well, one woman, you've got 25, you know, there's other actors, etc, working with it,
23:43but I devised them, and I devised Free Fall, I've always, I'm interested in that creative side of
23:49of an album, or a concert, or, and so, I'm trying to, well, Crazy for You was because the show fell
23:57through that we were supposed to be doing for promoters here, so in Sydney, Peter Kenny and I
24:02put, we did it at a disco called The Palms, and then we came to Melbourne to do it at The Last
24:09Laugh, and that was great. Oh, it's a love, about love songs, and love that doing, being, going crazy,
24:16but going crazy out of love, so it was a bit of mad, well, yeah, that's unusual, Jane, there was
24:22quite a bit of madness in there, and I, Crazy for You, we set it up so there were mirrors behind me
24:28on stage, oh, well, it was by accident, at the, at the disco in Sydney, there were mirrors behind
24:35the platform, and it was nothing fancy, so the audience had to focus on themselves as well,
24:41and then it was the same at The Last Laugh, we were upstairs, and then we did it at the Nimrod
24:48as well, but I had a big teddy bear, life-size, and I used to dance with the teddy, and stamp on
24:52the teddy, didn't get to do anything too amorous, but it belonged to my second youngest godson,
24:58but it was, like, up to here on me.
25:05In the 70s, I had done two Piaf songs, and one was called Les Bleus Blanches, The White Shirts,
25:11and one was called Bravo pour le Clown. Les Bleus Blanches, at that stage, wasn't even very well
25:16known to French people, and they're both songs about going crazy after love's gone wrong.
25:25That was all, I never wanted to touch her other songs, then in 1973, three people gave me the
25:31biog her sister had written. 1980, they were auditioning in Melbourne, so it was J.C.
25:37Williamson was at the Comedy Theatre, and they were doing a play by an English writer, Pam Jems,
25:43called Piaf, and they hadn't found anyone, and they were still auditioning, and a couple of my
25:51friends, one, a boyfriend, said to me, Jeannie, go and do it, you know, it'll open the door to do
25:55what you want to do, you know, and another friend rang up and made the booking for me to do the
26:00audition, and I got the part, and for two weeks, I couldn't go to the toilet, I was so scared,
26:09because they were all great actors, and here I was, I could sing, but I was terrified,
26:14and Ted Robertson, who always worked with me a lot, just said, all the actors I work with,
26:20when they get nervous, they can't stop going, you just block up, so that was, that's my,
26:24and that's a constant statement on news, so that was that. So John Derham and I had talked about
26:30working together for some time, and so we decided we would do a show about Piaf, but at that stage,
26:38my mum was starting to lose her memory, and I said to John, I can't do much, and so he did
26:44everything in Sydney, he booked the Regent Theatre, he wrote the script, he booked the Honky Tonk
26:49Angels to do the publicity, that was Margaret Rodenite and two other women, Robin Decretny and
26:54Sandy, oh, I can't think, three women anyway, to do the publicity, and we did two nights in the
27:02Regent Theatre, which is about a 2,000 seater, and we sold both nights, well Edie and I did,
27:07I was more Edie probably, that sold the nights out, so we did that, and then we did a bit,
27:12we did some more nights at the Seymour, and then we came back and did two at the Regent,
27:17and then the next, from then on, we had promoters take us on, that was actually Hocking and Woods,
27:23yeah, Hocking and Woods, Greek Hocking and Tim Woods, and they toured that. Well, so the Piaf
27:29show started in Sydney, and then from then on, when we had promoters, we went to Melbourne, Adelaide,
27:35Perth, Brisbane, several times, and in 89, Robert Gavin, who was my musical director then,
27:43and from the early 80s, from when we did, Robert first worked with me when I came to Melbourne,
27:50to The Last Laugh to do Crazy for You, and that was our first working together. So in 89, Robert
27:56had a dream, he wanted me to do Piaf with an orchestra, I think he also wanted to work with
28:00an orchestra, so Hocking and Woods hoisted the money up, and we did two nights in the concert
28:04hall in Sydney at the Opera House with a 40-piece orchestra, and Danny Nash was the narrator,
28:10different narrators we had over the years, and Danny Nash was the narrator at that concert.
28:15At one stage in the concert, or in the performance, Danny was saying some of his lines, and he was in
28:24darkness, so finally, because there's, you know, you don't have very long rehearsal periods in
28:30these expensive halls, you know, and so Danny just called out, I'm over here, I'm over here,
28:36and the spot found him finally, having done quite a bit in darkness, so that's what happens, isn't it?
28:47So I'll tell you when Blood was, you know, I'll give my blood, but for my dreams, not yours,
28:53if they're, you know, like destructive dreams, yeah. So we did it first in Melbourne at
29:01the Universal, I think, for about eight weeks, I think it was,
29:06and then we come up to Sydney and did it at Kinsella's funeral parlours, and it was now a
29:11cabaret venue. It was a great band, had two other people working with me, Russell Garber, who's a
29:20magician and mime artist, and Joanie Miller, who was a cabaret performer, and she was great. We did
29:26Power and Passion, Midnight Oil, and Red in one interview said, oh, it's good to have a real
29:34singer doing it, and so Peter and Rob turned up one night to check out what we were doing,
29:43that was all right, it was funny. Red was officially the MD, but I would say that
29:51no one in the band would doubt the fact that Paul Grabowski was the one who was in charge,
29:55and was a head, well, I mean, it was, look, the band was a very good band, Ian Macdonald on bass,
30:02Eddie Rhone-Rosendahl on drums, it was, oh, George Warrencheck on keyboard,
30:07and Paul Grabowski and Red, so it was a good band.
30:17I've been working for a long time, since about 85, I started working on this project about women's
30:23voices in history, and I like the idea of Voxy Lady, Voxy Lady, Voxy Lady, and it was also my,
30:29one of the subtitles was the history of women's voices, women's voices in history, and the other
30:34subtitle was the Vox in the Box, and the Vox in the Box, for those of you who know what a box is,
30:38you'll be right, the rest of you won't, so it goes through sort of stages of the voice, so I started
30:48well, here we go again, I started it off singing on the toilet, singing Visidarte from Tosca,
30:54and it goes into all areas of the voice, I suppose, there's an orgasm by a nun,
31:03as an aria, improvised, there's, it's all me, sorry, with backing tapes, the only show I've
31:08ever done with backing tapes, not my favourite way of working, but that's how it was done,
31:11for the Ablade Festival 1990, and there's a lullaby of,
31:21probably an Indigenous woman, there's a song I wrote with the composer Jim Cotter,
31:26called Mothers of the Missing, which has a verse about, and this was in 1990, a verse about an
31:32Aboriginal mother, a Chilean grandmother, and the wife of a South African man who's been
31:40fallen from a window in South Africa, so, and it's a beautiful song, and Jim did,
31:46Jim's a great, Jim Cotter, who does a lot, he put music to a lot of Dorothy Shewitt's plays,
31:52he really is a great, has a great relationship with words, and so that was, yeah, it's a
31:59beautiful song, and that is on my, the last album I've done, hopefully not the last, in 2003,
32:04called South Heart, at this stage of my life, at 72, and of the last few years, I have all the
32:15energy in the world to perform, I love singing, and I love singing, and I have always loved singing,
32:25but I do not have the energy to go begging, and the energy to find places, and the energy
32:31to produce, and I am, and as I have had to do that with most of my shows, except things I've
32:37done for the Adelaide Festival, where at least you've got a venue to start, Piaf we had to do
32:42ourselves to start, and Thripney Opera, which I did for the State Theatre, we haven't really,
32:52it's a lot more things I've done in these 50 years, but the energy now to have to go and
32:58put the show on, I've just lost. Someone wants me to do a gig, whether it's for free or not,
33:03or paid would be nicer, that's good, but to have to go and do it, and I've got a whole new project
33:09I want to do, and I'm sort of hanging on to the thought of how. My poor friends, when I get into
33:14my depression states, I think they wish I'd just go, so no, no, because you don't have to look far
33:22to see that reality outside is nothing like, I look at the programmes on Syria and I just,
33:31my heart, I just think, what are you doing, you're doing nothing, me, and what have we done,
33:38and I say we, have we done, and it's not just there, then we can look at all the
33:43First Nation communities all around the world, etc, etc, etc, but I do think music,
33:50and probably other art forms as well, but music in particular,
33:55can give people hope, can make people smile, can make them cry,
34:03and I think that's important. I know some of the mothers of my, my friends who are mothers,
34:11would probably advise their children not to do what Aunty Jean has done,
34:14when they see them going towards a sort of semi-artistic career, think, oh god,
34:19but on the other hand, nothing is secure now, and in fact, people are starting
34:23to live the way we have always lived, contract to contract, not good, but that's how it's starting
34:30to, it is more and more, and at least, perhaps we have a privilege of that, there's some work,
34:37I don't mean performance, I mean, in this country, there is still some work, as much as we
34:43try to pretend we have to close the doors to make, not allow people in, in case they still work,
34:49but I want to read you a quote, I want to read a quote, the film I saw five times,
34:57in about, whenever it came out, someone will know, and I kept going, I kept going again,
35:03because I couldn't, I was trying to convince friends to go and see it, this is a quote from
35:08the film, there's a devil in me who shouts, and I do what he says, whenever I feel I'm
35:16choking with some emotion, he says, dance, and I dance, and I feel better,
35:22once when my little Dimitraki died in Chalcidice, I got up as I did a moment ago, and I danced,
35:32the relations and friends who saw me dancing in front of the body rushed up to stop me,
35:37Zorba's gone mad, they cried, Zorba's gone mad, but if at that moment I had not danced,
35:43I should really have gone mad from grief, because it was my first son, and he was three years old,
35:50and I couldn't bear to lose him. Is that from Zorba the Greek?
35:56Fantastic. And I haven't lost a son, I wish, my big hole in my life is I don't have children,
36:01it's the biggest hole, and my, the last album I did is about my attempts to adopt a little girl
36:08in Argentina, so it's a story of that, without people really knowing that, but that's where it
36:12came from. So, but I don't want to cry, who said I'm crying at everything today? But I think that,
36:19but that is why you go on, I mean he, and some people have to dance, and they're lucky if they've,
36:27I mean, as I said in Syria, the children in Syria aren't doing too much dancing, but some of them
36:31are throwing balls, and some of them making kites out of plastic, it's not what you dream of for
36:35your children, but there are ways of finding some sort of joy, or some reason to go on. One of my
36:43favourite songs is by an Argentinian composer called Victor Heredia, and I love this song,
36:51that's also on South Heartland album, but that's, and it's called Razón de Vivir, and it is a
36:57combination, and this is what I was saying about Latin American, but I know they're not the only
37:02people, there is no division between life and art, and this song is,
37:32and it is a combination, and this is what I was saying about life and art, and this is what I was saying about life and art,
38:03and I missed out a couple of lines, but it's a beautiful song, and it's a combination,
38:09he wrote it at the time of the disappeared, but it's a personal love song.
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