Once, when Lena asked me what I was doing here—why wasn’t I doing music?—I told her what I’d been telling myself for years: that there just wasn’t a place for music like mine in the world today. I was born in the wrong era. I should’ve been born in the sixties, I said. Now, the only way for a girl to make it in music was to take her clothes off in a video clip and do what the record companies told you. I told her I didn’t want to take off my clothes in video clips. I didn’t want my songs to be about how sexy I was. (Lena joked, in her mother’s voice, ‘Isn’t that obvious enough, just by looking at you?’)
But she kept calling me on it. She said I was being a chicken. She said, How long are you going to stay here, hiding in your little cubicle? She said I had bigger fish to fry. Why else would I sing so much in between my calls? Did I? I asked. Yes, she said. Always. She told me I could be out there touring with Jeff Bentley, or whatever his name was, anytime I wanted. She said all he did was moan, like a cow or something. At least I could actually sing! I told her to shut up, I loved Jeff, and it was Buckley, not Bentley, by the way.
The first time I ever heard Jeff Buckley sing live was in Gaslight Music in 1994 with only fifty other people in the room. I’d bought his album, Grace, earlier that week, and by grace I was told that Jeff was coming to town. He was going to play an instore. I was given a ticket. I wasn’t sure what to expect.
But seeing him play live that night changed my life. It made me realise how much modern music could mean—that it wasn’t just disposable. How it had power. How when Jeff sang, so pure, and then so funny and cheeky between songs, it felt like someone had heard me. I felt known. I felt alive. I felt hope. Music really did matter. Something in his voice, in watching him perform live, unlocked something in me.
Jealousy, for a start. I wouldn’t admit it at the time, but with hindsight it’s clear to me that every time I feel jealous of someone, or something, it’s because there’s some fear hiding in there. In this case, my fear was with what I thought to be the immutable facts of the situation: I was fat, and no record company was ever going to sign a fat girl like me. And the truth is, I kind of had a point.
In the 1990s, there was only one way to have a sustainable music career—you had to win the attention of a mainstream audience. At the very least, you needed a massive fan base, and the only way to get that fan base was through signing to a record company; to people who had massive budgets, who could pay for your recording, your advertising, your touring, and—all going to plan—somehow get your song on the radio. Without them, it was hard for your fans to find you. And to go mainstream you needed to fit the bill. And the bill, as far as my mind was concerned, was: don’t be fat.
Even though the voice in my head told me it was pointless to try, pointless to write songs at all, no one wanted to hear songs like yours, seeing Jeff Buckley, feeling what I felt that night, somehow gave my latent ambition new ammunition, and I once again started writing songs. At home, in my bedroom in my share house in North Melbourne, I found my old cassette recorder, pressed play and record, just like I had as a child, and—using only my three chords, and the truth of whatever I was feeling at that moment—sang my heart out. I did it again the next night, and the night after that. It was as though my heart had cracked open a little, and now I was beginning to think crazy things. What if, what if, what if ‘songwriting’ was what I got to do with my life?
I had been happy at the call centre that first year: happy to entertain the thought that maybe I would end up being a normal person after all. I would be someone who wore a suit, and had a job, and maybe a mortgage, and I’d get promoted, and maybe one day Joffa would ask me to marry him, and we would have kids, and things would finally settle for me. Inside me.
Joffa and I fell in love in high school, when we were just seventeen. On the night of our first kiss, it was raining. In the seconds just before his lips touched mine for the first time, I remember the feeling in my stomach, like flying. Like something was right, for once. He was wearing a denim jacket with a woollen lining. He smelled of washing powder and beer and cigarettes and musky deodorant and chewing gum and his skin was so soft. And when he put his arms around me and drew me in, I knew this was meant to happen.
Our love affair was instant and brilliant and stretched on for years to come. At first, we just fit: saucepan and lid, yin and yang. We were like an old married couple, always going out for coffee and cuddling up on the couch with a cup of tea and a movie, cooking meals, playing adults. Things grew very serious very quickly, and before long we were so in love we could hardly bear to be apart at all. When we weren’t together, we were on the phone, or writing letters to each other. Handwritten letters,
