I had no words then to tell Fabian how much this meant to me—this moment of her naming my dream, of talking to me as though a dream like that was actually possible. I was just a kid in a costume, and here was this grown woman looking me in the eye, telling me my dreams weren’t too big at all. I have never ever forgotten that—of how much it meant, of how it made Frank go quiet, of how exciting it was to imagine that maybe, just maybe … I blushed and tried my best to fob off the compliment but, inside, I was shining. Maybe this was what I was born to do.
I joined a band not long after that, a real one. My brother-in-law Tim—a bass player—asked me to sing backup in his friend Matt O’Donnell’s band. We were called Quarter Acre Dream, QAD. My bandmates were all men in their mid-twenties; I was sixteen when we started, then seventeen. Most of my weekends in my final two years of high school were spent playing gigs, under-age, in pubs and clubs around Fitzroy and Collingwood. We played at the Rochester Castle Hotel on Johnston Street, the Prince Patrick on Victoria Parade, The Club on Smith Street and the Evelyn Hotel on Brunswick Street. I didn’t drink or smoke by then—this was, mercifully, a very clean-living time in my life—and, although the nights were long, I loved singing, loved being on stage, and secretly wished, rather often, that I was singing the main vocals, not the backups. That was probably another clue, right there.
Tim kept a close eye on me, picking me up from rehearsals and making sure I got home safe. Mum and Dad would sometimes come to gigs and stand at the back, Mum trying to charm the mixer into making sure the vocals were high enough so she could hear the lyrics and not just the instruments. Here’s the thing: Mum and Dad didn’t exactly love the fact that their under-age daughter was playing in dodgy pubs and clubs around Melbourne, but I suspected they were proud of my chutzpah.
For twelve months, we saved all our gig money for recording—we were going to make an EP—but when the day came I was so nervous, so overwhelmed by all the strangers in the room, and Frank was so loud in my head, that I could hardly get any notes out. The producer was a man in his thirties and, like every cliché I had ever read in Rolling Stone magazine, he was sitting behind the glass at a control desk with a big fat spliff, trying to get me to ‘Open up, open up’. (Open up what, exactly? I had no idea what the fuck he is asking, actually. Can someone just speak English, please?) I was trying not to let it show on my face, but every word of his (possibly quite useful) ‘feedback’ hit me as criticism and I just could not for the life of me get it right. ‘Do it again,’ said the producer. You deserve to die in shame, said Frank. This was the first time I’d ever sung into a microphone in a studio in front of the whole band, all on the other side of the glass. I felt incredibly exposed, and Frank got so loud that I had to excuse myself to cry in the toilet (As per fucking usual, you fucking loser, said Frank). Louder and louder he grew and I wish I had known then about FAFL, about how to manage such a moment, how to lead myself through, but I did not, and I guess this was the moment my childhood dream of one day being a famous musician died in me.
I couldn’t do it. I’d never be able to do it. Who was I kidding? I left the band after that. Apologised, told them it was interfering with my schoolwork. They were pissed off, disappointed, and fair enough, too—we’d spent a whole year leading up to this moment, and now I wanted out? The guilt was awful, but I didn’t know what else to tell them. All I knew was that all my life I had imagined how good it would feel to stand in front of a microphone in a studio and sing my little heart out, and now that I’d tried, I felt like I’d failed. You are a failure, said the voice of Frank.
I dropped music after that. Drama, too. In Year Twelve I wanted to study slightly more sensible things: humanities. Renaissance history, English, literature, international relations and environmental studies. And I worked hard, too—wanted to make my parents proud, to make sure they knew their faith in me was not misplaced.
It wasn’t like the dream of music didn’t still call to me after that, it’s just that I stopped listening. In the quiet of my room, when no one was home, I still wrote my songs. I didn’t know the names of the strings on the guitar but I still played them, plucked them, recorded ideas on my tape recorder, hid the tapes under my bed, never daring to say it aloud but secretly hoping that one day, by some miracle, I would meet someone who could help me work out what to do with them.
When I was twenty and working at the call centre, I heard this guy singing on the radio and, although he sounded a little morose, I quite liked his voice. His name was Jeff Buckley. I’ve told you about this, haven’t I? How I bought his album Grace and then went to see him play an instore?
There were only about fifty of us at Gaslight Music that night, including me, and Jill and our Preshil mate, Anna. The
