Adelaide Cabaret Festival 2022: Tina Arena on getting through the pandemic and what comes next
The past two years have been especially hard for award-winning singer Tina Arena. But she’s ready to put it all behind her and launch into the Adelaide Cabaret Festival.
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Tina Arena does not come across as someone prone to vulnerability.
For almost five decades she’s been in the public eye as a performer, so it’s safe to say she feels comfortable in front of a crowd.
But when she stepped back on stage for the first time since the pandemic began, vulnerable is exactly how she felt.
“Sort of like a sense of unfamiliarity and familiarity at the same time,” she explains over the phone from her home in Melbourne.
Had she felt that way before?
“This time it was just different … because it’s a frequency that you feel as a performer,” she says after a long pause.
“I think what was really obvious for me was that the frequency had really changed and there was an incredible respect and a sense of, ‘I can’t take this for granted because this is so amazing.’
“I could sense that coming from the audience as well. Like this sense of relief … a lowering of the arms and the shoulders and the sense of almost just floating,” she adds, with the audible exhale of a deep breath.
The ARIA Hall of Famer has just arrived home after a trip to Brisbane to attend the Australian Women in Music Awards, where she presented a special impact award named in her honour.
The recipient was artist Dina Bassile, recognised for her work to improve access to music and arts for people with disability. Arena says it was a special moment.
“I’m absolutely thrilled for her,” Arena says of Bassile’s recognition.
“She just fights the fight and I really love that about her.”
Arena says to have the award named after her was “incredibly flattering”.
“It’s incredibly humbling because I don’t tend to see myself in that light,” she says modestly.
The awards night, where Arena also performed a tribute to fellow music icon Olivia Newton-John, was one of many public events the performer has added to her schedule, which is slowly getting back to its
pre-pandemic franticness.
“It’s been pretty nuts,” Arena laughs.
“It’s been pretty crazy but all good.”
There’s a hint of fatigue in her award-winning voice but it’s clear she is relieved to be back doing what she loves.
Throughout the pandemic, Arena has been one of the more outspoken performers calling for support for the arts sector, particularly Melburnians, who spent almost 300 days in lockdown.
“I would say these last two years is like living through a war,” Arena says after another reflective pause.
“I say that very humbly, because there are people that live through wars so we can’t possibly understand what it’s like, but to not be able to do your job for two years is life changing … it’s changed and shifted all of our lives.”
Now, with life back to relative normality, Arena is hesitant to dwell too much on the downside of the past two years.
“We’ve got to move forward from that and we’ve got to try and move forward with some positivity,” she says.
But she admits some valuable lessons have been learned.
“When you take something away that people love to do, where they can’t do and fulfil what it is they love to do, whether you’re an artist, whether you’re the audience, that’s a tough thing to live through.
“Coming out of that now I do think people’s perspectives have shifted and I do think there’s a greater sense of appreciation so if that’s something that’s come out of it, that’s probably a beautiful thing. It’s put things into perspective in a really beautiful way.”
Finding the silver lining and running with it, Arena is now more than ready to put the past two years behind her and launch into whatever comes next.
And for her that’s a new opportunity to connect with an old flame: Cabaret.
She will step into the role of artistic director for this year’s Adelaide Cabaret Festival – a position that has previously been held by Australian music royalty Barry Humphries and Kate Ceberano.
“It gives me the opportunity to do what I do … but also the objective is just to bring people joy,” Arena says.
“That, for me, is an extraordinary gift.”
Her task at the head of the festival is celebrating the human connection that she so sorely missed in the past two years.
“The most enjoyable part of my career is the performance aspect of it, is the exchange between art and human beings,” she says.
“It’s about having something to look forward to … so this is something to look forward to very, very much.
“I think this festival is going to be luminous in so many ways.”
And it’s not as if Arena is any stranger to cabaret, quite literally, having won rave reviews for her performance as Sally Bowles in the Australian production of the hit Broadway musical Cabaret in the early 2000s.
As well as curating the festival – no small task in itself – Arena will also headline it with her new show Songs My Mother Taught Me.
The performance is an ode to her musical roots which grew even before she stole hearts across Australian loungerooms as “Tiny Tina”, a big-voiced eight-year-old contestant on the beloved Young Talent Time television show.
She laughs that she doesn’t see much of that little girl in herself now but certainly remembers the early musical influences that led her to childhood fame.
“I guess going back to where it all starts was, for me, really important to pay respect,” Arena says.
“And to pay tribute to where your journey initiated … that starts when you’re children, what you listen to, what you’re influenced by, the musicality and the tastes and the stories and the melodies that are passed on from family … and it was really important for me to highlight that for some reason.”
The idea for Songs My Mother Taught Me came at “the drop of a hat” and although she couldn’t totally envision what the end product would be, there was an undeniable urge to explore her earliest influences.
“It was like something had fallen from the sky,” Arena remembers of the lightning bolt moment. “And I just said, ‘You know what? This is what I see. This is a vision I have of the show. I don’t know what it is but … I just can see us sitting around and telling stories because stories are so important’.
“People knowing what your influences are, what inspired you to do what you do … it really was about that because I am the sum of what I grew up listening to.”
Those influences Arena refers to may not be what most would expect.
The Melbourne-born, platinum-selling artist grew up speaking Italian at home and didn’t pick up English until primary school.
She fondly remembers early years spent listening to Italian pop and folk, as well as French music.
But it was the people who introduced her to those exotic tunes that had the biggest impact.
One in particular was a neighbour who often played the role of nanny while Arena’s mother was working.
“She lived behind us and had never had children so I was kind of like an adopted daughter for her,” Arena recalls.
“And she was extremely musical, she had a beautiful voice; she was a six-foot tall, blonde, Italian-Egyptian woman who spoke seven languages.
“I grew up listening to … all sorts of really interesting, eclectic stuff … I grew up with really beautiful, kind of happy music.”
It’s the influence of hours spent with her nanny, as well as the music tastes of her own family that the headlining show draws its biggest inspiration from.
Arena recalls being introduced to the likes of David Bowie, John Lennon and Depeche Mode through her older sister Nancy.
“She was just a massive music head,” she says.
“Flattered” is a word Arena uses often during our conversation.
She is “unbelievably flattered” to be at the helm of the Cabaret Festival; she is equally as flattered to have had the special impact award she presented last month named in her honour.
Her answers ooze modesty when asked about these subjects, as well as her career highlights. And there are plenty of those.
She’s been acknowledged for her contribution to Australian and French music by being awarded Order of Australia status and a Knighthood of the French National Order; her 1994 album Don’t Ask reached 10 x platinum in Australia as well as taking out ARIAs for song and album of the year in 1995; and in 2015 she was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame where she is immortalised alongside legends like Kylie Minogue, John Farnham, Midnight Oil and a multitude of others.
Those are just a few items off the long list of her career highlights, which include being voted Australia’s greatest ever female singer in a 2013 Herald Sun poll.
Yet when asked if the title sits well with her, the generation-spanning, global superstar chuckles uncomfortably.
“Well, no,” she laughs.
“It’s a really beautiful compliment.”
Arena is quick to shift the focus away from herself and highlight the achievements of others in the industry she has ruled for decades.
“I think that there’s a lot of really beautiful singers in this country and I think we all bring something different to it,” she says.
“I don’t like the sort of competitive thing of, ‘She’s better than you or you’re better than them’ … I think that there’s a place for everyone.
“I really, really believe that so I don’t see myself above and beyond anybody else.”
Arena admits her long career has contributed to the title but is not resting on her laurels.
“There’s a lot to draw from in 45, 46 years. Does it necessarily make me better? No.”
And even though she has achieved enough for several careers over, there is always something to learn.
“I think that’s what keeps me going, the fact that I’m very curious,” she says.
“I’m always upping the ante and trying to raise the bar as opposed to lowering it.”
Despite her already prolific career in music, Arena is not pumping the brakes anytime soon.
In fact, she’s in the process of putting together a new album that explores a new level of emotion for her.
“It’s lyrically pretty raw,” she says.
The biggest influence in the album has been the desire to be “transparent” and “authentic”.
“There’s a level of that that I felt during the exercise of the creative process of that record,” Arena says.
“Feeling quite a bit exposed, too, with the changes and stuff around, I think the project has definitely absorbed a lot of that.”
And given how taxing the past two years have been for her, Arena says the feeling in the album will reach new heights even for her.
“Emotive, I think is the word that comes to mind,” she says.
“There’s a level of emotiveness that has probably never been as present as [in] this new piece of work.”
But there’s another silver lining that Arena has found in the past two years: the ability to slow down and take her time. “That’s been really luxurious,” she says gratefully.
That Arena is so willing to open herself up in her upcoming album, and in curating her deeply personal show for this month’s Cabaret Festival, speaks to why she has remained in the hearts of Australians and at the top of her game for so long.
And as for that vulnerability she felt returning to the stage?
Well it’s never far away and, while Arena doesn’t see much of Tiny Tina in herself now, she certainly recognises that feeling she felt all those years ago.
“I think that there’s a lot of vulnerability in me and I don’t think that will probably ever leave me.”
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