How Thelma Plum stared down rock music’s boys club
Singer Thelma Plum faced an onslaught of cruelty after going public with a jarring run-in, but she reveals why she won’t let the trolls keep her from calling out racism and sexism wherever she sees it.
When Thelma Plum sat down last year to write a song called ‘Not Angry Anymore’, she had to ask herself if its message was a lie. At the time, the now 24-year-old singer was recovering from a badly broken heart.
That pain was further compounded by the relentless fallout she endured after calling out racism and sexism via a series of impassioned social media posts, some of them long since deleted.
One of them, from December 2016, related to a late-night altercation involving Dylan Frost, frontman of the Australian indie rock group Sticky Fingers.
The confrontation occurred when Plum was leaving a Sydney pub with her partner at the time, and it shook her to her core.
Her post detailing Frost’s aggressive behaviour towards the duo as they tried to get an Uber unleashed a storm of hate from fans defending the rocker, who in the aftermath revealed he would seek treatment for alcohol addiction and mental illness.
And “the incident”, as Plum calls it, also forced the Australian music industry to reckon with the anti-social behaviour, sexism and harassment long shrugged off with dismissals such as “That’s just rock’n’roll.”
In the past two years, Plum has exorcised her pain through songwriting, and worked through enough that she has been able to fill a debut album titled Better In Blak.
“Sharing all of this has been therapeutic for me,” she tells Stellar. “Once you figure out how to put how you are feeling into words, it starts the healing process, and that is the big theme of this album: the healing.
“For so long I was just so angry... and hurt. And I didn’t know what to do, or where to place that anger and hurt.”
Before the healing, there was the move to Melbourne. Plum has shifted several times in her young life, from her hometown of Brisbane to her grandparents’ farm in the tiny northern NSW town of Delungra and then Sydney.
But the inner-city haunts she liked to frequent would become no-go zones after the incident.
“It was too small,” she says. “I was scared of running into people, and that happened a few times, where men in my industry — bands I knew — would yell or laugh at me, or make me feel really uncomfortable so that I would leave a venue. [And] I would.”
Music became her safe space, as it has been since she first sat at her grandfather Terry’s side and watched him play Slim Dusty songs on guitar, or snuck out to his shed at 4am as he prepped for the day’s work by listening to country music on the radio.
Plum liked school, but it didn’t suit her creative bent until she became one of the inaugural students at the Music Industry College in Brisbane.
It was there she recorded her first song ‘21 Problems’, which remains a favourite of her mother Lieszel.
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When she was 17, and after graduating from high school, Plum posted her song ‘Father Said’ to Triple J’s Unearthed platform for unsigned artists; music soon became her day job.
She released her debut EP Rosie in 2013. Another called Monsters dropped a year later. The debut album she is about to unveil has been a long time coming.
Plum attributes its long gestation to navigating the necessary rites of growing up. She worked hard on letting go of anger by undertaking therapy, culling negative people from her life and, most importantly, learning how to love herself.
A Gamilaraay woman on her father Paul’s side, Plum was the subject of racist taunts in the schoolyard.
While she loved Britney Spears and Delta Goodrem, the only Indigenous pop star she saw on mainstream television was Jessica Mauboy.
“I had to teach myself to love myself. It’s pretty sh*tty to be a young girl and feel you are ugly because you don’t look the same as people in your class,” says Plum.
“I loved looking at pop stars and beautiful women in magazines and TV shows, but I was always seeing white women. My mum and family would tell me I was beautiful, but it really does something to a young person of colour when you have no representation. It really ‘others’ you.”
After Plum’s relationship ended, she spent time searching for answers to big existential questions, such as “Can you die from heartbreak?” and “How to be happy again?”
A song on her album called ‘Do You Ever Get So Sad You Can’t Breathe’ was written in the wake of that split, and in the vocal her voice cracks with emotion; she was in the middle of recording it when her Instagram was suddenly flooded with hateful messages.
The next day, determined not to let her haters triumph, she penned the album’s defiant title track.
For all of Plum’s detractors, there is a legion of loyal fans. Her friend Briggs, an Indigenous hip-hop artist who, along with his cohort Trials, make up the duo A.B. Original, invited her and Mauboy for a special songwriting session. Plum’s eyes dazzle as she recalls the power and magic in the studio that day.
And it was inevitable she would write with another close mate, Gang Of Youths frontman Dave Le’aupepe; they penned a song inspired by the harrowing Four Corners episode exposing the abuse of young inmates at the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre in Darwin.
But it is the last track on the album that gives Plum the kind of bragging rights young Australian songwriters only dare to dream of.
It was co-written with her hero Paul Kelly, and features lead guitar by Paul McCartney, who happened to pop into the New York studio where his producer David Kahne was working on the track.
“He heard the song and asked who I was,” explains Plum. “Then he said, ‘Mind if I lay something down on guitar? I can hear this part...’ And David was like, ‘I don’t think Thelma will mind!’”
Better In Blak is out on Friday; a national tour begins on August 9. For ticket information, visit thelmaplum.com.
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