Australian singer Max Sharam: Where is she now?
Max Sharam first appeared on our TV screens in the 90s and then our radio waves with her hit songs like Coma. Then she disappeared. This is her new life.
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Max Sharam was just 23 when she appeared on the talent show New Faces in 1992, performing her song Coma, which would catapult her into Australian stardom.
However, she told News Corp Australia in New York that she originally auditioned with a stand-up routine she had been performing around Sydney.
“I was doing a comedy country and western character who only wore gold lame,” Sharam says. “They told me ‘we want you on the show, do you have anything of your own?’ So I had Coma, which I had already written and which I was a little embarrassed by because it was so weird and such a private song.”
“It was winter, it was July, and it felt like everyone in Australia just happened to be home watching TV that night and here is this chick in a gold lame outfit singing a weird song,” she says.
The record companies came knocking at her door but Sharam says it was two years before her album A Million Year Girl would be released by Warner Music.
“Had they signed me and released me within six months I feel like it would have taken off even more than it did,” Sharam says. “They should have let me out of the barriers and I would have galloped down the straight. I am a racehorse. I would have won the race but instead they kept me in the stables for way too long and I feel like we missed the moment. I was chomping at the bit.”
Coma still reached No. 14 on the ARIA singles chart and was voted the 8th most popular song in Triple J’s Hottest 100 of 1994. A Million Year Girl provided two more Top 40 singles, Be Firm (No. 25) and Lay Down (No. 36), with the album, released in 1995, reaching gold status and peaking at No. 9 on the Australian charts.
She was nominated for eight ARIA Awards, losing out in most categories to Tina Arena and Silverchair, but picking up an award for Best Cover Art.
Sharam went to Los Angeles to record her second album but split with Warner due to creative differences.
“I wanted to make a heavier second album. I wanted to do something where you would sit down and listen to it and be unable to get up,” she says. “I wanted to work with (Canadian producer) Daniel Lanois who did For the Beauty of Wynona but Warner didn’t want to spend the money on me.”
“Perhaps moving to LA worked against me because I was perceived to have abandoned ship. I was seen as a turncoat,” she says.
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Sharam largely disappeared from Australian eyes. She self-published a book called Snakes Live Under My Bed, appeared in the TV documentary show Dream Factory, and performed in the Melbourne International Comedy festival in 2000 and 2009.
She also supported Cyndi Lauper on her She’s So Unusual 30th Anniversary Tour in 2014.
Now firmly ensconced in New York City, Sharam tells News Corp Australia that she doesn’t want to contain herself to one art-form.
“I am definitely an interdisciplinary artist. I would love my own Broadway show. It would be a hybrid sort of Elaine Stritch-style show with music and comedy,” she says. “The running joke now is that Tim Minchin stole my career because essentially that is what I started out doing.”
Sharam says she “doesn’t subscribe to the idea of age” but her Wikipedia page says she has just turned 50.
Asked if she has any regrets, Sharam says “I was never going to be a conventional recording artist.”
“I didn’t know how to play the game and the music industry didn’t really understand how to develop new talent,” she says. “The magic is there on A Million Year Girl but when I look back and feel disappointed by it to be honest. I feel like it should have been bigger but they wanted to box me in to this Indie market rather than making it a bigger commercial success.”
Sharam, who still owns an apartment in Sydney that she rents out, says her best advice would be for women to be financially independent.
“Girls should buy their own piece of real estate because every woman needs their own home. Do not marry for money, be independent. Why are so many women waiting for men to liberate them? Get financially independent girls, buy your own property, and then you will be able to do what you want,” she says.