MEMOIR
Book of Life
Deborah Conway
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
It’s never one thing that shapes a life, but in the distillation of memoir it’s tempting to spot the symbol of destiny, the moment of realisation or definition from which all else follows. If you squint into the hazy sunshine of one late 1960s Toorak afternoon, you can see a small girl shaking in her swimsuit who is about to become Deborah Conway.
“He was in a filthy mood that day, full of sneer and snarl,” she writes of her father, Carl, a bit player until chapter 37 then suddenly, as if held at bay to deny him agency as long as possible, a dark shadow unfurled. “I was nine, but f--- me, I realised I was in charge. Reasons to be traumatised – or tough. I picked tough.“
Deborah Conway is described as ‘fierce’ by her husband and musical partner, Willy Zygier.Credit: Jackie Dixon
Her husband and musical soulmate, Willy Zygier, opts for “fierce” in his foreword, ahead of “unafraid, incautious, loyal, loving and at times disagreeable”. None of which jars with the uncompromising performer fans love, nor the story as recalled by a reckless lawyer’s daughter who worked out early she “wasn’t cut out to be an employee”.
Though not as lucky, lucky, lucky as some, this suburban Melbourne girl’s resolute rise to her own self-made empire is no hardscrabble tale. In one telling press grab, just before her band Do Re Mi jets off to London to make a debut album, local journalist - and musician - Paulie Stewart accuses Conway of hubris in the light of her good fortune. The fact that she remembers suggests a concession to possibility.
With a few more decades’ hindsight, she surveys her formative years almost shocked at her own privilege. She’s modelling “just for the cash” at 18; cast as a dyed-blonde “clothes horse” in a racing car B-movie at a sexually voracious 22, then caught shoplifting from Grace Bros — “like I was going for an Olympic Gold Medal for the Sheer Brazenness event”.
“There was a real shock to the system,” she tells another journalist a few years on, “when I realised there was going to be some incredibly hard work” involved in this rock and roll lark. The injustice!
The reckoning arrives in the form of a gilded cage spun by Virgin Records UK. In a scenario that screams “1980s”, Do Re Mi are cruelly dumped and the solo frontwoman bounced from London to Los Angeles for years, all expenses paid and barely any music released, until she hits the corner of self-doubt and corporate indifference that grinds her first act to a halt.
Here Conway is brutal enough in self-reflection to include a contemptuous review from one of the London music weeklies that damns her as a pretty pop puppet. “Deborah, you poor hip bitch,” the critic concludes, “you’re gonna be one bitter old woman.” Reasons to be traumatised? She picked tough. Within three years, she’d own the insult with a multi-award-winning second album titled, as startlingly then as now, Bitch Epic.
That phase begins with the validation of a smash Mushroom Records debut back home, but that honeymoon naturally wanes too and further “incautious” mistakes are made. The guts of her story is an indefatigable determination to seize the reins of her career; a will coupled with an ingenious entrepreneurial mindset. She practically invented house concerts, you know, and her all-female BROAD tours flirted with personal ruin to make a far more lasting stand.
Conway’s “unafraid” streak extends to some unvarnished reflections on fellow travellers in love and music, including a whiskey-soaked altercation with Renee Geyer, a slightly prickly meeting with Madonna and the surely un-Australian opinion that there’s “quite a few stinkers” in her old friend Paul Kelly’s catalogue.
Her own lyrics provide more-or-less oblique counterpoints to most chapters, which digress from an essentially linear form to consider various themes and subjects: drugs, plagiarism, the rigours of the road, curating a Queensland Music Festival, and a late preponderance of family concerns from several intensely observed angles — not least the pivotal paternal revelations of the aforementioned chapter 37.
As this book itself becomes a launchpad for yet another lap of staunchly self-powered victory, Conway’s parting tone is one of gratitude for the life allowed, by good fortune and good management, to deepen and prosper into a seventh decade. If that brutal English critic made it this far, he can take some comfort in getting his “hip bitch/ bitter old woman” assessment half right.
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