Bull sisters doing it for us, and each other

While the pause on live performances has made 2020 a year most musicians want to forget, Vika and Linda Bull have bucked the trend by having a year to remember.

Singer-songwriting sisters Vika Bull, left, and Linda Bull have thrived by making music at their homes in Melbourne during lockdown. Picture: Julian Kingma

While the pause on live performances has made 2020 a year most musicians want to forget, Melbourne sisters Vika and Linda Bull have bucked the trend by having a year to remember.

After more than 30 years in the public eye — as backing vocalists with the Black Sorrows and Paul Kelly, and as singer-songwriters in their own right — the siblings achieved their first No 1 album in June with Akilotoa, an anthology of their earlier work whose title means “cascading” in Tongan.

“When we went to No 1 with that record, I thought, ‘I wish I hadn’t been such a pain in the ­goddamn arse’,” says Vika.

“Linda is a perfectionist; she kicks me up the arse. I just beat myself up and think, ‘OK, if they don’t like it, just forget it’ — whereas she’ll make us work hard at it.

“I’m glad that she decided to ­become a singer instead of an art teacher,” said Vika of her younger sister. “I think it saved my life.”

At the beginning of national lockdown in March, the Bulls began a series of gospel-tinged home videos they dubbed Sunday Sing Song. The weekly clips went viral, attracting millions of views — particularly Iso City Limits, their timely take on Ike and Tina Turner’s hit Nutbush City Limits.

The sisters have featured prominently in Australian music culture since they joined the Black Sorrows as back-up vocalists in the late 1980s, but the videos showed a different side of them and an intimacy akin to looking through a window directly into their homes.

Of the decision to turn to live-streaming on Facebook and Instagram for the first time in their careers back in March, Linda said: “Our response was to step forward, not to step backwards, and I’m just so glad that we did. It’s lit a fire under us to keep going, spurred on by the people who respond to us.”