Another word for happiness for Felicity Urquhart
Her husband’s suicide was a bolt out of the clear blue sky. Two years on, the country music star reveals a professional and personal relationship has turned her life around.
As the Golden Guitar awards continued to pile up around Felicity Urquhart, it was becoming apparent that this would be a night to remember. Her success was bittersweet, though, for the man with whom she had shared her music and her life was not there, and never would be again.
On a summer’s Saturday night in Tamworth last year, the country singer-songwriter felt an unusual mix of pride and sorrow as Frozen Rabbit, her first solo album in a decade, was named as the winner in just about every category in which it was nominated.
While accepting her first trophy for the night, she said from the stage, “It has been a pretty tough 12 months – you all know the story. But we’re here, and music heals. Friends are forever, and family is everlasting, and you are all my family.”
That story is one that had united the Australian country music community in grief: seven months earlier, on May 27, 2019, her husband and creative partner Glen Hannah had died by suicide, leaving behind Urquhart and their two daughters, Tia and Ellie, then aged eight and six, respectively.
Hannah’s death was a lightning bolt out of clear blue sky: there was no forewarning, no hint of distress beforehand, nor a note of explanation following his final act. There would be no answers for Urquhart or anyone else who knew and loved the man whose musical fingerprints were all over Frozen Rabbit, which had been released a month prior to his death.
Everyone in the room at Tamworth that night knew the story, and knew the quality of her songwriting and musicianship, but what became one of the night’s great surprises was the class and grace with which Urquhart carried herself amid the wreckage.
After her fourth win – song of the year for Chain of Joy – she told the audience, “Felicity, for those of you that don’t know, is all about happiness. It’s in the dictionary. I was given that name by Rex and Trish Urquhart – it’s Urquhart like ‘circuit’ – and Joy is very much a family name.
“I used to think, when I was a kid at primary school, that Felicity was a bit of an average name,” she said. “But I’m very proud of that name, now, and I wear my happiness like a badge.”
For her sixth and final award win of the night, album of the year, she at last managed to coax Tia and Ellie to the stage as thousands of eyes looked on, plus many more watching on TV and streaming online. Wearing a long white dress, Urquhart made a joke of promising her girls lemonade and maybe even a Coke to celebrate, before getting real again.
“I am embarrassed,” she said. “Yes, I’ll say it. I’m absolutely overwhelmed. This has never happened to me, and I’ve been part of the furniture here from the get-go; born in the Tamworth Base Hospital, loving country music from those early days.”
In turn, the community’s love for her that night was tangible. Later, in a quiet moment backstage after the crowd had cleared out of the entertainment centre in search of other watering holes, Urquhart spoke frankly of some of the unexpected social challenges that the prior week at the Tamworth Country Music Festival had thrown her way, as a relatively new widow.
The night before, while out at The Tamworth Hotel watching The Flood – a band in which Hannah played guitar – a woman asked her out of nowhere why she was there. Her surprised tone contained perhaps a hint of judgment, as if she expected all bereaved to stay home, too stricken with grief to ever get out the door and do something for themselves.
“It took me aback,” she told Review. “I went, ‘Oh – these are my friends, and I love this music, and I’m OK to be here. It makes me feel good.’ I mean, people have funny ways of expressing interest or concern, but it sort of cut me a bit.
“I’ve found that, too, since losing Glen through suicide – now, at signings [after gigs], you’ll get three different types. People who would just like an autograph; those from the [psychic] medium side of things that want to send me a message, and then those that are suicide survivors.”
“I was not prepared for that,” she said. “I just thought I would come back and do my songs, and people would probably be sympathetic to the situation – but no-one prepares for that.
“I found myself having to suit up in a different way for a gig, and then you have to kind of physically brush that after you leave, to not carry that weight.”
Frozen Rabbit was a decade in the writing, as Urquhart juggled hosting the weekly ABC Radio program Saturday Night Country – which she had steered since 2010 – and playing in a singer-songwriter trio alongside fellow country artists Kevin Bennett and Lyn Bowtell, as well as the usual demands of family life.
Produced by Hannah, the album began with a banjo-led song named New Harmony, which tells the story of their relationship, including his marriage proposal and the arrival of their two girls. In his absence, its meaning had shifted, and she had found that the song had become harder to play live. “When I first came back, I was playing it, and I have done it a bit – but I think I’m looking for a new harmony now, you know?” she said.
On her golden night, before she left to toast to her success at an after-party across town, Review asked whether her notebooks were filling with new ideas. “Oh, yeah, I’ve been writing; actually, it was flowing like a river there,” she said. “They were gifts from somewhere; some of them for my own self-therapy. I went and sat in rooms with people because I was advised to – but the irony of the situation is, I’m a talker and I shouldn’t have been the one sitting in the room. It should have been Glen.”
With a sad smile, she said, “I found writing songs much more fun than going and talking about my life, because I didn’t have a problem. I was given a problem.”
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On the other side of the country, Josh Cunningham was streaming the Golden Guitar Awards on his phone while backstage at the Albany Entertainment Centre, where he was playing a gig that night with The Waifs, the folk-rock band he co-founded in 1992 with Vikki Thorn and Donna Simpson.
Thanks to the West Australian timezone difference, he was able to watch the events in Tamworth unfold in the gap between soundcheck and when he was due on stage. His bandmates, too, were fond of Urquhart; the trio was among the many to send her a note of condolence after learning of the terrible news in mid-2019.
“I knew she was going to do really well,” Cunningham tells Review. “I remember sitting in a dressing room there, watching on my iPhone; the Waifs girls would be coming in and out of the picture, going, ‘Oh, she’s got another one!’, and Felicity would get up and deliver these absolutely incredible, moving, heartfelt words. There were certainly a few tears from both the girls and myself.”
Having met Urquhart a couple of times socially over the years, and otherwise being a regular listener to Saturday Night Country and admirer of her radio hosting work, Cunningham went along to Urquhart’s first public performance since losing Hannah, a gig held at the Milton Theatre on the NSW south coast on July 19, 2019.
Afterwards, Urquhart thanked him for coming and casually invited him over if he was ever passing by her place near Gosford, a few hours’ drive north, to have a cup of tea, play banjo and maybe write a song together. And so, on his way to Queensland a few months later, he took her up on the offer.
“He buzzed and said, ‘Cuppa?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I might even make you a biscuit,’ – but I don’t think I even did make him one, I was that slack-arsed,” Urquhart recalls with a laugh.
“I did give him a cup of tea, though. It was really nice to catch up and talk shop; all the music language we hit it off with, but there are elements of Josh I didn’t know about.”
Cunningham had gone through some challenges of his own, having endured the slow-motion disintegration of his marriage culminating in a separation in 2017, and a divorce a couple of years after that.
“It was a very difficult time and I was very low,” he says. “At one point, I decided if I lost everything in this whole process, if I had a van, a dog and a guitar, I’d just jump in, go travelling and live a hermit’s life on the road. I think I had pretty well been through a long season of that, but was just starting to come out of it.”
Having met Urquhart at her home a few months earlier, the pair were still just friends when Cunningham sat streaming the Golden Guitar Awards; not yet partners, but well on their way.
“That was still ‘cuppa tea’ time, but obviously there was a fondness and a deep connection there,” he says with a smile. “I just felt so happy and proud of Fliss, too, for what she was achieving.”
It is a Friday morning in late April when Review connects with the pair on Zoom via a smartphone propped up on a table inside their hotel room in downtown Wodonga. They’re on their way to Urquhart’s solo show at the inaugural Gippsland Country Music Festival, followed by their first official show as a duo at Archies Creek, Victoria.
Ask any couple to dissect their shared history and you’ll usually find plenty of levity and gentle ribbing as they share their individual perspectives on key events that led to two becoming one. In this case, having both experienced different versions of devastating breakups, both parties are mindful to listen carefully to one another while Review seeks to join the dots.
It was music that brought them together, naturally, and we’re talking because the pair has written and recorded a set of 11 songs that they’ll soon release as an album before touring regional and capital cities across several months.
Its title, The Song Club, is a hat-tip to the online community of the same name: a group of disparate musicians who accepted a challenge last year to keep each other accountable by writing and sharing one new song each week via email. Eight tracks are credited to Cunningham, two are co-writes, and one is Urquhart’s alone, named Hopeless and Good.
The album opener, Seasons, is built on Cunningham’s reflections of his time in the proverbial wilderness while lost and lonely.
“Sometimes you go through those dark chapters and you just feel you’ve been cheated of all these years of life,” he says. “Especially when life turns a corner and you start enjoying some sunshine and positivity, and you think, ‘Gee, why couldn’t I have enjoyed this for the last seven or eight years?’
“But I think, sometimes, going through those difficult times are really what makes you aware of what the good stuff is,” he says. “I think we’re both living testaments to that sort of thing.
“I guess, in some strange way, you can almost feel a sense of gratitude for having gone through your struggles, because you appreciate what you’ve come to at the end of it a whole lot more.”
Urquhart has been nodding while he speaks, and now she says, “When it’s nice and easy, it does make moving forward fun; when you’ve had enough shadows hanging around, to see sunshine. And then reflecting that on little people as well: it’s so important that the girls were on board from the get-go.
“For me, family has always been number one, and the kids just fell in love with Josh,” she says. “They really just loved him, and it’s been a really great thing – but I guess they could see mummy light; they could see me happy, and everything lifted.”
Among the scores of fans and strangers who have encircled her with kind words and well wishes since the worst day of her life, Urquhart recalls an after-show meet-and-greet at the Gympie Muster in August 2019, where a couple of different women grabbed her arm and reassured her that she would find love again.
At the time it was the last thing on her mind, but with hindsight she can see their wisdom.
“They understood how important that is: life is lovely, but it’s way cooler to be able to share it with someone,” she says.
“I love my children, but there’s nothing like having a mate – an adult – to share stories and a cup of tea with.
“There’s nothing like chilling out with one, and talking about the plans for the next day; everything from school drop-off to just moving as a family, and having help. It’s so wonderful to have that help and support with Josh.
“My folks think he’s an angel; they think he just dropped out of the sky.” With a laugh, she says, “I think he did.”
Urquhart’s contribution to the album with her new partner, Hopeless and Good, is the penultimate track. The two singers alternate vocals in the verses, before joining in a duet for a chorus and middle eight that beautifully captures the new harmony they have found together.
I’m uncovered completely
Hopeless and good is my heart
I can breathe for a minute
And I thought you might want to stay
I believe you are someone
True that’s come my way.
The Song Club is released on May 7 via ABC Music. Felicity Urquhart and Josh Cunningham’s 17-date tour starts in Newcastle (May 6) and ends in Milton, NSW (November 20).
For help:Suicide Call Back Service 1300 659 467; Lifeline 13 11 14, Survivors of Suicide Bereavement Support 1300 767 022.