Clare Bowditch on life, music and a Taylor Swift tribute

The Australian singer who from early childhood had “a good feeling” in her bones about music, offers a message of hope.

Australian musician and author, Claire Bowditch. Picture: She Is Aphrodite

The first song I wrote was called ... Vacuum Cleaner. I recorded it on a cassette and it consisted of me just repeating the word vacuum cleaner, hot water bottle and then talking to my dog. I was really young when I had that good feeling about singing, I had parents who loved everyday singing. My mum was great with the harmony, and so I remember when really young — three or four — thinking how fun singing was. We used to record tapes for my Dutch relatives and for my sister Roy, who was in hospital at the time. So I’ve got all of these tapes of me singing from a really early age. And to the objective ear I sound like any other kid who’s singing, but I had that good feeling in my bones.

Most of rock and roll is … just 23 hours of grunt for that one on stage. I think a lot of rock and rollers are a lot straighter than their public personalities reflect. I guess I say that because I’ve had the good fortune to be in a solid, stable marriage and be able to be someone who raised my children within that world. And I think there’s a lot of cliches about those peak moments in rock and roll life where televisions get thrown out windows and people have affairs and that all goes on for sure. If I think about peak moments, I think about the time Leonard Cohen invited me to come and travel with him on his private plane and tour with him. It’s probably one of the last support tours – I did it a while ago – and moments like that are quite surreal.

I promised myself I would write a book … when I was in my early 20s, when I had what we would call a nervous breakdown or an acute episode of mental health. I was having rolling panic attacks whilst in a backpackers hostel in London. I hadn’t slept for a number of weeks and I was really terrified. I came home thanks to the generosity of a friend of mine, Libby, who got me on a plane, and my parents gratefully received me back and cared for me and nurtured me back to health. But I was really unwell. I lost half my body weight and I was trapped in that cycle of panic. I remember one of the few bright points during that time was thinking, look, if I can recover from this, I promise that I will share whatever I find out. And that made me feel really brave and hopeful.

The process of writing a book is … f...ing hell. I’d always heard that writing a book (Your Own Kind of Girl, 2019) was difficult and I loved doing it in some parts, but it was more difficult than I thought it would be. There are a lot of people who you can affect when you write a memoir. You are always aware that you’re a person attached to a family, attached to a family story, or attached to a whole lot of love, luckily in my family. So one of the best parts of this process of writing was that I really got to talk through some really important stuff with my mum. I gave my mum a draft, and I thought she would have two comments, and she came back with this sticky note full of, it looked like, hundreds of mark-ups to me, and I was terrified. A lot of them were just grammatical corrections that she had made, but there was some really important stuff about family history that I got to talk through and settle and get straight with my mom. And unfortunately, she passed away the year after this was released. So for me, the precious experience of being able to write the book and have it received by the world was amazing, as was this personal reckoning with my own mum and that closeness that I got to feel with her.

My favourite age so far has been … the age I am now, I’m 48. This is a really difficult age in some ways. You’re sitting there on the cusp of a massive transition from young woman and mother of small children to having a much more independent way of living. But I think it is perhaps my favourite age. My children have become such interesting, independent people, and I get to enjoy their company in a way that’s quite different from the other eras.

The weirdest thing about being a mother is … all the f..king liquid. You spend your whole life, before parenting, keeping yourself clean and cleaning up your own business, and all of a sudden you are literally just cleaning up someone else’s shit all the time.

My message of hope for the future is … there is so much in life that we cannot control. It’s always been this way, whether it’s the weather or the first fearful thought that we have or so on. What gives me hope, and what I love to remind people of is we are quite clever. We’ve got the choice to have a second thought. Although there’s a lot we can’t control, there are still many things that we can control. And we do that with our small actions and with our arms and our voices and our legs.

Clare Bowditch will perform in a Taylor Made: A Taylor Swift Tribute (part of this year’s Night at the Barracks, Manly, Sydney) alongside Alex the Astronaut, Clementine Ford, Charley, Emily Wurramara and Lucy Durack on September 29.