How sisters Vika and Linda Bull found new harmony in isolation
After achieving their first No 1 album in 2020 after 30-plus years in Australian music, Vika Bull said, “Well, there you go: you can still have success in this industry in your 50s.”
It was March when the lights began to dim, and within the space of a week or two the global spread of coronavirus to our shores saw most doors in Australia slam shut, from airlines and restaurants to offices and music venues. Staying home became the norm and walking out the front door became a rare treat.
On the morning of Sunday, March 22, Melbourne sisters Vika and Linda Bull decided to try something new to break up the housebound tedium. On Vika’s front porch, Linda stood beside her older sister and spoke down the lens of a camera streaming live on Facebook.
“Welcome to our first Sunday Sing Song,” she said. “We’re on forced sabbatical. Everybody is. All our gigs have been cancelled. We’re all in the same boat, so we wanted to sing a gospel song ’cause it’s Sunday.”
Accompanied by guitarist Dion Hirini, the white sneaker-clad siblings performed one of their favourite songs by American singer-songwriter Sister Rosetta Tharpe. “Up above my head / I hear music in the air,” they sang in its chorus, while keeping the beat with hand claps and filling the space with their complementary voices.
That first stream lasted only three minutes. “Have a great day — we might see you next week, same time,” Vika said at its conclusion, before Linda completed the thought: “Same bat-channel; different song.”
Having become fixtures on concert stages while touring the country from the late 1980s onwards as vocalists with the Black Sorrows — and more recently having appeared on television screens through endless glorious repeats of the music trivia program RocKwiz — the sisters showed a different side in the streaming video series. Perhaps for the first time they were captured while truly being themselves, up close and personal, at a moment when just about everybody else was spending most of their time at home.
Without a clear plan beyond a vague hope to brighten the Sunday of whoever happened to be tuning in, the sisters unintentionally launched a life raft of positivity into a roiling sea of uncertainty. Soon it would become apparent that 2020 was the year that many artistic careers slid to a pause, inched backwards or fell off the rails entirely. But not that of Vika and Linda, whose soulful vocal prowess became a radiant beacon of warmth in what otherwise has been perhaps the darkest year in Australian music history, at least from a live performance perspective.
Scores of viewers from across the nation and the wider world clicked on to these videos, and no matter where you were when you pressed play, it was impossible not to feel uplifted by what followed. Though their physical presence had shrunk to the size of our smartphone screens or computer monitors, their collective lifetime of experience connecting with audiences burst beyond rectangular confines.
The combined wattage of the sisters’ beautiful harmonies, expressive faces, impromptu dance moves and occasional moments of breaking into uncontrollable laughter — sometimes while singing directly to Linda’s seven-year-old schnoodle, Iggy Pup — could power a small city. Sunday Sing Song offered life-affirming appointment viewing when anxiety and dismay were the prevailing emotions as we watched, waited and wondered how Australia would fare against the deadly pathogen.
During the first few weeks they covered gospel songs by the likes of Mahalia Jackson and Sister Ola Mae Terrell. In time, musical guests such as Paul Kelly, Diesel and Cameron Bruce appeared on a laptop screen to provide prerecorded backing tracks on guitar or piano, but it was a tossed-off and gloriously silly cover that helped the Bull sisters truly go viral.
“Iso City Limits. Bored bored bored!” they wrote on April 10 when posting a hilarious remixed version of the 1973 Ike and Tina Turner classic Nutbush City Limits, complete with a mid-song attempt at the titular dance routine. It has since amassed six million views on Facebook.
“The Sing Song helped us a lot,” Vika tells Review in late August. “We’ve never used Facebook or Instagram before to get to our fans. It’s incredibly slow of us; we’re really showing our age. I think that people liked that we reached out and sang ’em a gospel song once a week. It’s probably our demographic, and I didn’t know that so many people our age — especially our audience — were so into Facebook as well. I know for a fact now that they are; I read their comments and I think, ‘Strewth!’ It was a shock to me because I just had no idea.”
That homespun naivety is part of the appeal, as from the very first video — with their manager streaming live on Facebook with one phone and Linda’s daughter Kiki streaming live on Instagram with another — it was apparent that they weren’t trying too hard or being too calculated in their intent.
A couple of weeks into the Sunday Sing Song routine, the barefooted sisters sat at Linda’s kitchen table to perform a remarkable a cappella reading of Amazing Grace for Review’s Isolation Room video series.
Across three minutes, their empathy, physicality and shared eye contact were on full display: after taking one verse each, they lifted off in harmony together and scaled wicked heights in the hymn’s second half, prompting goosebumps, tears and gratitude from tens of thousands of viewers.
“Do you two ladies know how much Australia loves you? National treasures,” one fan wrote on YouTube.
Thinking back to those dark March days, Linda says, “Gospel music was one of those things that we just turned to instinctively, to bridge that gap between what we were going into and what we were feeling. Something kicked in really quickly, and I think that’s our way of coping. We thought we’d do it to make others feel good, and gospel’s a good way to do that. But we weren’t prepared for the reverse effect: it came back like a tidal wave in the other direction, which has made us feel great. It’s been our lifeline, really.”
On the afternoon of Friday, June 19, Vika and Linda were at a recording studio in Melbourne, finishing off the last of three days of vocal tracking for an album that would come to be titled Sunday (The Gospel According to Iso). The previous week, the sisters had released a 28-track anthology collecting their previous recordings released between 1994 and 2006. Industry whispers had indicated that the double album, ‘Akilotoa, which means “cascading” in Tongan, was polling strongly on the midweek ARIA sales chart.
Vika and Linda’s manager, Lisa Palermo, had already arranged to visit the studio with Warren Costello, director and co-founder of Bloodlines, the record label that had issued ‘Akilotoa and would soon release Sunday. So the fact the pair of them turned up at the studio was nothing out of the ordinary — except for the queer look that Palermo couldn’t wipe from her face as she stood in the doorway. They came bearing news: at 5pm the following day, ARIA would announce that their anthology would debut at No 1.
Linda screamed and burst into tears; Vika stood still, stunned, unable to process what she was hearing. “I was so happy, and Warren had ripped the house number off his fence and brought it, so that we could hold a number one,” says Linda. “It’s the sweetest thing anyone in a record company has ever done.”
As Melbourne’s restrictions on social gatherings had just lifted, the Bulls and Palermo soon left the studio on that Friday afternoon and walked to a nearby pub to toast to their chart-topping success.
“It is one of the best things that’s ever happened to me, to be honest. I know people go, ‘Oh, my babies …’, and I love my kids,” Linda says with a laugh. “They are my favourite things in the whole wide world. But this is up there, too.” Vika was a little more subdued. “I was in shock: that’s just not supposed to happen,” she says. “But I was really pleased. Well, there you go: you can still have success in this industry in your 50s.”
With glasses of champagne in hand, the sisters and Palermo — who began managing the pair in 2016, after previously working with them for years at booking agency Premier Artists — reminisced on all the moments that had led to this one, where a collection of their songs would soon spend a week as the most popular album in the country.
They thought of their Tonga-born mother, Siniva, now 86, teaching them how to sing as children. Siniva helped them take those budding vocal talents — particularly their heavenly sisterly harmonies — into the Tongan community in Melbourne while soaking up the works of artists such as Aretha Franklin and Etta James.
Then, as the older sister, Vika struck out on her own as a singer in Melbourne bands from 1983 onwards, but by 1987 she had convinced Linda to leave university so they could give music a crack together. The following year, the pair joined blues-rock band the Black Sorrows, led by vocalist and saxophonist Joe Camilleri. Rather than sticking them at the back of the stage, though, Camirelli insisted on putting them upfront, where they belong. In 1994 the siblings released their self-titled debut, which reached No 7 on the ARIA chart.
Behind the scenes, in a two-year negotiation between Sony Music and Mushroom Records, the sisters had insisted that the copyright for their recordings would revert to them after 25 years. They won. That debut album with Mushroom — the first of five collections of original songs — included songwriting and production assistance from singer-songwriter Paul Kelly, who later would invite Vika and Linda to join his band full time in 2010, after many years of touring work as back-up vocalists.
“They’re a joy to work with,” Kelly tells Review. “They’re easy, but they sometimes get a bit hard on themselves because they’re very serious about what they do.”
Although they’ve been elemental forces of Australian culture for more than 30 years, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. In the early 2000s, Vika began to experience serious problems with her voice.
“It started when we did Tell the Angels, that live album at the pub [released in 2004],” she says. “And you can hear it in that album, too; you can hear the raspiness set in.”
She soon went under the knife to treat her vocal cord nodules and was thrilled to find that her surgeon’s prediction — “after I finish with you, you’re going to sing like a 17-year-old girl again” — came true.
“I did the operation and didn’t speak for a month, then did my speech therapy — and sure enough, he was right,” she says now. “My voice was back to life. What a relief.”
Around the same time, in 2005, Linda took a break from music for a couple of reasons: to have her second child, Kiki, and to open a children’s clothing store in North Fitzroy named Hoochie Coochie. “I had no experience at all and no idea,” Linda says with a laugh. “Vika went along with the kids’ shop and helped me look after Kiki while I ran the shop with her. I did it for 10 years; it was tough, but it was good for me and for my kids — and good for Vika and I because we thought, ‘Oh, we can do something else.’ ”
You Am I frontman Tim Rogers has shared plenty of stages and touring vans with the sisters, and he has been greatly impressed by how his friends have handled themselves across the years. “You kind of have to get used to peaks and troughs; you’re going to be hot, and then you’re not,” he says. “Getting told no a lot and getting rejected a lot does very unfunny things to you. You go through self-doubt, but you have to wear it. And if you want to be a decent person, you learn to deal with that.
“I don’t think there are two humans that deal with that better — and now that the swing’s come around again, they deal with it with a lot of grace. As anyone who’s their friend knows, their joy emanates outward; they definitely don’t just grab it for themselves, they want to share it around. But as soon as they start singing,” Rogers adds with a laugh, “and as soon as you see those beautiful faces, you know who the stars are.”
The upcoming album of gospel covers contains a couple of tracks that appeared in the Sunday Sing Song series, including James Moore’s In the Land Where We’ll Never Grow Old — with Kelly on guest vocals — and Paul Simon’s Bridge Over Troubled Water.
The likes of Memphis Flu and opener There Ain’t No Grave (Gonna Hold My Body Down) shine new light on the events of this year by resurrecting songs written in the wake of past pandemics.
The only new original is the haunting mid-album track Shallow Grave, a co-write by Kasey Chambers and Harry Hookey, while music director and multi-instrumentalist Cameron Bruce recorded his tracks remotely in NSW. A stunning version of Amazing Grace closes the set, in the same a cappella style in which they sang it at Linda’s kitchen table for Review’s Isolation Room back in April.
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Next year, Vika and Linda intend to release their first collection of new originals since 2002’s Love is Mighty Close. Despite nearly two decades between releases, some of the country’s best songwriters have again lined up to offer their words for the sisters to sing, with Chambers, Rogers and Don Walker among them. “I’ve got a few in contention,” Kelly says with a smile. “There’s a few of us sending songs, but as they say: it ain’t final ’til it’s vinyl.”
Bloodlines boss Costello is a long-time supporter who has been pleased by the year they’ve had, not least the No 1 outcome in June.
“Hopefully there’s a pay-off down the track for them commercially,” says the record label manager. “There’s certainly one creatively for them in the minute, but I do feel for a lot of artists who just can’t even leverage chart success into punters through the door, and actually start to get some of the money back that they’re just sitting at home, watching disappear.”
Their professional history is largely one of togetherness, such that most Australian music fans tend to see them as a package deal.
Yet despite living within 2km of each other, Vika and Linda haven’t been in the same room for weeks because of the public health situation in Victoria; the interviews, photographs and video calls for this story were all done with the sisters apart.
Just before that second lockdown took hold, though, they were prepared enough to get together at Linda’s place once again to film in advance a second, shorter season of Sunday Sing Song. As before, these performances show the singers exuding a warmth and light that extends far beyond the confines of any screen, and the weekly connection has once again become a lifeline for housebound artists and viewers alike.
Sunday (The Gospel According to Iso) is released on Friday, September 11, via Bloodlines.
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