Divinyls poured out of the funnel of their record company as a kind of pre-mix new wave act but just as no one identified as punk then no one smeared themselves with its softer epithet. The term was a joke, a dad-in-a-cardigan stab at hipness, and no one under thirty would say it without a smirk or a sarcastic twang. Divinyls, of course, weren't so much a new wave band as a band. They dressed theatrically in their videos and their songs clicked into AM radio playlists like Lego pieces.
For me, their overproduced rock sound and reliance on sweet guitar hooks turned me off. And then there was the singer. Chrissy Amphlett's turn as the female answer to Angus Young was astute and proved durable. Miming on Countdown or flailing on stage, she tore it up as the eternal schoolgirl, the first one to blow perfect smokerings at the bike shed and make much more of it than shaping of exhaled fumes. Publicly, the brat child of pop royalty and senior administration, Amphlett played 19th Nervous Breakdown from the point of view of its target, living and playing unto peril and dependency, a thick moppy fringe hiding a pair of eyes you knew could turn you to stone if she showed them.
But there was also the side she would only allow us to glimpse and while it could be sentimental, it wasn't warm and fuzzy. That was the briefly sounding harmonic that had me thinking twice about her while the rest of me dismissed her band and their output as costumed-up Oz Rock. My favourite song of theirs is Good Die Young and it would be here except that the loss that it tells of and wails with is not about love.
Chrissy Amphlett's voice was like no other. It morphed from girlish naiveté to the rasp of a crazy old lady in the same line. The transition was effortless as though her throat was wired to a distortion pedal. And while a lot of pop music production still removes the breaths Amphlett's are deliberately left in adding a constant urgency, some inhalations sounded more like wheezes. Her vowels were defiantly Australian and when scraping into the rasping madwoman tone created a startling disconnect between her fresh beauty and some old boiler screaming at the kids riding bikes on the footpaths. It was hard to tell how contrived this was: on the one hand there was the uniform which could have been a dirty old manager's idea of the sex sell or a wearable irony before it was cool; on the other hand Amphlett seemed so earnest, her dancing more like the shakes and flails of hyperactivity than raunch. If it was contrived that was only polish after the fact. It seemed a product of a condition, something she was, if not natural then inevitable.
Only Lonely, recorded for the film of Helen Garner's Monkey Grip, shattered my dismissal of the band who were sold as new wave but sounded like the old 70s. Shattered because for all its guitar track trowelling it did something extremely effective. On the one hand the bright wall o' guitars chimes like churchbells on speed, Amphlett's chanting verses, which would be choruses in a lesser song, use a chirpy almost calypso melody to tell us how lonely she is. She likes morning but can only feel lonely when the sun goes down. Even in the arms of a lover she feels lonely and apologises for it helplessly.
This is the crush of every day and it rings with the urgency of youth and rasps with the desperation of experience, sometimes in the same line, Amplett's turning of a phrase transferred her effortlessly between the schoolgirl and the cranky old hen with the cats. For every bird call springing up to the third there's a sob down a semitone, welling in the minor until the lush descent of the guitars come down to pick it up again. The chorus bashes in with cooing falsettos and Amphlett's torn voice pleading to get involved.
Chrissie Amphlett was a beautiful woman. She became a rock diva in the space of a very few hit singles. But look at the clip I've linked above and count how many times you see her face in light. Go and find the video for the first hit song, Boys in Town. Even back then there's a conscious effort to play down the sexiness of her school uniform. But here she's backlit, her face a dark shape in the frame of her mop of hair. It's an impression, almost negative space. This is not the video done on film which has much more light and air, more 80s, if you will. This one is less the 80s of hot pink hair and yellow jeans than the 80s that came after the sweaty old 70s when for a few years at least the brashest of pop music shied from sex like the schoolgirl who didn't smoke from the disco medallioned monster eyeing her off from across the room. In the record company video she's a singer in a rock band; the Countdown (!) clip she's a scream in the darkness.
I think it's unwise to align songwriter or singer too closely to their life when a song lyric is most likely a distillation of experience rather than a direct report of it. Then again, we happily attribute a Jim Morrison or Kurt Cobain with near divine inspiration from personal trauma why not Amphlett who was pretty open about her own. And why sniff at her and McEntee's wish to keep all of that wrapped up in contemporary pop? It works, it still works. Let that stand.
This is the girl who try as she might can never connect with those she does gets close enough to hold, whose desperate eyes scare her dates who tell her to wait. That middle eight used to annoy me and seemed to be an uncorrected line written by the male of the songwriting partnership. Now, the more I hear it the truer it rings for this character Amphlett has assumed. And here she is, singing from the void that was once a girl, her face a blur, her hopeful springing melody cracking with failure.
This is essentially the same message as the Smiths' How Soon is Now and while there is much to love about that song there is really none of the scream through the bars of Only Lonely whose gleaming fresh guitar rock cannot conceal the real deal. I prefer it the way I prefer Good Die Young to The Smiths' Suffer Little Children (a bigger stretch, admittedly, but while we're down there...): the sombreness of Morrissey's lament for the victims of murder doesn't go as far as Amphlett's broken anger and pain for the missing person for me. The tight sustains of the chords and insistence of the chorus which seems to fall from the verses breaks into my chest cavity every time I hear it. Same goes for Only Lonely. To my knowledge, while the band and their central creative partnership delivered nothing as powerful as these again this pair of songs shall stand for the rest of my imaginable life as the essence of pop music's power at its best and that is the glimpse of what always seems to lie behind the joys of love, the ache that burns to pain ... and can get you singing along like a kid on a school excursion bus.
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