Lo Carmen - Lovers Dreamers Fighters

Contents

For all my soul sisters: real, imagined or in the ether

Lost in Music

I must have met Loene Carmen somewhere in the late 1980s. But thats only a guess. Time had a way of sliding back and forth in those days. Until you lost your sense of it altogether. To be young and artistically inclined meant having a whole decade to wander in before you even began to think about what might happen to the rest of your life. Inevitably, people got lost along the way. Others are still out there, chasing the green light they can see just ahead of them. For an artist, for a hell of a lot of us, it can be hard to pinpoint the line you are walking between magic and loss til most of the walking is done. Maybe you never get to know the answer. Others have to find you later. And you have to die with your boots on.

Loene was always a pretty unique figure on the scene. Shed made a teenage splash in the film The Year My Voice Broke and carried the afterglow of early stardom around her. By the 1990s wed both washed up in share houses a block apart in Sydneys Surry Hills. Me in an attic beneath the plane trees of Bourke Street; she in an alley called Raper Street, just a few doors along from the studio of artist Brett Whiteley, pale and dangerous looking as he stalked the local pavements. We both held big parties at our mutual houses, with the usual parade of characters that made the inner city the mad and thrilling village it was.

Her abode was an all-female place as I recall, one of those share houses that they seem to only invent in the movies, where every single inhabitant is beautiful, talented, fascinating and cool. Unbelievable, right? I think they all went on to become stars in one way or another. It must have been the water in the taps there or something. Who knows why groups of people gather so much energy between them. But it happens. Like and unlike attracting one another and becoming a communal force for a while.

I could never quite figure Loene out as she seemed indifferent to the enticements of a stellar acting career and the fame that so many others on the scene were hungering for. Shed appear and disappear in random ways, taking on minor parts then emerging in something startlingly memorable, like her reincarnation of the life and death of Sallie-Anne Huckstepp in the true crime series Blue Murder, a role she writes about with confronting love and awareness in this book.

It took me a while to understand Loenes first love was music. Acting had been a bit of a happy accident, as much to do with the performing side of her nature and the way we find new faces for ourselves as we change and grow. Id get to know Loene slowly over the years, crossing paths with her at venues and parties. Id also see her doing her own shows, solo and in various band incarnations, gradually building up to playing supports for people like Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, Paul Kelly, Don Walker and others, all of whom gave her the respect she clearly deserved.

Loene would meanwhile release a series of solo albums, ghostly country and rocknroll wrapped in whispery cathedrals of sound. Maybe if Bobbie Gentry had written songs for and fronted the Velvet Underground youd have some idea of the vibe she created on her albums. Even so, it took me a long time to recognise just how lyrically strong her songwriting was. So much so I invited her to write what evolved into a brilliant memoir piece for a literary journal I was editing that was running to a rocknroll theme at the time. At my request, Loene came to the journals launch to play a song for everyone. Unfortunately, wed botched the night technically and she was reduced to using her electric guitar without an amp, strumming it into a very humble microphone set up while she sang, mic-less, into the open evening air. There were about a hundred people crammed into a garden bar behind Sappho Books in Glebe that night. As Loene sang a song about love and honey with a sting to its beauty, singing softer rather than louder to meet the limits of the situation head-on, I watched everyone leaning in towards her to hear and feel every word. Twenty plus years into our friendship, that night I finally recognised how great she really was. When I listen back to her albums I often think they are a music publishers goldmine, studded with stone cold classics. You might like to lean in some time to hear them.

Later on, when I was going through a hard time, Loene would stop and sit with me as we waited for our kids on a wooden bench at their primary school. I saw all her qualities at work there and then. Not how cool she was but how warm. Im tempted to say fragile too, but thats not right; there was always plenty of strength in Loene. Sensitive, empathetic... yes, those are better words. And kind. Kind when I needed the kindness most. Wed talk about all kinds of things, from the poetry of Terrence Malick films to the music of T-Rex. But I especially remember us discussing singers like Dolly Parton, Chrissy Amphlett, Suzi Quatro and Betty Davis, the last whom Loene inspired me to take a really good listen to. Kickarse women all, great performers with great songs; outsiders, survivors, fighters, truth tellers.

In this book, Loene writes about those women and many others. The heroines who matter to her, from the women in her own life to the roles she has played to the singers and songwriters she deeply cares for. I can feel her love for these people in the way she writes about them. The lives are all different... some are powerful, others tragic; theres always that wavering, even frightening line between profound sensitivity and being shattered by talent and honesty; between the wildly giving and radical assertions of strength. These women gather in her world, as alive as any ghosts can be in the haunted house of influences and memory. Like her music, there is a spooky warmth and generosity to how she brings them to life through her words. It makes Lo Carmen a beautiful bunch of people to know.

Mark Mordue

We are the music-makers,

and we are the dreamers of dreams

Arthur OShaughnessy, Ode, 1873

Little Lo with Barrie McAskill, 1979, courtesy Barrie McAskill

I awoke in a breathless sweat from a dream where I had received an edict from above: I had written fifty songs, I could never write another one, I was done fifty was the cut-off number. The world had no room to accommodate any more songs, there were simply too many, and I was now stuck with whatever I had written. I railed against the unfairness of it, shook my fist at the sky and lamented that no one had ever warned me, and if they had, I wouldve written better ones to be stuck with forever. I didnt want a catalogue of merely half decent or pretty good songs I wanted to be stuck with eternal greatness! The existential ennui I woke up with was almost impossible to shake, and I can still sink into it if I let myself consider the tragedy of brilliant songs that will never be played in front of an audience or recorded or otherwise transmitted. It hurts my heart. The casual waste of a perfect turn of phrase, waylaid notes never to be slaved over, never transformed into songs let loose in the world to gladden or break hearts in all the best ways. This was a nightmare that to most may seem absurd, but to me felt as heavy as the funeral of a friend.

My slavish dedication to the art of song has ruled my life, for better or for worse. It keeps me awake at night, forces me into a creative trance, then leaves me in a state of exhausted catatonia each time I write one. Its never kept the metaphorical wolf from my door but the sublime satisfaction I receive from writing a good one is a high too good to ignore. Keep your drugs, your debauchery, your finery and your feasts, and give me one great song or more than fifty, preferably. Dolly Parton has purportedly written over three thousand songs, which seems somewhat extravagant until you consider thats really only five on average per month from age twenty to seventy. Beethoven composed 722 works over forty-four years, an impressive average of sixteen per year. According to the internet, Neil Young has only written 312 songs, and hes two years older than Dolly. I guess he smokes a lot more pot. Or maybe I shouldnt trust the internet. The point here might be that quality and quantity are equally impressive, but if youre a songwriter youre probably going to need far more than fifty songs to work it all out in rhythm and rhyme.