‘Book of Life’ by Deborah Conway

Non-fiction – paperback; Allen & Unwin; 400 pages; 2023.

Back in 1998, not long after I first arrived in the UK, I went to Edinburgh to attend the renowned comedy festival. One day I got talking to a monk on the Royal Mile (as you do) — I think he must have been handing out flyers to a show of some sort, but my memory is vague and I can’t recall the detail.

He was Dutch and when I told him I was from Melbourne, he confessed he once knew a girl from Melbourne. He’d met her in Amsterdam and she was a singer in a band. Her name? Deborah Conway.

He had lost touch with her, so I was able to tell him she had forged a successful solo career and had achieved two chart-topping albums, String of Pearls (released in 1991) and Bitch Epic (1993). He was rather delighted by this!

Multi-talented performer

I was never a diehard Deborah Conway fan, more a casual listener, so I didn’t know much else about her, like the fact — newly discovered by me — that she’d had a fledgling acting career and had been in Peter Greenaway’s 1991 film Prospero’s Books, an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Conway played Juno and sang songs composed by Michael Nyman; I’ve seen the film but can’t recall Conway in it).

Earlier, in 1988, she had also starred in The Iron Man: The Musical by Pete Townshend — from The Who — playing a character called The Vixen.

Nor did I know she’d recorded a dance album in LA in 1990, which was never released, and a third album, My Third Husband, in London in 1997, which didn’t chart particularly well.

Memory lane

Reading her memoir, Book of Life, which was Conway’s covid lockdown writing project, was a real trip down memory lane for me.

(The title, by the way, is a nod to her Jewish background — The Book of Life is a metaphorical book that God opens on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and seals ten days later on Yom Kippur after he’s inscribed the names of people he considers righteous in it.)

I had first come across her as the singer in the post-punk group Do-Ri-Mi (before she went solo) and adored the song Man Overboard, which was all over the radio in 1985, and I have vague recollections of an experimental band she formed in 1995 called Ultrasound. (I had the album, I don’t recall loving it.)

I loved all the references to other Melbourne musicians I spent my teens and twenties listening to, such as the late Paul Hester, of Split Enz/Crowded House fame, who was her boyfriend for many years; singer-songwriter ex Boom Crash Opera guitarist Richard Pleasance, who produced her debut solo album and whose own solo albums, Galleon and Colourblind, are old favourites of mine; and troubadour Paul Kelly, with whom she’d had a fling before entering a long-term relationship with his cousin, Alex McGregor.

But it also fills in a lot of gaps. I lost track of her career when I lived in the UK for 20 years, but during that time she did a load of interesting things, including playing Patsy Cline on stage, being the Artistic Director for the Queensland Music Festival,  producing a national concert series called Broad featuring all female singer/songwriters, and performing in people’s homes in a bid to break down the barrier between performer and audience.

An eye-opening chronology

The book was also curiously eye-opening because I knew so little of her background (a fairly privileged upbringing. for instance, in Toorak, one of Melbourne’s wealthiest suburbs) nor the wide scope of her talents, which extend to modelling, singing, songwriting, acting and performing.

It’s told in broadly chronological fashion, but roughly every alternate chapter is themed around a specific aspect of her life, such as her romance and marriage to singer-songwriter musician Willy Zygier with whom she has three daughters, and the complex and complicated relationship she had with her late father, a lawyer who hid his homosexuality from his entire family and treated everyone around him abysmally.

Song lyrics are also included, often at the end of chapters to show how events in her life had inspired them. (There are photographs, too, but infuriatingly, there is no index.)

She writes in the same frank and forthright way as she has lived her life. There are tales about drugs and sex and, obviously, rock and roll, for which she makes no apologies. She’s loud and proud — and often contrary.

I remember always being impressed by her authenticity, her flagrant disregard for the norms, never afraid of just saying what she thinks and being her true self. This comes across tenfold in the book.

Doing her own thing

There’s a great example in Book of Life that shows her independent streak and unwillingness to bow to conventions or to be sexually commodified by the music industry. It’s 1991 and she turns up at a golf course in Melbourne to film the music video for It’s Only the Beginning — the first single from her first solo album — wearing pink plus-fours.

Michael Gudenski, the head of Mushroom Records, was not impressed. He had expected her to wear something more flattering and feminine and told her as much. She refused to change her outfit.

It certainly didn’t stop that song from doing well — it peaked at number 19 on the Australian music charts in August 1991 and was nominated for four Australian Recording Industry Association awards. It still gets radio airplay today, more than 30 years on.

Later this month, Deborah Conway will be starring at the opening night of Perth Festival’s Writer Weekend. I’m so looking forward to being in the audience.

Finally, here are some of my favourite Deborah Conway tunes for your entertainment.

“Man Overboard” by Do-Ri-Mi (1982)
The bass line is incredible…but be warned, this song is a complete earworm!

“It’s Only the Beginning’ by Deborah Conway (1991)
There are those plus-fours I mentioned earlier! I love the upbeat nature of this song. The video is supposed to be a homage to the Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn comedy Bringing Up Baby.

“Alive and Brilliant” by Deborah Conway (1993)

An hour-long interview with Conway where she talks about her life in music (2023)
Interestingly, despite being inducted into the National Live Music Awards Hall of Fame in 2019, made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 2020 and inducted into the Music Victoria Hall of Fame in 2022, she mentions none of this in her book. She might be opinionated and powerful, but she’s also humble.