How Chrissy Amphlett’s legacy lives on through Sheridan Harbridge’s stage show
“The devil’s television” was banned in Sheridan Harbridge’s childhood home, so evil had to wait until mom fell asleep. On a night like this, Divinyls I Touch Myself shuddered to life get angry“I actually kind of short-circuited it,” he says.
“I didn’t know what I was watching or what this woman was telling me to do. But I knew it was perfect. And I knew suddenly there was an image of femininity before me that I found absolutely fascinating.”
This excitement is the result of the flammable writer-performer (at first glance, Terrible Jane) begins his last stage adventure. Inside Empowered: Chrissy Amphlett’s Exquisite Rock and AngerHarbridge is playing on his own, but he’s in the process of evolving into something stronger.
“I really see Chrissy as an actor,” he says. “I could see the character she created, a schoolgirl monster, and how she slowly built that character. The fringe in front of the eyes is her armor part, but the uniform, even her vocal mannerisms, come together to create this wild little monster on stage.”
Chrissy Amphlett passed away in the spring of 2013 in New York, one of the lasting sorrows of the rock world. It was breast cancer complicated by multiple sclerosis. More than a decade later, his creative afterlife proves his tenacity.
Harbridge’s one-woman stage show returns to Melbourne this week after premiering at the Rising festival last year. He has since completed runs in Brisbane, Sydney, Ballarat and Amphlett’s hometown of Geelong, and will return to Sydney next month for a stint at the Seymour Centre.
This will be followed by the release of a cache of unheard songs unrelated to music later this year. reinforcedIt is curated by Amphlett’s husband, Charley Drayton.
“There were already some ideas for him to tell his own story,” says Drayton, Keith Richards’ former bassist and drummer for the B-52s and the Divinyls, who joined Cold Chisel in 2011. “Chrissy did some development with the band and a producer in a studio in New York in 2009/2010, and I have some footage of her working on ideas…
“He was always looking for who he could be. And of course, your perspective changes drastically when life presents you with not one but two serious illnesses.”
Drayton says he has six completed Chrissy Amphlett songs, written with different songwriters, ready to meet the world this year. He’s being cautious about the details for now, but plans to start releasing them in June.
“I watched Chrissy journal in her journals. She loved to collaborate. She wrote music from the late ’90s until the end of her time with us. My plan was to release two songs at the beginning of 2020, but unfortunately COVID hit.”
reinforced she also had a long and complicated pregnancy. Amphlett and Drayton’s fellow writer Simon Morley are best known for co-creating Penis PuppetShe says he encouraged her to reclaim her songs for an intimate stage show she conceived in her final years.
“I was in New York and Chrissy was living there with Charley, she was looking for something, and I said, ‘Take it off. You know, you have great words. You’re funny. People don’t know how funny you are. People are so scared of you,'” says Morley.
“We started developing this thing and we got closer, and then because she got sick…we never quite got there. So there was something permanent between Charley and I. We’d like to see this thing happen, a stripped-down version of Chrissy. But of course, no one can play Chrissy.”
Australian theater director Sarah Goodes (Julia, children) introduced them to Harbridge, who had her own ideas for telling Amphlett’s story and had the kind of stage presence that would never settle for imitation.
“After Charley and I brought Sarah on board, we decided that the only way this was going to work was if we opened the doors and allowed the special people in Chrissy’s life to open up. Everyone was pretty closed off and didn’t share much.”
Drayton is preserving Amphlett’s legacy. Drayton went public with his concerns when Divinyls guitarist Mark McEntee announced plans to tour the band’s catalog with a new singer in 2019. The tour has been cancelled.
“Charley approved of this project,” says Morley. reinforced. “But for this to work, Sheridan specifically needed insight. He had to dig deep. And thankfully, that’s what happened.”
Deep might be an understatement. in writing reinforcedHarbridge first drew on Amphlett’s remarkable 2005 memoir, Pleasure and Painand songs that seem to reflect the constant tension in his life.
The lyrics, she says, are “locked into that majestic wound… and I think they drip from the pages of Chrissy’s book: the pleasure and pain of her ambition, her successes, her failures. She’s a very mercurial creature in that way. I really used the book. If that’s how she wants us to remember her, I’ll honor it.”
With Drayton’s approval, the stories he collected from respectfully silent friends took his insight to surreal depths.
“The thing that stuck out was that someone said to me in passing that Chrissy wanted to do the show as a crow. I was like, ‘What?’ I said. ‘Yes, first he tried to do it as a cat, then he tried to do it as a crow’…
“Simon told me he saw it as Chrissy trying to get out of being herself there, because she was having a hard time being really vulnerable onstage. She didn’t have the persona of the Divinyls frontman anymore, so she was looking for a mask.”
About six months later, Harbridge says, “I realized this was the gift I could give him. I know how to do it like a crow. So much of the aural soundscape of the Divinyls’ music lives in that mythical storytelling space, so the crow between it all somehow makes perfect sense.”
“There are so many layers,” he says with a laugh.
No joke. Amphlett remains best known as the rock’n’roll frontman who raised the hell he created for the Divinyls in the 1980s, but he also received critical acclaim for his musical theater work in the years that followed.
Performances in Willy Russell’s film Blood Brothers with a young Russell Crowe and as Judy Garland The Boy From OzShe benefited from the strict stage discipline that began with an early devotion to ballet as a little girl in Geelong in the 1960s.
Drayton knows: “There are still people now wondering who Chrissy is. I don’t think Australia has had the opportunity to get even remotely close to Chrissy, and I think there’s a lot more to share from where the book ended in 2005.”
“With reinforcedWhen Simon and I have a creative discussion about this topic, there is always space for Chrissy to be spiritually involved in the conversation, and we listen. This allows us to take risks. Put the book down. Take risks. “Let’s talk about where he is: truly an artist, truly a beloved artist.”
Her voice and expression were clearly unique, “but I think her connection to people was more valuable than anything else,” Drayton says. “You can’t please everyone who does this creatively, but finding this team was a way forward. Sarah, of course; but I can’t see how it would have been possible without Sheridan.”
Harbridge says, “I really dug into his intentions; he wanted his listeners to meet him in a new way. And he wanted them to hear his songs in a new way. So we really separated the music to let the lyrics live up front.”
The group led by Glenn Moorhouse (Hedwig), comes into play Men in the City. “That thing is supposed to strip the paint off the walls,” Harbridge says. But beyond the themes of small-town escape and righteous anger, it’s important to underscore what Amphlett’s story means to modern audiences.
“Chrissy had to make a lot of sacrifices to become an artist taken seriously in her time. She had to never give up her armor. As an artist, I do it devotedly now. No one stops me. If I want to do something, I do it and I am taken seriously.
“On this show, I made sure every woman in the audience knew: All I sacrificed myself so that I could stand here and do this thing. I think it honors all the women who came to see her at that time and said, ‘Oh my God, look at her with such dedication, she’s out there doing things we were told a woman shouldn’t do.’
“I think it’s important for us to remember how hard people like Chrissy worked for us to be here. And I want us to enjoy the third act of Chrissy that she didn’t get to have. I feel like the show is doing that, and it makes me really happy.”
reinforced there Melbourne Comedy Theater19-22 March and Sydney Seymour Center from 15-25 April.
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