Deborah Conway is a Jewish Melbourne born singer/song writer. I didn’t know her growing up, but that’s mostly because I didn’t attend youth groups or other communal events and not because she’s a few years older than me. She burst onto my radio as the lead singer of Do-Ré-Mi in 1982. Do you remember radios? The stations on radio played all the hits and some that were one-hit wonders. If your band were going to make it you wanted your music played on radio. When people liked what they heard they could go to the music shop and buy your record, or (a little later on) your cassette…you could make real money, well, a little money from these sales. The money you made depended entirely on the record companies and while they were prepared to spend money on you they expected lots of work. Your contracts were mostly geared towards the record company making money and not you. And you could go on radio and spruik your latest record or your newest concert. If you had fast fingers and an audio cassette recorder as well you could record all your favourites direct from the radio…that is no fun any more.
Conway has written a tell-all book that name drops some huge names, people she’s slept with, and many that she’s played music with. Often she’s done both with these people. We get the highs and lows of her relationship with people such as Paul Hester (Split Enz). The highs are the friendship and the lows are when he dies, it’s hard to weather a good friend’s death.
She goes through the various ways in which she tries to make money. How the contracts with the record companies are not actually as good as they sound from the outside. How it’s hard to make money without being able to write good songs. How she and her husband (Willy Zygier) transitioned from record companies to making records for themselves (CDs rather than records by this time).
Conway talks us through the troubled relationship she had with her father and the relationship she has with both her mother and her sister.
This book is everything I wanted it to be. The only way this could be better is if I’d read it near a computer and played the songs on a medium such as YouTube when the lyrics came up. Yes, she printed lyrics to some of her songs in this book. Not all of them, it’s not that type of book, but enough to illustrate her life at that time. Watching or listening to those pieces of music at the same time as reading would have made this book ever so much better.
There are a few references to Judaism dotted throughout this book. Some of them are quite deliberate and easy to spot while others are brief references to things within our tradition. The only one I want to mention is to do with rams and lambs. Conway mentions the plants leaping like rams and the books like young lambs. This is a nicely worded description of the earthquake she experienced in LA which refers to an earthquake in the middle east when Moses took the Hebrew Slaves out of Egypt. This trip out of Egypt is spoken about every year during Passover.
I loved this book. I didn’t love everything about it, but enough to want to recommend it to people. If you’re my generation and you loved her music back in the day then you’ll probably love this too.