WHAT COMES TO MIND … CHRISSY AMPHLETT THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY
- Mar 25
- 6 min read
WHAT COMES TO MIND …CHRISSY AMPHLETT THROUGH GLASSES DARKLY
Here we have the next instalment in What Comes To Mind, an alternative series in the Wind Back Wednesday space, based on the work of the brilliant photographer Stuart Spence.
Each time, he will dig out a photo from his archives going back almost 50 years and challenge me to respond with what comes to mind when I look at that image. It might be serious or ridiculous, personal or historical but it will be inspired by a photo I’ve not seen before, and maybe even unseen by anyone beyond Stuart himself.
This week, Chrissy Amphlett and one of the boys in town.
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YOU CAN LOOK IT UP in the dictionary, you can find any number of amateur explanations for it, but the truth is because it is in the end so personal, there really is no way to explain charisma in any meaningful way.
Is it inner confidence or outer swagger? Good looks or charm? Being at ease with humour and adept with language, or needing neither and depriving you of both? A reflection of lust (on your part) or expectation of it (on their part)? A complete obliviousness to lust? History remembering or the future prospecting? The right time or the right place? The wrong time in the right place?
Jeez, is it as simple as just being, or having been, famous or on-screen or onstage? Or, to take the cop-out of saying you’ll know it when you see it, or feel it? Buggered if I know. But I can say, sitting across the table from Chrissy Amphlett, I felt it. I knew it.
The cue was a new album, and though I’d been watching her perform for nearly 20 years and would interview and review her years later when the MS that was invading her life had crimped her moves and cramped her style but not derailed the Divinyls revival tour, this was the first time we’d ever spoken. It felt weird to say that because, as usual with someone you’d effectively grown up with at some distance but compelling ubiquity – she was a mere six years older but had always felt a full adult to my embarrassing perpetual teen – I couldn’t shake the feeling we had, surely must have, talked at some interview or show or event or something.
Chrissy was having a coffee; I was pulling down water to stop my voice from cracking. A cool sunny Sydney day, mid-morning, we were indoors and away from sunlight, but her glasses – not quite the full dark but certainly the full face – remained on. As I knew they would. As I, to be honest, had hoped they would.
After all, while strictly speaking they contradicted the soft voice and relaxed manner, the careful thought she gave to my questions and the thoughtful care there was in her answers, and they pretty much kept hidden whatever insight I might tell myself I could glean from her eyes, there was something of the insouciance of the Italian film star, the studied distance of the moneyed widow of European business, in that presentation, with those glasses.
Which was perfect. Which was charismatic without even having to try any harder. Which kept me stumbling internally while externally I presented as some sort of professional – god, I hope I presented like that and she wasn’t sighing at this idiot’s behaviour – as we talked through a life not short of incident.
"I never thought about it, I just did it. It wasn't contrived, it was very raw, very spontaneous," she recalled. "But that [strong sexuality] was what I was putting across and it was great I was able to do that."
Yep. But in my defence, there was a bit more going on here than C. Amphlett. You see, I had a bit of form from a different life and nowhere near a gig. A susceptibility you might say, the memory of which smacked me about during the interview.
Back when I was some curly-haired, mumble-mouthed blow-in from the ‘burbs, new to this post-dropping out of uni/pre-getting a fulltime journalism job world of junior clerk in the Tax Office’s debt recovery unit, everything seemed weird. Occasionally sophisticated. Sometimes juvenile. Sometimes very adult. Sometimes both – like the time a well-known actor from a big TV soap, twice my age and way more comfortable in this situation, negotiated a payment schedule with me while I had to restrain myself from repeating one of his catchphrases and just saying, pay whatever you want whenever you want.
Like I said, weird. But the job did give me some “down time” where I might write a review or duck out of the office at lunch to drop some copy at the R.A.M. offices in Darlinghurst and (fail to) act like a casually confident freelance writer. And it paid rent and helped this non-beer drinker afford a night out with my mates in the office when they were having happy hour ales and I was keeping up with, and getting drunker faster on, Cointreau.
(Not out of any pretension, believe me – I had no concept of it being anything special as it had always been on my parents’ shelf, next to the various Advokaats nobody touched - but because teenage whiskey drinking had put me off that for a couple of decades, and gin and vodka were five years or so from being palatable to the one-time blackberry juice drinker. Rock’n’roll Ribena!!)
One day, late in the afternoon, a more senior person in the office came over, sat herself down at my desk – actually, on my desk – and peered down at me through big, like really big, like Jackie O big, dark glasses. And started talking to me. About my interests, my background, my age. Wait, what?
She was well mature, 28 or 29 (I know!), talked liked someone permanently amused by the hoi polloi (and here was me very hoi and quite a bit polloi), lived in Greenknowe Avenue in Elizabeth Bay (not the Cross, definitely not the Cross, ok? Let’s not make that mistake twice.) and no, my ears did not deceive me, was suggesting we get a drink after work. Tonight even. Now.
We did. And we did. But someone once said it’s a fine line between pleasure and pain, and to no one’s surprise, certainly not mine, a couple of months later, I was dismissed from my position (off you go little boy) with about as much amusement as I had been appointed to it. Right then, well, thanks I guess. See you and the big glasses around.
Yes, the big glasses. Left a mark, left me well aware that whatever your state of mind and state of life, no matter how good you might be at, say, your job, you were something of a bit player in this drama. But boy the bits could be sexy as all get out, and fun.
That's what was running through the back – and a bit of the front – of my mind years on while Chrissy, behind the glasses, was talking. Good talking, about confidence and control, vulnerability and the facades you have to erect if you want to make anything happen in the face of idiocy in all its macho forms.
"I don't know why I scare men. Maybe it's my tone of voice," she said back then. "I'm getting better at relating to men, to people. Maybe what's scary about me is … I have a natural rebellion. It's in me from when I was a little girl. That's the thing: I can't be controlled."
Which was just cool, you know? She was fascinating and so smart, ready to open up some more, and in turn ask me to do likewise, like we might be having a conversation. "A lot of people in Australia are derivative of something and when I came along there wasn't really anything like how I was and people gasped and misread me," she told me, not so much a warning as an acceptance.
I even made her laugh (probably at some self-deprecating business, my fallback under pressure). Score!
Yes, I did think to myself, “she thought you were ok”. Yes, I did walk out thinking some of that good feeling can be banked, to be drawn on at a future moment of professional or personal insecurity. Yes, she almost certainly gave it and me no more thought within minutes of leaving the café. But that didn’t matter. Not one bit. Charisma, eh?
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