The greatest female vocal performance ever recorded is of course the late Lorraine Ellison’s Stay With Me, which would be celebrating its 50th birthday this year if recordings weren’t inanimate objects incapable of celebration. From the first exquisite notes Ellison moans, the listener knows he’s in the presence of genius. As the song progresses, he is sure that he has never heard romantic desperation more vividly expressed by a musician — and isn’t most popular music about exactly that? I have often written that it sounds as though Ellison was receiving open-heart surgery without an anaesthetic. You won’t doubt for a millisecond that she means every syllable.
It isn’t quite as easy to identify the single greatest female performer in popular music history. When, as a university student, I saw Tina Turner with The Ikettes, I was dumbstruck with lust, and her singing was thrilling too. Deborah Harry’s beauty is incontestable, and I regard Blondie as the best pop band America has ever produced. Chrissie Hynde has a magical voice, as does Elizabeth Fraser. There have been moments when Kate Bush’s singing has made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. There was a young Filipina in a bar band in the San Fernando Valley in the fall of 1979 for whom spandex had apparently been invented, and I shall never cease to savour the memory of her rendition of Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall.
But I think one diminutive Australienne towers over all. I discovered Chrissy Amphlett on New Year’s Eve 1985. First Wife and I were at a party in Healdsburg hosted by the two marijuana barons who laundered their money at the art gallery where she worked. The Grateful Dead were on TV. I have detested The Grateful Dead pretty much from first hearing. But someone had the presence of mind to switch channels, and there, on another, was an Aussie New Wave-ish band I’d heard of, but not actually heard, The Divinyls, whose singer, in a school uniform, seemed to be trying to be the female Angus Young. She looked the sort of schoolgirl who’d have got the headmaster in terrible trouble, and led to his banishment from the community. Or maybe it was the dad who drove her home from babysitting whose life she’d ruined. Her voice perfectly complemented her look. It wasn’t big and powerful, but, well, coquettish, small and slightly nasal, most distinctive. Where has this woman been all my life, I thought. To my astonishment, someone, when my back was turned, switched back to The Dead, and the out-of-tune three-part harmony in which they’d come to specialise. For the next hour, I and various Deadhead took turns switching channels out of each other’s sight. It was the most enjoyable part of the evening. I’m not a party person.
I didn’t pay much attention to The Divinyls for the next half-decade. I liked their music, but didn’t come close to loving it, though I noted with delight that they’d covered The Syndicate of Sound’s garage classic, Little Girl (in which, remarkably, the singer gloats about having been cheated on not just once, but repeatedly!). The mad schoolgirl shtick didn’t captivate me. But then came the magnificent, eagerly salacious I Touch Myself, on which La Amphlett had never sounded sultrier, and in the video of which she jettisoned the school frock and made one forget all about young Filipinas in spandex. A rock Sophia Loren in in Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow now, our Chrissy, unrecognisable from her mad schoolgirl days!
They toured, and my new life partner the zoo keeper took me to see them at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco. Chrissy was wearing a pushup bra and a skirt that exposed four inches of lovely white flesh above the tops of her gartered stockings. Debbie…who? A rock Brigitte Bardot, our Chrissy!
About halfway through the performance, she began putting one dainty foot up on her monitor speaker, leaving no secrets. This must have given at least a couple of those at the edge of the stage the thrill of a lifetime, but she was only getting started. As the band started its biggest American hit, she sat down on the edge of the stage and, with the utmost nonchalance, spread her knees far apart. Instantly, there were hands all over her — her legs, her feet, her face. She hardly seemed to notice. You want titillation? she seemed to be demanding, with a yawn. Well, have some of this. It was as bold and hilarious and sexy as Iggy Pop had ever dared to be.
No one there had ever seen anything quite like it. No one ever would again.
[In mid-May, The Freudian Sluts will be releasing a new EP containing a song I wrote in Chrissy’s honour. It’s sub-theme is that over the course of many marriages, people cease to find their spouses attractive. “You’re not exactly Chrissy Amphlett,” the singer grumbles in the chorus, before resignation kicks in: “At my age, though, you’re the best I can get.” You will want to keep an eye out for it! ]