Deborah Conway is one of Australia’s most gifted songwriters and vocalists. In the early 80’s she formed Do Re Mi with Dorland Bray and they had a major breakthrough in 1985 with Man Overboard, which went on to become one of the biggest selling Australian songs of that year. The band followed it with a number of other minor chart successes including Warnings Moving Clockwise and Adultery before Conway launched her solo career.
In 1991 Deborah Conway established herself as one of Australia’s leading female artists with String of Pearls and with a collection of incredibly rich and evocative songs like It’s Only The Beginning, Release Me, White Roses, Someday, Under My Skin and the title track that’s precisely what it was. It was an extraordinarily strong debut, eventually scoring Conway the Best Female Artist gong at the 1992 ARIA Awards.
Deborah Conway’s next album Bitch Epic was equally as impressive featuring fan favourites like Today I’m A Daisy, She Prefers Fire and Alive and Brilliant – the latter eventually inducted into the National Film and Sound Archive.
By the time the collaborative experimental project Ultrasound was released guitarist and producer Willy Zygier had become her partner in music and life. Ultrasound also included Bill McDonald and Conway’s one time love Paul Hester (Split Enz, Crowded House).
Conway’s solo albums since then have all explored new territory. My Third Husband was described by Deborah as “a dark, throbbing, hypnotic and dreamy kind of record”, while Exquisite Stereo’s audaciously titled and catchy lead single Radio Loves This was ironically and typically ignored by commercial radio. Deborah Conway was no longer young enough to be considered a pop star and sadly her music has been largely ignored by the mainstream media ever since, despite being one of this country’s most consistently innovative artists.
In 2004 Summertown (attributed to both Deborah Conway and Willy Zygier) was released with some exquisitely crafted pop songs including the gorgeous Something’s Right, yet the album was again ignored by commercial radio. It was at this time that Conway and Zygier pioneered the Summerware house concert series to promote the album, a concept that has since been adopted by many other artists.
Along with stints as Artistic Director of the Queensland Music Festival and the Shir Madness Melbourne Jewish Music Festival Deborah Conway has continued to release a series of impressive albums. Stories of Ghosts looked at old testament themes from an unbeliever’s perspective, while 2016’s Everybody’s Begging took its cue from other writers with a deeper spiritual perspective. In that same year both Rolling Stone and the Leaps & Bounds Festival named Deborah Conway as a living legend.
Sound Distractions spoke to Deborah Conway ahead of her appearance on the APIA Good Times national tour with the Black Sorrows, Colin Hay and Mental As Anything. Check the tour dates here.
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