Rich Girl

Rip It Up, Issue 222, 1 February 1996, Page 8

Rich Girl

Max Sharam strolls into the foyer of the Regent Hotel, and she looks a million bucks. Immaculate in a black pinstriped suit and crisp white shirt, she’s clutching a dirty navy sock, full of 20 rusty 50 cent coins, that appear as though they’ve been at the bottom of the sea for a hundred years. “This is all my New Zealand money!,’’ she exclaims. According to the press in her native Australia, this is not untypical behaviour. Music papers nationwide have labelled Sharam a fruitcake, and she appears willing to exploit it. In Auckland to promote her debut album, A Million Year Girl, she attempts to explain what makes her tick. “Most of where I come from is based on

how you feel, your soul, your love connection, as opposed to mental, logical reasoning. I think what happens in my case is that my music is removed from my sense of

logic. It’s like making love, you let go with everything and you have no boundaries, there’s no limitations to what you can say or do when you’re impassioned or completely in love with something. When you’re in your head, which I am quite a bit, that’s when you’re analytical. But most of my time is in that musical space, which is totally boundary-less.” Sharam 7 who provoked a record company bidding war after she appeared on the conservative Aussie TV show New Faces in a gold lame suit with a shaved head, says her aim with A Million Year Girl was to make a record that the ladies would enjoy. “Women get off on different things in music than men. The music that men have been making for so long has usually been directed at wooing women in the real schmaltzy, Barry Manilow manner, or else a complete assault of the senses, which is loud and aggressive, like cock rock. But there’s this other side — if women were making music for women, what would women want to listen to?”.

JOHN RUSSELL