Shine On, You Crazy Deadstar

Rip It Up, Issue 235, 1 March 1997, Page 17

Shine On, You Crazy Deadstar

Deadstar singer Caroline Kennedy is a stellar explosion just waiting to happen, and with a recorded output so constantly sublime, it’s a miracle it hasn’t yet. She began sprinkling her wicked-angel dust on the tracks as lead singer with now-defunct Melbourne band the Plums, with whom her delivery of the line, ‘ln my dream your fat mouth was a gun I But you had no bullets I You couldn’t even load it,’ (on the opening and title song of 1994’s Gun) sent her rocketing into residence in my diva cannon. There she sat singing the same sad and mad songs over and over, showing conspicuously absent signs of ever adding to them. In 1996 she returned with Deadstar, and their self-titled debut. Originally conceived by Hunters and Collectors guitarist Barry Palmer as a soundtrack for an Australian television series called The Baby Bath Massacre, with then-Crowded Houser Peter Jones doing drum duty, a decision was eventually made to seek a voice for the songs. Palmer was halfway through the aforementioned ‘Gun’ when he knew he had to offer Kennedy the opportunity to step up to the mic’ for Deadstar.

“She came in, with a pile of paper scattered all over the joint, smoking and drinking beer,” Palmer has said of the meeting. “She walked straight behind the microphone, sang four or five words.. and it was perfectly right.” Those words were most probably, ‘His memento was.a loaded gun I And he knew what it took to have real fun I He was my only one,’ as the song was another grand opening track, ‘Going Down’ (just one of a number of songs on the album which sound suspiciously star obsessed). It almost didn’t make the album at all, as Caroline thought it sounded too much like the Pixies to include. Barry disagreed. “That was the first sort of argument we had about music, and we’ve been having them ever since,” Kennedy laughs, saying of the band, “We’re really good friends now. Basically, it’s just a very work-like relationship. For some reason, in the case of Barry and I particularly, I think we have a similar idea about how to write a pop song, and we just happen to sort of coincide in that area. It’s just fortuitous.” Especially fortuitous when you consider the collaboration led to the same album’s ‘Valentine’s Day’, and its hormone-ic hit line, ‘I think you’re great ’cause everybody knows you I All the girls in high school want to blow you.’ Caroline laughs when she says, “Well, there’s another song where... they were having dinner in the front part of the recording studio, and I just stayed behind with the engineer, Kalju Tonuma, and was saying, ‘Look, I really wanna put something down to this song, I’ve got an idea.’ We did it, and I sang a lot of it off the top of my head — I’d organised quite a few of the lyrics — and finished it, and was really over-excited, and got Peter and Barry to come back down to the control room, and played them back the song with me singing on it, and they were like, ‘This is just so awful, we can’t do that, that’s horrible.’ And I’m going, ‘No it’s not, it’s fuckin’ great!’ It took Barry ages to like it, although I have to say he really does now.”

‘Now’, out here in Record Buying Land at least, is the time of Deadstar’s second album Milk.

“It’s been sitting in the record company [Mushroom] for ages, months,” explains Kennedy of its delay in reaching the stores. “The two albums were recorded six months, or even four months, apart. We’d done the first one, and I wish it was really successful, but it was what it was, and we wanted to just capitalise on the stuff that had started to happen. For some reason the record company wasn’t keen for us to do that, so we just went in there and recorded [Milk], and it was really good.

“The second album is very much different from the first, in the sense that it’s got a real focus about it, whereas the first one had this fragility which was born of its beginnings in life as a soundtrack. We were just trying to work stuff around things, Barry and I didn’t know each other very well, and we didn’t really know what the whole Deadstar project was gonna sound like, and stuff like that. The second album, we decided to really focus on these pop songs we had in mind. “It’s as collaborative as it was the first time. I’m doing the same thing, which is singing melodies and words over the top of Barry’s music that’s already there. Really, we could’ve sat down and written the stuff together before we did it, but because we like to be peculiar about it, we followed the same pattern we had in the first recording.” With the voice of Deadstar now firmly established, Caroline says she recognises it as being more liberated than the melancholy of the Plums. Still, she does have another band with which to stroke her sad side, and Salon Baby will be recording an album in April. “Something I’ve only recently realised about music — and it’s probably from having the Plums split up and now being in two bands rather than one, and being able to compare them both to the Plums — it’s like, different musical cohorts, different people to work with, and different songwriting techniques and styles just lead to the most extraordinary differences. I mean, some people who don’t understand music that well

would just describe my voice as a signature thing and then leave it at that, but when you say there’s a vast difference, there really is.” Although no live dates in New Zealand have been planned yet, overseas interest for the band is snowballing all the time (their most recent coup was an invitation to do an evening slot on the BBC’s Radio 1), and it can only be a matter of time before events conspire to roll them this way. When Kennedy says, “We’re not really a live band in some ways, although we’re fast turning into one with Nick Seymour on bass,” I can’t help but think how I’ve heard the first part of that line gleefully thrown back at its speaker before. “We’ve just done everything backwards really,” she continues, “but we’ve enjoyed the process a great deal.”

BRONWYN TRUDGEON