Weekend Australian: Lost & Found in the Music; by Mark Mordue
Thinking back, I must have met Loene Carmen somewhere in the late 1980s. But that's only a guess. Time had a way of sliding back-and-forth in those days. Until you lost your sense of it altogether. To be young and artistically inclined meant having a whole decade to wander in before you even began to think about what might happen to the rest of your life. Inevitably, people got lost along the way. Others are still out there, chasing the green light they can see just ahead of them. For an artist, for a hell of a lot of us, it can be hard to pinpoint the line you are walking between magic and loss till most of the walking is done. Maybe you never get to know the answer?
Carmen was always a unique figure on the scene. She'd made a teenage splash in the film The Year My Voice Broke and carried the afterglow of early stardom around her. By the 1990s, we'd both washed up in sharehouses a block apart in Sydney's Surry Hills, me in an attic beneath the plane trees of Bourke St, she in an alley called Raper St, just a few doors along from the artist Brett Whiteley's Studio, pale and dangerous looking as he stalked the local pavements. We both held big parties, with the usual parade of characters that made the inner city the mad and thrilling village it was.
Her abode was an all-female place as I recall, one of those sharehouses that they seem to only invent in the movies, where every single inhabitant is beautiful, talented, fascinating and cool. Unbelievable, right? I think they all went on to become stars in one way or another. It must have been the water in the taps there or something. Who knows why groups of people gather so much energy between them. But it happens.
I could never quite figure Carmen out as she seemed indifferent to the enticements of a stellar acting career and the fame that so many others on the scene were hungering for. She'd appear and disappear in random ways, taking on minor parts then emerging in something startlingly memorable, like her reincarnation of the life-and-death of Sallie-Anne Huckstepp in the true crime series, Blue Murder, a role she writes about with confronting love and awareness in her new book.
It took me a while to understand Carmen's first love was music. Acting had been a bit of a happy accident, as much to do with the performing side of her nature and the way we find new faces for ourselves as we change and grow. I'd get to know Carmen slowly over the years, crossing paths with her at venues and parties. I'd also see her doing her own shows, solo, and in various band incarnations, gradually building up to playing supports for people like Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, Paul Kelly, Don Walker and others, all of whom gave her the respect she clearly deserved.
Carmen would meanwhile release a series of solo albums, ghostly country and rock 'n' roll wrapped in whispery cathedrals of sound. Maybe if Bobbie Gentry had written songs for and fronted the Velyet Underground you'd have some idea of the vibe she created on her albums. Even so, it took me a long time to recognise just how lyrically strong her songwriting was. So much so I invited her to write what evolved into a brilliant memoir piece for a literary journal I was editing that was running to a rock 'n' roll theme at the time. At my request, Carmen came to the journal's launch to play a song for everyone. Unfortunately, we'd botched the night technically and she was reduced to using her electric guitar without an amp, strumming it into a very humble microphone set up while she sang, mic-less, into the open evening air. There were about 100 people crammed into a garden bar behind Sappho Books in Glebe that night. As Carmen sang a song about love and honey with a sting to its beauty, singing softer rather than louder to meet the limits of the situation head-on, I watched everyone leaning in towards her to hear and feel every word. Twenty-plus years into our friendship, I finally recognised how great she really was that night. When I listen back to her albums I often think they are a music publisher's goldmine, studded with stone cold classics. You might like to lean in some time to hear them.
Later on, when I was going through a hard time, Carmen would stop and sit with me as we waited for our kids on a wooden bench at their primary school. I saw all her qualities at work there and then. Not how "cool" she was, but how warm. I'm tempted to say fragile, too, but that's not right; there was always plenty of strength in Carmen. Sensitive, empathetic… yes, those are better words. And kind, Kind when I needed the kindness most. We'd talk about everything, from the poetry of Terrence Malick films to the music of T-Rex. But I especially remember us discussing singers like Dolly Parton, Chrissie Amphlett, Suzi Quatro and Betty Davis, the last whom Carmen inspired me to take a really good listen to. Kickarse women all, great performers with great songs; outsiders, survivors, fighters, truth tellers.
Carmen writes about those women and many others in her book. The heroines who matter to her, from the women in her own life, to the roles she has played, to the singers and songwriters she deeply cares for. I can feel her love for these people in the way she talks about them. The lives are all different …. some shattered by talent and honesty; between the wildly giving and radical assertions of strength.
These women gather in her world, as alive as any ghosts can be in the haunted house of influences and memory. Like her music, there is a spookytly warmth and genrosity to how she brings them to life through her words. It makes Carmen a beautiful bunch of people to know.
Mark Mordue is the author of Boy on Fire - The Young Nick Cave
