Front row or death row

Chrissy Amphlett was a beautiful woman who was unafraid to be ugly. That was what I loved most about her: it was what made her such a riveting performer, as well as a genuinely intriguing personality. Fully aware of her sexual power, she nevertheless confronted her audience with songs that spoke frankly of love as a co-dependent act of submission, and occasionally of subjugation – even, sometimes, of humiliation.

But most of all, desperation. The Divinyls’ first album was named Desperate. Pleasure And Pain – written not by Amphlett or her co-pilot, Mark McEntee, but by proven hit-makers Holly Knight and Mike Chapman – was the perfect vehicle for her: it was the tension between the vulnerability of the song and the aggression of those uniquely phrased vocals that made Amphlett great.

Most of the best Divinyls songs utilise this dramatic tension: Boys In Town; Casual Encounter; Only Lonely; Elsie and the band’s truest masterpiece, Back To The Wall: for all the tough rock-chick talk, Amphlett bled on record, and on stage, as freely as anyone. The difference between her and the vast majority of other female singers was that if you hurt her, she was gonna hurt you back, hard.… Read more..

Front row or death row Read More ยป