Tracee Hutchison

In June 1991, Deborah Conway was driving in her home town of Melbourne and, with the aid of one of those old push-button car stereos, the singer heard her song playing on three radio stations at once. It’s Only The Beginning was everywhere. No one could resist its ringing, descending guitar hook, with its obvious echo of the Cure’s Just Like Heaven.

The song was joyous, something Conway – who had first hit the charts with Do Ré Mi’s feminist anthem Man Overboard – was thrown by. She rewrote the lyrics with a darker undercurrent before settling on the sunny optimism of the original, with its wry acknowledgment that some of the best affairs of our lives are fleeting, if not wildly inappropriate.

And then there was the film clip.

In her new memoir, Book Of Life, Conway reveals that Mushroom Records boss Michael Gudinski didn’t think she had made the best use of her physical assets by dressing in plus-fours and setting the song on a golf course – a playful homage to the classic 1938 Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby.

Conway wasn’t interviewed for the recent Gudinski documentary, Ego.… Read more..