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SURVIVAL OF THE FEMME FATALE
"No one can escape the truth of who they really are," she
sings on her new solo EP, Stiletto Survival (Part 1). But
who is Fiona Lee Maynard?
She's one of Melbourne's greatest rock chicks. Howzat! will
never forget seeing Fiona for the first time. It was at
The Club in Collingwood and she was fronting Have A Nice
Day. Of course, we'd seen Suzi Quatro and Joan Jett on TV,
but we'd never witnessed such a formidable female rocker
in the flesh. Soon after, Howzat! interviewed Concrete Blonde's
Johnette Napolitano. She was also a fan. "Please get Fiona
to give me a call," Johnette insisted, "I want to sign her."
The new EP - the first half of an album - features a confronting
title: Biggest Bitch. "I took this line, 'Though I walk
through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no
evil, because I am the biggest bitch in the valley' from
a poem my mother had used when she was roughly the age I
am now, to help give her strength to overcome some workplace
bullying," Fiona explains. "I was about 12 at the time and
that poem made a big impression on me." Fiona played the
song live, asking the crowd if she should call it a polite
name, "Landmark For The Pain", or "Biggest Bitch". The answer
was unanimous.
Stiletto Survival - which Fiona is launching at the Caravan
Music Club on Sunday, March 6 - is delightfully dark, filled
with melodrama and menace. It's like the soundtrack to a
late-night movie. Call it pop noir, if you want. And the
highlight is Fiona's evocative voice. She could sing the
phone book and make it sound sexy or scary. The EP opens
with a song called Opened The Door. "When I was 20, living
in a share house in Carlton, I was a 'victim of crime',"
Fiona reveals. "I opened the door one night to a home invasion.
This event means I have to live with Post Traumatic Stress
Disorder for the rest of my life, but I have become very
good at managing it with the support of my family and friends."
Fiona had never been able to write about the experience,
but just before comedian Dave Grant died of cancer, Fiona
was giving him Reiki. "He was a very good friend, and when
I shared this story, he said, 'Fiona, you weren't to blame
for that, all you did was open the door.' Together, we realised
we're not always to blame for the trauma we face in our
life. When I returned home, I went straight to my recording
machine and wrote the song."
STONE THE CROWS
Howzat! agrees with the late-great James Freud who wrote
in his first book: "Why is it that Triple J, which is funded
solely by Australian taxpayers and is run as a non-profit
organisation, doesn't play 100 per cent local music? Surely
that should be their mandate - to reflect Australia's artistic,
political and musical diversities? We all own Triple J,
let's make it 100 per cent local." That said, it was pleasing
to see that more than half of Triple J's Hottest 100 was
homegrown. Angus & Julia Stone's Big Jet Plane became the
first local song to top the listener-voted poll since Augie
March's One Crowded Hour in 2007 (and the first to feature
a female vocalist since The Cranberries' Zombie in 1995).
Nine of the 18 year-end Hottest 100 winners have been local:
Spiderbait's Buy Me A Pony, The Whitlams' No Aphrodisiac,
Powderfinger's These Days and My Happiness, Alex Lloyd's
Amazing, Jet's Are You Gonna Be My Girl, Bernard Fanning's
Wish You Well, and Augie March and the Stones.
LESS IS MORE
D. Rogers loves a good short song. "I subscribe to the 30-minute
theory of human attention," he says. His new album, Natural
Disasters, contains a dozen songs and clocks in at just
32 minutes. But it closes with a couple of epics - This
Part Of Town (3.44) and Food & Electricity (3.51). "It seems
as though I've tried to hide the longer songs up the back
of the album, hoping that no one would notice," Dave laughs.
"But that's not the case. Even though I tend to write shorter
songs, I never think about how long they go for when I'm
writing. I'll never tack on an extra chorus or force a middle-eight
just to get the song to the three-minute mark. Or maybe
I wanted the album to have an epic finish." Dave launches
Natural Disasters at the Northcote Social Club on Friday.
CHART WATCH
The Hottest 100 success sees Angus & Julia Stone return
to the Top 40.
Who's That Girl GUY SEBASTIAN (number seven)
Saturday Night JESSICA MAUBOY (17)
Friday To Sunday JUSTICE CREW (18)
Rapunzel DRAPHT (23)
Big Jet Plane ANGUS & JULIA STONE (32)
Birds Of Tokyo fly from 17 to 11.
Twenty Ten GUY SEBASTIAN (number six)
Down The Way ANGUS & JULIA STONE (nine)
Altiyan Childs ALTIYAN CHILDS (10)
Birds Of Tokyo BIRDS OF TOKYO (11)
Gilgamesh GYPSY & THE CAT (17)
Get Closer KEITH URBAN (20)
We Are Born SIA (24)
Running On Air BLISS N ESO (26)
He Will Have His Way VARIOUS (27)
I Believe You Liar WASHINGTON (29)
Little Bird KASEY CHAMBERS (34)
Get 'Em Girls JESSICA MAUBOY (35)
Immersion PENDULUM (37)
HOWZAT! PLAYLIST
Opened The Door FIONA LEE MAYNARD
Buyer's Remorse D. ROGERS
The Circus Clown NIC DALTON
Everything You Need NICK BATTERHAM
Mark The Day LAURA
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