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A review by kimbofo
Book of Life by Deborah Conway
4.0
Back in 1998, I went to Edinburgh to attend the renowned comedy festival. One day I got talking to a monk on the Royal Mile (as you do) — I think he must have been handing out flyers to a show of some sort, but my memory is vague and I can’t recall the detail.
He was Dutch and when I told him I was from Melbourne, he confessed he once knew a girl from Melbourne. He’d met her in Amsterdam and she was a singer in a band. Her name? Deborah Conway.
He had lost touch with her, so I was able to tell him she had forged a successful solo career and had achieved two chart-topping albums, String of Pearls (released in 1991) and Bitch Epic (1993). He was rather delighted by this!
I was never a diehard Deborah Conway fan, more a casual listener, so I didn’t know much else about her, like the fact — newly discovered by me — that she’d had a fledgling acting career and had been in Peter Greenaway’s 1991 film Prospero’s Books, an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Earlier, in 1988, she had also starred in The Iron Man: The Musical by Pete Townshend — from The Who — playing a character called The Vixen.
Nor did I know she’d recorded a dance album in LA in 1990, which was never released, and a third album, My Third Husband, in London in 1997, which didn’t chart particularly well.
Reading her memoir, Book of Life, which was Conway’s COVID lockdown writing project, was a real trip down memory lane for me.
(The title, by the way, is a nod to her Jewish background — The Book of Life is a metaphorical book that God opens on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and seals ten days later on Yom Kippur after he’s inscribed the names of people he considers righteous in it.)
I had first come across her as the singer in the post-punk group Do-Ri-Mi (before she went solo) and adored the song Man Overboard, which was all over the radio in 1985.
I loved all the references to other Melbourne musicians I spent my teens and twenties listening to, such as the late Paul Hester, of Split Enz/Crowded House fame, who was her boyfriend for many years; singer-songwriter ex Boom Crash Opera guitarist Richard Pleasance, who produced her debut solo album and whose own solo albums, Galleon and Colourblind, are old favourites of mine; and troubadour Paul Kelly, with whom she’d had a fling before entering a long-term relationship with his cousin, Alex McGregor.
But it also fills in a lot of gaps. I lost track of her career when I lived in the UK for 20 years, but during that time she did a load of interesting things, including playing Patsy Cline on stage, being the Artistic Director for the Queensland Music Festival, producing a national concert series called Broad featuring all female singer/songwriters, and performing in people’s homes in a bid to break down the barrier between performer and audience.
The book was also curiously eye-opening because I knew so little of her background (a fairly privileged upbringing. for instance, in Toorak, one of Melbourne’s wealthiest suburbs) nor the wide scope of her talents, which extend to modelling, singing, songwriting, acting and performing.
It’s told in broadly chronological fashion, but roughly every alternate chapter is themed around a specific aspect of her life, such as her romance and marriage to singer-songwriter musician Willy Zygier with whom she has three daughters, and the complex and complicated relationship she had with her late father, a lawyer who hid his homosexuality from his entire family and treated everyone around him abysmally.
Song lyrics are also included, often at the end of chapters to show how events in her life had inspired them. (There are photographs, too, but infuriatingly, there is no index.)
She writes in the same frank and forthright way as she has lived her life. There are tales about drugs and sex and, obviously, rock and roll, for which she makes no apologies. She’s loud and proud — and often contrary.
I remember always being impressed by her authenticity, her flagrant disregard for the norms, never afraid of just saying what she thinks and being her true self. This comes across tenfold in the book.
For a more detailed review, plus links to relevant YouTube clips, please visit my blog.
He was Dutch and when I told him I was from Melbourne, he confessed he once knew a girl from Melbourne. He’d met her in Amsterdam and she was a singer in a band. Her name? Deborah Conway.
He had lost touch with her, so I was able to tell him she had forged a successful solo career and had achieved two chart-topping albums, String of Pearls (released in 1991) and Bitch Epic (1993). He was rather delighted by this!
I was never a diehard Deborah Conway fan, more a casual listener, so I didn’t know much else about her, like the fact — newly discovered by me — that she’d had a fledgling acting career and had been in Peter Greenaway’s 1991 film Prospero’s Books, an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Earlier, in 1988, she had also starred in The Iron Man: The Musical by Pete Townshend — from The Who — playing a character called The Vixen.
Nor did I know she’d recorded a dance album in LA in 1990, which was never released, and a third album, My Third Husband, in London in 1997, which didn’t chart particularly well.
Reading her memoir, Book of Life, which was Conway’s COVID lockdown writing project, was a real trip down memory lane for me.
(The title, by the way, is a nod to her Jewish background — The Book of Life is a metaphorical book that God opens on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and seals ten days later on Yom Kippur after he’s inscribed the names of people he considers righteous in it.)
I had first come across her as the singer in the post-punk group Do-Ri-Mi (before she went solo) and adored the song Man Overboard, which was all over the radio in 1985.
I loved all the references to other Melbourne musicians I spent my teens and twenties listening to, such as the late Paul Hester, of Split Enz/Crowded House fame, who was her boyfriend for many years; singer-songwriter ex Boom Crash Opera guitarist Richard Pleasance, who produced her debut solo album and whose own solo albums, Galleon and Colourblind, are old favourites of mine; and troubadour Paul Kelly, with whom she’d had a fling before entering a long-term relationship with his cousin, Alex McGregor.
But it also fills in a lot of gaps. I lost track of her career when I lived in the UK for 20 years, but during that time she did a load of interesting things, including playing Patsy Cline on stage, being the Artistic Director for the Queensland Music Festival, producing a national concert series called Broad featuring all female singer/songwriters, and performing in people’s homes in a bid to break down the barrier between performer and audience.
The book was also curiously eye-opening because I knew so little of her background (a fairly privileged upbringing. for instance, in Toorak, one of Melbourne’s wealthiest suburbs) nor the wide scope of her talents, which extend to modelling, singing, songwriting, acting and performing.
It’s told in broadly chronological fashion, but roughly every alternate chapter is themed around a specific aspect of her life, such as her romance and marriage to singer-songwriter musician Willy Zygier with whom she has three daughters, and the complex and complicated relationship she had with her late father, a lawyer who hid his homosexuality from his entire family and treated everyone around him abysmally.
Song lyrics are also included, often at the end of chapters to show how events in her life had inspired them. (There are photographs, too, but infuriatingly, there is no index.)
She writes in the same frank and forthright way as she has lived her life. There are tales about drugs and sex and, obviously, rock and roll, for which she makes no apologies. She’s loud and proud — and often contrary.
I remember always being impressed by her authenticity, her flagrant disregard for the norms, never afraid of just saying what she thinks and being her true self. This comes across tenfold in the book.
For a more detailed review, plus links to relevant YouTube clips, please visit my blog.