Grrl power
Kelsey Munro
August 18, 2006


Young Divas... equal talent?



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AdvertisementThe world of rock music, with a handful of notable exceptions, has always been dominated by men. Even now, more than half a century since Elvis drove young girls wild and decades since feminism went mainstream, most musicians are still men. It would be difficult to get hard numbers on it, but ask any working female muso and she'll tell you she's usually outnumbered by male colleagues 10 to 1.

Why? The equal apportionment of talent between the sexes doesn't mean there'll be equal opportunity or motivation to cultivate it. Is there something about music that preserves its status as one of the last bastions of male domination? We'll ignore that most boys get into bands because they sucked at football, or that it's a tried and tested way for skinny guys to meet girls. Does it go deeper?

An all-male line-up, after all, is never a story. But an all-female line-up of musicians is still rare enough to be a special event - and sometimes regarded by men with the sort of wariness they'd reserve for a Julia Roberts movie.

As a respected blues guitarist and songwriter, Mia Dyson is a rare commodity in a male-dominated field. She has encountered the rare sexist roadie or musician, but overall she says sexism has not been a problem in her career. She suggests the shortage of famous role models for young girls - female guitar heroes, for example - is to blame for the relative scarcity of female musos.

"Bonnie Raitt as a guitar player was a really big role model for me," she says. "Seeing her play guitar when I was 12 or 13 meant I could see myself doing that because she was a female and I'm female. I looked at Nirvana but it didn't make me want to play guitar because I didn't identify with them."

Former Do-Re-Mi frontwoman Deborah Conway, now a solo artist and producer of all-woman show Broad, agrees.

"I think it's just the weight of history - there has always been so many male musos, so there's lots more male role models," she says. "There's no reason why at this point in history it won't start to shift."

With Broad, Conway conceived a show where five female singer-songwriters get together, play each other's songs and talk about their craft. The second Broad festival hits Sydney on Thursday, hosted by Conway with a different line-up to last year's version.

"The reason I wanted to do it," Conway says, "was first of all it gives it an interesting focus. I'm a woman, so I wouldn't be able to get an all-male group together. Secondly, I spend most of my life playing with men. So it's actually very nice to play with women."

Conway recruited Dyson, country singer Melinda Schneider, folk-opera singer Kate Miller Heidke and Killing Heidi frontwoman Ella Hooper. All five are respected songwriters and/or musicians with many years of experience in the industry.

"Any one of these women could entertain a crowd in her own right," Conway says. "But this is like a good restaurant offering the degustation menu - you get a taste of everything. And like all good collaborations, each singer urges the others to lift their game."

Women musos are in short supply, yet female singers are highly visible in - and none more so than the Young Divas, who also hit town this week. Made famous on Australian Idol, Kate DeAraugo, Ricki-Lee Coulter, Emily Williams and Paulini Curuenavuli represent a very different end of the music industry to Broad.

The divas' Sydney shows coincide with another Sony BMG-Channel Ten pop TV venture called Girlband, which follows four girls as they try to make it.

Such poppets don't cut it for Dyson.

"I don't think people like Kylie Minogue and the Australian Idols are good role models," she says. "Not because they're not good at what they do, but what they do has a one-in-a-million chance of ever making it. Whereas to play for yourself is something anyone can do. There's a lot of bad role models who are just being skinny and not doing anything. It's almost as if being pretty is a career."

Surely, in this era of famous for being famous and the instant TV star, being pretty is a career?

"But it's so boring," Dyson says. "It's just so empty, and playing music is so fulfilling. But I'm biased."

Dyson had no qualms about joining a pointedly all-female bill.

"I'm all for dropping the idea that there's artists and there's female artists," she says, "especially the notion that we all sound the same. [But] Broad is a really good example of how we don't sound the same."

Conway: "Basically, we're trying to explore the monolithic category of 'female singer-songwriter'. Hearing the incredibly different voices of Melinda and Kate and Mia and Ella really just proves the point."

Conway won't be queuing for tickets to Young Divas.

"I listened to the Young Divas album and all the voices sounded the same to me," she says. "I couldn't tell where one started and one stopped. We would consider putting one of the divas on the bill, but only one of them. Broad is the reverse of Young Divas - we are about exploring differences."

Young Diva DeAraugo wouldn't agree.

"We've got four strong solo vocalists, in their own right, in their own different fields," she says. "The beautiful thing about the four of us is that we're all different, down to the way we dress, to our personalities, the way we sing, to the kind of music we like. There's nothing to compete against."

And if DeAraugo has any feelings of uneasiness about the rise of a fresh set of girl pop stars who might seize the Young Divas' crown, she's not letting on.

"Girlband? That screened on Sunday night. I had a show, so I haven't seen it."