From newcomers like Julia Jacklin to twelve-time ARIA winner Kasey Chambers, Katie Noonan rightly declares the ARIA Awards a “great time for celebrating badass women”

This piece was originally published on the entertainment website Music Love - a platform for women, by women and about women in music.

Kasey Chambers can’t remember how many ARIA Awards she has won.  After receiving the award (her twelfth) for best country album at last night’s 2017 ARIA Awards ceremony, she noted that the pointed statues are becoming a hazard with small children in the house. The singer/songwriter’s children were clearly at the front of her mind as she ran out onto the stage to accept her award, having been caught up backstage getting ready to present the award for Best Male Artist to Paul Kelly later in the evening.

“My life is so weird!” Kasey said as she stepped up to the microphone. “I was literally getting nits out of my kids hair this morning.” The mother of three was quick to thank the numerous artists who contributed to her album Dragonfly, including Paul Kelly, Foy Vance and Ed Sheeran, noting that collaborators “take a song to a whole other level”.

Kasey has had a busy couple of years and her experiences heavily influenced her award winning album, from relationship changes to having surgery to remove the vocal nodes she has lived with for 20 years.

“[I’ve been] travelling more in the last 18 months than in the rest of my life. Tonight is my last commitment – less so the ARIAs, more the after party! During this last record I went through a lot of different things personally and vocally. I discovered a whole new part of myself and getting to write in a whole new way. Going through a divorce – for a country artist there’s nothing better than that. For country singers that’s why we get married, so we can write about it.”

It’s clearly worked out for Kasey. She finished her speech by shouting “there’s a lot of negativity around being a woman in this industry over forty years old but I fucking love it!”

Kasey wasn’t the only one who seemed to be having a blast. The general consensus from nominees and guests was that the awards were just a great excuse for a catch-up with friends and a helluva party.  Old hands like The McClymonts were enjoying a rare kid-free evening and, like many nominees, seemed far more excited to see Daryl Braithwaite be inducted into the ARIA Hall Of Fame than to receive an award themselves.

The sisters said that they were just there to have a good time as they weren’t expecting to win an award (they were also nominated for Best Country Album).

“It’s a hard category ‘cause when you’re a country musician you really only get nominated in one category. So if you do win it’s really exciting.”

Having already taken home her award for Best World Music Album at Artisan and Fine Arts Awards in November, Katie Noonan was able to sit back and enjoy the success of others. Wearing large earrings bearing the slogan ‘Woman Power’, she called the awards “a great time for celebrating badass women”.

“I’m looking forward to applauding all my fellow awesome musicians who are smashing it, as well as a rather loud rendition of The Horses.  I presume Dazza Braithwaite’s gonna rock that out.”

ARIA newbies were also keen to just sit back and take it all in.  Julia Jacklin, nominated for Best Female Artist for Don’t Let The Kids Win, was just “trying to relax” and have no expectations about the night. Enjoying some well deserved time off before working on a new record in the new year, Julia, like most of the younger guests, was particularly keen to see superstar Lorde perform.

Brisbane rapper Mallrat was excited to see Lorde but was slightly preoccupied by hunger as she had forgotten to have breakfast before making her way onto her first ARIA red carpet. The diminutive teenager was having a night off before touring next month, with a sold out 18+ show in December and an all ages show in January.

All female band, the fabulously named All Our Exes Live In Texas, were excited for another international guest performer – for One Direction member Harry Styles. And free champagne. Although they went on to win the ARIA Award for Best Blues and Roots Album, the four young women were so confident that they wouldn’t be able to pip heavyweights Archie Roach and Paul Kelly that they had failed to write an acceptance speech.

“Our reactions were half like ‘wow that’s so lovely’ and half like ‘oh god what are we gonna say?’ Super exciting but also quite scary.”

One notable newcomer was ARIA Music Teacher of the Year Renee Macarthy from Woodcroft College in Adelaide. Having taught students for 7 years, she was delighted to accept a brand new award that “recognised music teachers all across Australia and the value of music”.

“I’m blessed to have an amazing job. Music brings people together across all year levels and you can get away from any problems and just escape,” Renee explained. “It’s like a creative outlet for the soul. Winning has changed my life because it’s just a job for me that I love. So to be recognised in that way is just priceless, a big honour. My students are so beautiful. I’m a lucky lady.”

Newcomer Amy Shark got off to a good start by winning the first award, Best Pop Release, for her album Night Thinker. She later performed the album’s hit single Adore before returning to the stage to accept her second ARIA Award for Best Breakthrough Artist. Amy noted in her second acceptance speech that the difficulty she had attracting attention to her work meant that there were “a lot of years when I was really frustrated by the industry because I’d been writing music for a really long time and I just wanted everyone to hear it. I was wrong. I realise now you are all amazing people.”

She later elaborated on her statements, noting that her road to success “was no walk in the park”.

“There were many people who wouldn’t respond. I would [write songs] for therapy, and I didn’t want to chase any more people because it hurts too much. The last thing I wanted to do [before I gave up] was work with a great producer. I had to apply for a government grant ‘cause I couldn’t afford it. It was such a slog but I got that, I got to work with M-Phazes [on Adore]. And no one knew it was going to be a door [to better things]. I don’t think it would have worked if I’d been successful sooner. I wouldn’t have been able to write those songs when I was sixteen. The songs are so personal.”

Her advice for other young songwriters?

“Everything happens for a reason. Just concentrate on what you’re doing. Really love it. If you love song writing, just write a good song. Don’t do it to be famous. Just do it for yourself. Be honest with yourself. If you honestly love it then you’ll be successful.”

 Other snippets

Taiwanese pop singer A-Lin was also experiencing her first ARIAs on one of her first trips to Australia. Having just released her self-titled album, featuring a song co-written by her friend Sia, A-Lin was particularly keen to run into Guy Sebastian. They are currently collaborating on a track which should be released within the next few months.

Alex The Astronaut, looking sharp in a pink suit, was looking forward to having a good time at her first awards show and hopefully sharing style tips with fellow snazzy suit wearer Harry Styles.

“I get to kind of just have a big party which is fun.”

All Our Exes Live In Texas were sporting some pretty distinctive nail art. The phrases “SAVE MANUS” and “#METOO” were powerful topical statements for a group of women who are finding their feet professionally.

Their advice for young women hoping to make it big in music?

“Form a band with your girlfriends. Get in a garage and do it like the boys do. You don’t need a boy drummer or whatever – we didn’t and look where we ended up.”

ARIA Awards 2017: Women fan the flames in this year's ARIA Award nominations as Amy Shark and Jessica Mauboy ride high

This piece is housed on the entertainment website Music Love - a platform for women, by women and about women in music.

It's ARIA Awards time! Last year Music Love was there to cover all the women in music winners and nominees, and here we are, ready to go again. Fenella Henderson-Zuel was at the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney for the nomination announcements, as well as the winners for the Artisan and Fine Arts Awards. 

The ARIA Awards offer a chance to celebrate the achievements of some amazing women in music, but also a chance to wonder if their absence from certain categories indicates that women don’t make rock, adult contemporary or dance music – the categories where women received no nominations. Or perhaps the powers that be just aren’t recognising it. 

Whatever the case, of the more than 70 acts up for awards this year as announced at a ceremony at the NSW Art Gallery on Tuesday, 29 women were among the list of nominees for the mainstream awards – including mixed and all female groups as well as soloists. Aside from that there were 42 women – not including the members from the Sydney and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras - who were nominated for the Fine Arts and Artisan Awards of which the winners were announced today.

One such was multiple ARIA Award winner Katie Noonan, who today took home the Best World Music Album Award for her collaboration with Karin Scahupp, Songs of the Latin Skies, took the opportunity during her speech to “fan the flame” of women in the industry.

She pointed out that it was the first time either she or Schaupp had won an ARIA with another woman and finished by commenting that it “would be nice to see a woman on the ARIA board”.  

Noonan, who has won previously for Best Jazz Album and been nominated for Best Classical album, had to learn Portugese for Songs of the Latin Skies and believes that learning and experimenting is the key to becoming a better musician. 

“Getting out of your comfort zone if really important to being a human being in general,” she tells Music Love, “but particularly as an artist. You need to challenge yourself and not rest on your laurels.” 

Riding high in the nomination leader board were Amy Shark and Jessica Mauboy, each boasting six nominations. Although Mauboy missed out on Best Original Soundtrack for her work on the TV show The Secret Daughter, she will go up against Shark for Best Female Artist and Best Pop Release. Shark is also in good company in the Breakthrough Artist category, where she is nominated alongside Tash Sultana and Tkay Maidza.

Sia is also making her presence felt with five nominations, including Best Female Artist, Best Independent Release and the publicly voted Best Video & Song Of The Year. Tash Sultana isn’t far behind, with four nominations including Best Blues & Roots Album and Best Australian Live Act. 

Climbing the awards ladder is Julia Jacklin, a newer ARIA face but already nominated for Best Female Artist and Best Cover Art. Having just finished a year of touring overseas and getting ready to head out again next month, Jacklin revealed that being unable to listen to Australian radio while travelling meant she was almost unaware of the success she was receiving locally.

Jacklin has been focusing on touring internationally, telling Music Love, “You can tour [in Australia] but you can’t play that many shows because it’s a pretty small country. You do have to leave for a long time.”

The fantastically named all-female band All Our Exes Live In Texas have received their first nomination for Best Blues & Roots Album and consider it an extra achievement to have done so with minimal support from local radio. Vocalist and guitarist Katie Wighton considers the nomination and the recognition that comes with it to be a bonus after spending the past few years on tour just to raise the funds for their debut album When We Fall, released earlier this year with crowd funding support.

“I genuinely never thought I’d be in this position,” says Wighton.  

Bandmate Hannah Crofts (vocals & ukulele) considers the time they spent on the road essential not just for finance but in helping to choose the songs for an album.

“When we write a song, we need to play it for six months before we go into the studio with it,” Crofts explains to Music Love. “We have to learn to love it and then record it.”

Former The Voice contestant Vera Blue is returning to the ARIA Awards after performing Papercuts, her #1 single with Melbourne rapper Illy, at last year’s ceremony. This year she is nominated for Best Pop Release and is looking forward to attending alongside performers she has long admired.

Working with artists like Illy and Empire of the Sun’s Nick Littlemore (on The 2 Leaves Project) has allowed Blue to explore what music has to offer and to find her groove in electronic folk. 

“I’m open to doing so many different things,” Blue tells Music Love. ‘[The collaborations] have opened my eyes to so many different musical genres and what we can do with music.”

The ARIA Awards will be held in Sydney on November 28. Details here

Keep scrolling for a full list of women who are winners and nominees.

BRANDED ON MY DNA: KATHY MCCABE’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH MUSIC

This piece was originally published on the entertainment website Music Love - a platform for women, by women and about women in music.

Our favourite music is often intrinsically linked to memorable periods in our lives, or perhaps these moments are made more memorable thanks to their soundtrack.

This has certainly been the case for Kathy McCabe, a 25 year veteran of the Australia music business as an award winning journalist, one-time A&R manager and favoured confidant musicians around the world. Speaking at a packed Women In Music event last week, News Corp Australia’s National Music Writer talked about her lifelong love affair with music and her best loved songs and artists.

Describing it as being “branded on my DNA”, music was “omnipresent” in the McCabe household during Kathy’s childhood, with a stereo in every room and fights regularly breaking out over who would get creative control.

“Silence meant something bad was going to happen [but] if there was music it was going to be alright.”

One song that stood out from these early years was Stevie Wright’s Evie Part 1, on a compilation album which was the first record Kathy’s parents bought her. Infatuated, she ended up playing the album “literally to death” and it became the initial spark for a career in music journalism.

“The drama of it, the story of it, just sucked me in.”

Starting out as a court reporter, Kathy eventually managed to move into music writing but found it difficult working alongside a “legendary” and “scary as fuck” fellow arts critic who, apparently seeing her younger colleague as “an enemy” put Kathy into situations where she would have to fight hard for assignments.

Although it shaped her into the journalist she is today, by forcing her to continually improve her work, Kathy describes this older colleague as having made her life “horrible for a long time”.

As Kathy established herself, that competition disappeared and music journalism became more of a labour of love. She connects this period with her love for Australian band, The Cruel Sea, fronted by Tex Perkins, and their song, The Honeymoon Is Over.

When assigned to interview bass guitarist Ken Gormly, Kathy remembers feeling distinctly starstruck at the idea of interacting with a band that “represented the unattainable” by appearing smarter and cooler than anyone else the young journalist had previously had access to.

Running into Ken at the ARIA Awards later that year, Kathy congratulated the band on their nomination. Ken responded by thanking her for her article, telling her “My mother still has your story on her fridge.”

The interview ended up being a personal turning point for Kathy, who realised “I’m not shit at this.”

Kathy’s status as one of Australia’s premier music critics suggests that she is indeed not shit at this. She has “been lucky enough to meet most of my heroes”, from interviewing U2 and David Bowie to spending five days in London with P!nk, who Kathy describes as the “most unfiltered, human artist”.

Some of her most rewarding interviews have been with Australian women.

“Every conversation with Bertie Blackman, Megan Washington, Jessica Mauboy and Kasey Chambers is amazing and the best.”

Kathy is now in the enviable position of being able to choose who to interview and which releases to review, asking herself “has it got a beautiful story that needs to be told?” But in a changing media landscape, she is aware of the importance of her choices given the limited space, especially with News Corp recently removing the entertainment lift out from its national newspapers.

With so little space to work in, Kathy says that “50% of my day is saying no”, but there are some things she would say yes to immediately. On her bucket list are Patti Smith (“I wish Patti Smith would write something every day of the week”), Troye Sivan and Bruce Springsteen.

“[Bruce] I will get you if it kills me”.

How’s the serenity? NOIRE singer and songwriter Jessica Mincher discusses the value of leaving the big smoke for the quiet country.

This piece is housed on the entertainment website Music Love - a platform for women, by women and about women in music.

NOIRE. Image by Allyson Alapont

Jessica Mincher and Billy James quit their day jobs and moved out of their house in Surry Hills in inner city Sydney to a farm in Queensland near where they both grew up. Stepping away from the stress and the distractions of the city they were soon able to get back to making music. Fenella Henderson-Zuel spoke to Jessica in Switzerland about the indie pop duo known as NOIRE and their latest recording, Some Kind Of Blue.

Images by Blair Gauld

“You know, time just goes by so quickly and you realise ‘Oh my god, I’ve been in Sydney for so long and I haven’t really done that much yet, I haven’t made as much music as I wanted to.’ There was a lot of indecision and not feeling productive. It makes you feel depressed all the time.”

            — JESSICA MINCHER, SINGER/SGONWRITER FOR INDIE POP DUO NOIRE

When we finally manage to connect our Skype call, Jessica Mincher is bitterly disappointed to discover that the video feature isn’t working. “I’m in Switzerland and I wanted to show you the view! It’s very beautiful.” The singer-songwriter is currently road-tripping through Europe with fellow musician and songwriter Billy James, the other half of Australian indie pop rock duo NOIRE.

“We started off in Paris and then went to Berlin, then we drove down to Nuremberg and somewhere else and now we’re in Switzerland!” Jessica tells me excitedly. “I think today we’re going to drive to Italy.”

The pair are taking a well-deserved break as they celebrate the release of their debut album, Some Kind Of Blue, and are enjoying the freedom of living without a schedule.

“We’re just so unplanned, so every day we’re like ‘where should we go today?’ It’s been awesome.”

Though writing songs is one of the most important things in her life “so far”, Jessica’s greatest love is film. Asked who were her main influences, rather than songwriters or musicians she nominated directors David Lynch and Jean-Luc Goddard.

Visits to the cinema are "theatrical and dramatic experiences", and her lifelong dream is to follow in the footsteps of one of NOIRE’s other inspirations, Australian singer/songwriter and composer Nick Cave, and write film scores.

She and Billy are currently working on music for a filmmaker friend but Jessica’s “absolute goal” is to create music for Lynch, Godard, Sofia Coppola and Wim Wenders. Their influence is clear in deeply atmospheric NOIRE tracks like Real Cool and He’s My Baby.

 “I think with our music it’s about creating an atmosphere more than what’s being said. When I’m writing I always think about visually, ‘How would this sound?’ Movies are really good in that way.”

While this European trip and the impending release of the debut album is exciting, the past two years have been tough for NOIRE.

After moving to Sydney from Gympie in regional Queensland five years ago, the pair were soon profiled on triple j unearthed but found it difficult to sustain a music career. “We released an EP but weren’t really getting anywhere. We were just working [in other jobs] and Sydney’s so expensive. Then we’d have shows on the weekend.”

Unable to afford to focus on their music and support themselves in Sydney, Jessica confesses that the band became disillusioned with the life of a city-based artist.

“You know, time just goes by so quickly and you realise ‘Oh my god, I’ve been in Sydney for so long and I haven’t really done that much yet, I haven’t made as much music as I wanted to.’ There was a lot of indecision and not feeling productive. It makes you feel depressed all the time.”

It soon became clear that if NOIRE were to survive and thrive, there was only one thing to do. Says Jessica, “Once we’d made that decision it was fairly quick.”

She and Billy quit their day jobs and moved out of their house in Surry Hills to a farm in Queensland near where they both grew up. Stepping away from the stress and the distractions of the city they were soon able to get back to making music.

“It was a really good decision for us,” Jessica asserts. “We just went away for two months and decided to write an album. We were like, ‘we just need to get a full body of work together’.”

That body of work became Some Kind Of Blue, released last Friday. After putting the creation of the album aside for so long the pair felt a need to complete the work as quickly as possible and exorcise their city demons.

Taking a cue from Nick Cave, Jessica and Billy treated the creation of the album like a full-time job. Setting a strict timetable forced them to spend time on the album each day in an effort to put their difficult time in Sydney behind them as quickly as possible and produce their first major work.

“It’s just amazing to have it finally come out. We were more concerned about getting it done, rather than the end product, I think. We just needed to get something finished so we can move on.”

The album’s title perfectly captures both the struggles of the past and the musical influences captured within.

“We went through a really rough couple of years and I thought writing this would kind of focus on what happened but it ended up not even dealing with what was making us so sad,” Jessica explains. “We had this song called Some Kind Of Blue and it was referencing that Miles Davis album [Kind Of Blue]. And the lyric was ‘I’m all Miles Davis in some kind of blue’ and I really just loved those words.”

As is often the case, Some Kind Of Blue didn’t turn out exactly as expected but it still managed to have the desired effect.

“It was meant to be about a darker time and I think, even though we didn’t end up dealing with it, it was like the healing of it. [The album] turned out a lot more happy and positive than I thought it would,” she says while laughing.

The pair now feel far more comfortable with their abilities and the possibilities for the future, having proven to themselves that they can create music they believe in when they set their minds to it. And Some Kind Of Blue is only the beginning.

“I think we’ve still got a lot to write and I would like to have another album out in maybe six months, that’d be amazing. Whether that happens or not, I think it’s a lot easier now that we’ve gotten over that first hurdle. I feel a bit more confident in writing songs now as well and I feel a bit better that I’ve been able to produce something. It has gotten a lot easier to keep writing.”

Some Kind of Blue is out now. Follow NOIRE on Facebook and Instagram