KEY POINTS:
Annie Crummer has exquisite hands. Delicate nails, slender fingers, smooth and brown and wrinkle-free. They're tiny, but not so small as to be pudgily childlike, or to make her arms look foolishly long. Crummer loves them. When she's feeling overwhelmed by divadom, she takes comfort in gazing at her nails, simple, unpainted. "They're an extension of my voice", she says, "always helping me tell the story."
This is a rare show of vanity from the Good Fairy of New Zealand music, the sweet, smiling woman whose girlish-raucous voice has echoed around the nation for more than 20 years. A few years ago, Crummer became sick of the sound of her own voice and took a year off, during which she trained as a nail technician. She didn't really want to specialise in acrylics and French manicures forever, of course - it was just something creative to do that didn't involve everyone looking at her.
She's a fascinating woman; the superstar voice who would be just as happy being a backing singer - or a manicurist - for the rest of her days, if only people would stop offering her fabulous gigs.
In October, she will hit the Auckland stage as the star of an international hit musical based on the music of 80s supergroup Queen, We Will Rock You. Her character, Killer Queen, is not a very nice person. "She's a total bitch, a witch, a cow, a bi-atch, any way you want to say it, she's awful", says Crummer, sitting in a Grey Lynn cafe, twirling her long hair between her fingers and tucking the twist, black and glossy, behind one shoulder. "I sort of turn into her when I put the costume on, I acquire layers of nastiness. It's quite good fun."
Annie Crummer is not a bitch at all. At 41, she is delightful. She's so agreeable that an entire newspaper profile once focused on the writers efforts to get her to say something nasty, or even slightly edgy. He failed. But I've succeeded; today she's happy to spit vitriol, even if only about a fictional character. "I can't stand her, I hate her. I said no when they asked me to do the role. I just didn't want to go there again."
Go where? Back to the moment on stage during the musicals Melbourne production in late 2003 when, suddenly, Crummer's voice cracked. It was more of a ping than a crack - a burst capillary on her vocal chords. The voice just went. "I knew it was going to happen; I'm actually a really small singer, but this character is up there all the time; every song is belted out, like a friggin Vegas number. I managed to bullshit the audition, but when it came down to eight shows a week, it was inevitable. Thank God I do know how to bullshit like crazy, to be able to swing a bearable gig." She stayed on stage and kept singing the song, then rushed off stage to switch with her understudy, who came on and did the rest of the show. After several weeks, Crummer's voice came back to normal, but she was perennially nervous about it going again, and quite relieved when the show's run ended in 2005.
We Will Rock You, written by British comedian Ben Elton with the collaboration of former Queen musicians Brian May and Roger Turner, had its debut in the West End in 2002, using Queen songs to tell an imaginary story of a dystopian future where the kids aren't allowed to rock. Everyone has to listen to the same songs, downloaded for them by an evil corporation, and the world is ruled by Killer Queen, a despot in skintight leather pants.
When the producers of the upcoming New Zealand version approached Crummer earlier this year asking her to reprise the role, which she had also performed in Sydney, Perth and Japan, she turned them down without hesitation. "It took me two years [after damaging her voice] to get to a point where I could do what I thought was a passable job as Killer Queen. I'm a generous performer, but eight shows a week, and blowing the voice; I knew I had to re-learn how to take care of myself."
After rejecting the offer, Crummer was hanging out in Auckland and happened one night to attend a gig in Auckland by a friend, singer Georgia Duder. She recommended a vocal coach, Cheryl McLeay, who specialises in developing vocal muscles as the foundation of good technique.
"She's taught me to get rid of the fear", Crummer says. "I had to learn to stop my mind messing with me, to stop the voice in my head saying, 'You cant sing, really.'" McLeay was briskly dismissive of Crummer's fears and spent several weeks teaching the biomechanics of song. "I'd never really known why I could sing - it just happened but now I've learnt to work out how I produce the sound", Crummer says. "So in the end I thought 'You know what? Don't make it bigger than it is. You can do this. Your mind has to be steel.'"
So the Annie Crummer appearing on stage at the Civic Theatre from October 26 is a new woman, for the first time truly confident about her own ability. It turns out nobody else ever had any doubt. That audition she was able to "bullshit" back in 2003 was actually a triumph - so good that Roger Turner and Brian May invited her back to Britain to record one of the musicals key numbers for a We Will Rock You album. Working in Taylor's Surrey studio, a 400-year-old mill, was one of the most wonderful days of her life, says Crummer - although she was affecting nonchalance to keep the nerves under control long enough to sing Another One Bites The Dust over the top of Queen's original multi-track instrumentals. "I had Freddie Mercury's voice in my ears, singing over the top of him. Babe, I was imploding inside." Crummer grabs my hand from my lap, squeezing it, leaning forward. "I just couldn't believe I was there, with them."
Listening to the track, which was released as part of a UK cast recording of the musical, it's hard to hear the slightest trace of nervousness in Crummer's voice. She is sexy and breathy, growly and nasty.
But even getting to that 2003 audition was a struggle for Crummer. She had spent the previous nine months in a gruelling audition process for the Australian production of The Lion King, "along with every other Polynesian in the southern hemisphere" and had not got the role she wanted - but the process had made her audition-fit, as she describes it, in voice and mind.
Today, Crummer goes quite unnoticed as she eats eggs benedict in the busy cafe, which is strange considering she is one of this country's best-known names. "Ah, Annie Crummer", says nearly everyone whom I ask about her, "she was the voice of the 80s". On a blustery North Shore afternoon at our photo-shoot, makeup artist Lisa Matson and Crummer are squealing with laughter, reminiscing about the 90s starlets they have both worked with. The two women have been shopping to choose outfits for the shoot - glamorous long skirts, silk jackets, designer dresses - but Crummer can't wait to put on one of her own T-shirts and a pair of cargo pants for a more casual shot. She's clearly uncomfortable with being being the centre of attention - she banters with photographer Kenny Rodger, but as soon as he starts clicking, Crummer's huge natural smile is replaced with a slightly hunted look. Later, back at the office, I look up some other photographs of Crummer, and find the same, slightly pained expression, in every shot - so strange considering how genuinely warm she is in reality.
The only pictures in which she seems relaxed are on-stage shots, with a microphone in hand. One shot, where she is Killer Queen, she is clad in tight leather pants, a barely-there waistcoat and is belting forth one of her songs, surrounded by cavorting underlings. She looks totally transformed - the essence of confidence. "I have to get totally outside myself to play that role, Crummer says. On the day of the show, I'll spend hours and hours preparing myself, putting on the layers of aggression and attitude. I can't talk to my family, I just have to shut myself off from everyone so I can do it."
If you listen carefully, Crummer's voice is part of New Zealand's national soundtrack. At a recent rugby test, her familiar octave-straddling groove blasts over the crowd after one of the All Blacks tries, as half the audience sings along. The song is For Today by the Netherworld Dancing Toys, a bunch of Dunedin boys who invited Crummer, then 18, to sing as a guest vocalist in 1985.
The song shot to number one and shot the shy teenager to fame; such a mature sound, and so confidently delivered, from such a diffident young woman, was extraordinary.
Auckland-born Crummer had been singing since early childhood - her father was the 1950s leader of Willie Crummer and the Royal Rarotongans, and the seven Crummer children's lives were dominated by the sound of the big crooners; Roy Orbison, Elvis, the Everly Brothers.
Her father never pushed the young Annie into performance, but encouraged her to enter talent quests, packing her off to Manukau each Sunday on the bus. "I'd usually win, singing country songs or things I'd heard Dad performing. I remember at 12, I sang Listen to the Music by the Doobie Brothers, and for the first time, I heard a woman's voice coming out of my own mouth. It was unbelievable; I guess you could say I fell in love with the sound. I couldn't hear it enough, it just amazed me that I was capable of making a sound that was cool. From then on, I couldn't stop singing."
The siren call was so seductive that Crummer gave up school. "One day I decided I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to perform. So I stayed at home on the sofa and watched the soap operas and thank goodness I did." Lolling on the couch, she saw an advertisement for the television talent show Opportunity Knocks, which she won. The song she performed, Once or Twice, went to number 16 on the local charts. She was still only 16, but ever since Crummer has been in demand.
In 1986 she formed an all-girl band, When the Cat's Away, with three other singers: Margaret Urlich, Debbie Harwood and Kim Willoughby, and went solo in 1992 with her first album, Language. 1996 brought a second album, Seventh Wave, mixed at Princes Paisley Park studios and co-written with her old friend Barbara Griffin, now a Sydney-based producer and songwriter with Sony.
The pair had met in Wellington in the late 1980s, when Griffin's band The Holidaymakers were on top of the singles charts with Sweet Lovers, and they planned to collaborate on Crummer's second album. The problem was they couldn't find any decent songs among the hundreds record label Warner Music had sent Crummer to choose from.
"Annie said, 'Boo, help me, I've got all these songs and they're all shit, they all suck, can you help me reharmonise and coolify them a bit?'" Griffin recalls. "So we listened to them and went 'geez, these really do suck, we could write something better. So we did.'"
Neither woman had written songs before, but it came naturally; Crummer would drum up a tempo with her fingertips, Griffin would begin a melody on the keyboards, a piano or acoustic guitar sound, then the loop would emerge, then the bass line, then gibberish words, which eventually evolved into lyrics. "Annie's just into the flow of music, she gets it at a deep level", says Griffin, now a well-regarded vocal coach to top musicians. "Some people are musicians, some are singers, but Annie can dissect a chord to its individual components and sing exactly which note of the chord needs to change."
Crummer doesnt know any other way to work. "I don't really read the music or remember the lyrics", she says, describing how she learns her parts for musical roles. "When I have to learn lines for the spoken part of a performance, I learn them just as I learn a song - I learn the sound, rather than remembering individual sentences or words. I sort of absorb the ups and downs, the cadences, and then I bring them out again. It's very difficult to explain."
She toured with Paul McCartney, Ray Charles, kd lang, Michael Jackson and Sting and in 1996 Crummer joined Dave Dobbyn and Tim Finn on the orchestral project EnzSO, in which classical and contemporary musicians collaborated on old Split Enz numbers.
In 1998 Crummer starred in the Australian production of Rent, the emotional zeitgeist musical about young performers in the post-Aids world. It was a revelation. "Being part of an ensemble was the most wonderful thing I could have done. Rent is an incredibly bonding production to work on - we were all living through what we were portraying on stage; this world of sex and poverty and drugs and innocence and danger." "Crummer was the wise mother of the Rent crowd", says Australian singer Miguel Ayesa, who starred alongside her and went on to be third in 2005s Rock Star: INXS reality programme. "During Rent I had some pretty down times, worrying about my career like all of us and Annie was this constant voice of reassurance. She's such a funny person, she could do stand-up as a career if she chose but she's incredibly compassionate", says Ayesa, who will co-star in We Will Rock You as Galileo, the boy who saves the world from musical mundanity. "We're all touring together to Seoul and Singapore and Hong Kong after Auckland; working on a big show like this is always exciting, but working with Annie makes it safe and warm as well."
By the end of the Rent run, though, Crummer was exhausted and tired of hearing herself. "I came back to New Zealand and took a year off music. Best thing that could have happened."
As well as the nail technician's course, Crummer enrolled to study Cook Island Maori. "I've remembered only a couple of things - I can say and sing the Lord's Prayer and I can say grace", she says. "I can't wait to spend a few months in Raro - totally banning speaking English so I'm forced to get the reo right." That's the other part of her; the half-Rarotongan, half-Tahitian girl who never totally understood her Polynesian heritage until, at 21, she visited the Cook Islands for the first time. As soon as I stepped off the plane in Rarotonga I could feel it. I understood myself, all of a sudden. I was at home; the flowers, the people's faces, the warmth that just envelops you, hugs you, all the time.
We're still in the cafe, and she's hugging herself, eyes shut, beaming. "I own a piece of land there, and my sister lives at Muri Beach and I know that's where I'll go when I'm older".
I get the feeling she wouldn't mind being there right now, running the family's Muri Beach information kiosk. For Crummer, Rarotonga is a promise as well as an explanation of herself. "It's very nice knowing I'll never go to a rest home; I'll just go and live with my family", she says. "It's where I belong, you know?"
Crummer's apparent discomfort with fame, says Griffin, is intrinsic in many New Zealand performers of her vintage. "If somebody says 'Hey Annie, I like that song', the expected response for a New Zealand performer is 'Oh, nah, its stink'. In Australia, you can say 'Oh, do you think so? I'm not quite happy with it, still working on it, but thank you anyway'. It's only in the United States where you can say 'Why thank you', and leave it at that.
In our part of the world, and in the era that produced Annie, it's just not the done thing at all to even appear to respond to praise or fame."
Griffin sees Crummer's Polynesian heritage as adding even deeper layers of diffidence - "ripe for psychoanalysis", she says. "She's got nothing to prove, even though she's never been a massive-name star in her own right. When she came along and remember, this is pre-R'n'B, pre-Beyonce, she was so fresh, so unusual. There's never been any artifice about Annie, but her warmth has always come through, and that's why her popularity is so enduring."
Griffin is working with Crummer on her upcoming new EP and album, both including more original songs. "Annie's sound is quite hard to define because she's so diverse. It floats between Pacific/world music towards white-girl pop at times", Griffin says, adding the album will be introduce a more orchestral, epic sound.
Crummer is able to define her sound more clearly by what she's not than what she is. "The scene has moved on from me; I'm not doing those homie beats that the younger Polynesian women are doing, I'm not particularly hip. But I've learnt, partly through working with my voice coach, that whatever my sound is, is enough. I've been so lucky, I've got friends who have spent their whole careers gigging, struggling from one job to the next. Losing my voice was the greatest thing that could have ever happened to me - I could have given into it, gone with it and given up altogether, but I'm so glad I didn't. I feel new again."
The problem with being famous your entire adult life is that old remarks come back to taunt you. Crummer once said that by 30 she'd like to have had children, lived in Spain and own her own home; be settled down, in other words. At 41, none of it has come true - she has the land in Rarotonga but for Crummer, home is wherever she lays her voice, and family is her squads of adoring nieces and nephews, brothers and sisters, a million cousins. "I think my children will find me", she says at one point. It's the sort of remark that could be heartbreaking if delivered wistfully, but Crummer just says it straight, with a firm belief that whatever happens will be right.
"From my mum's womb, music is all I've ever known and done. From time to time I get over myself musically, and I have to do something else", Crummer says. "But I always come back. It's who I am. I used to worry so much about everything, but I've learnt two very powerful little words in the last few years: Ah well. That sums me up now. I've come to see that great things always come from mishaps. And if it all goes wrong, ah well."
