Grief is good

By GRAHAM REID

Tina C wasn't always a superstar, she remembers her humble beginnings. It's hard to image just how humble when confronted by this confident, glamorous woman from Open Throat Holler near Nashville on her way to the TV2 International Laugh! Festival here with her show about 9/11.

And before anyone suggests singing country songs about that tragic event is somehow in questionable taste, Tina C needs to explain. For personal reasons she won't go into - although is prepared to describe in her show - she missed 9/11 and the subsequent outpourings of grief.

"So I had to jump-start to get into the whole process," she says in charming, coquettish southern drawl. "I was later diagnosed from GES, Grief Exclusion Syndrome, and the public grieving, like appearing on telethons with a lighted candle, I couldn't take part in.

"So I had to focus all my attention on writing songs and getting an album together, which I did in about four weeks. It was an intense period for me, but there were also other country singers putting out their albums, everybody was scrambling.

"Mine was a real considered response, there was a lot of knee-jerk stuff about at the time."

With her role models those country music greats Tammy, Dolly, Loretta, Patsy and Steppenwolf, her album 9/11:24/7 is an outpouring of compassion and features songs with titles such as Kleenex to the World, If These Walls Could Talk (They'd Be in Therapy) and Stranger on the Stairwell.

It touches deep emotions with the kind of taste only possible for someone in a white, body-hugging hot-pants suit dripping with rhinestones and gold-lacquered tin.

Tina C has come a long way from Nashville to stadiums across the world.

"I was born and raised with my 17 brothers and sisters. I married young - not someone in the family, a second cousin - and when the marriage folded I thought it was now or never.

"I was almost 15 and it was time to make a break. I had a kind of epiphany - you can look that up later - and got into my car and thought I'd drive until I was dead or got to Nashville. And 15 or 20 minutes later I got there and started becoming what I am today."

Initially life in the capital of country music was difficult - "I was down on my luck but not down on my knees" - and Tina C was exploited because she was naive.

"From the vantage point of wealth and privilege I can say it was a learning curve. They got me to sign a really bad contract and made me sing some real trashy songs and that album was called It Ain't Easy Being Easy.

"You can't find that now because I bought up all the residual stock.

"But that led me to being strong and putting all the money I got into releasing my own record called No Dick's As Hard as My Life. You draw people in with an upfront title."

That album featured her breakthrough smash hit Course I Want You For Your Body (I Got a Mind of My Own) and since then she has featured in numerous films and now has her own daytime television talk show: "It's called Trash with Tina and we're on four hours a day, five days a week and it's a quality show. We have various strategies to warm people up to talk, it tends to involve Temazepam and orange juice, but we won't go into that. But it relaxes them - and then we provoke them."

Her albums include the recent Complete and Utter Country but it is her 9/11 show which has brought her the most attention. It features emotionally moving songs like Kleenex to the World where she sings, "I bet you can't imagine the real pathos of life, so I wrote this song to ram this point across."

Tina C rams - with subtlety.

"I always say if a little bit of emotion is a good thing, then a whole lot of it is going to be a whole lot better."

And while she understands some feel 9/11 isn't an appropriate subject for emotion and is actually a political issue, she denies she is a political animal.

"I follow politics and occasionally would make a comment because I think a stadium is a pretty appropriate place to talk about these things in a non-glib or non-superficial way. But I'm not a political intellect, a political heavyweight, like Donald Rumsfeld. I'm just a girl singer, I just look pretty and sing songs.

"But 9/11 is just as fresh to me as the day it happened - which of course I don't remember."

Okay, you've got the joke by now: The imaginary Tina C is the alter-ego for quietly spoken Englishman Chris Green, a former music researcher, who can slip into character within a sentence.

And once he's there he can improvise as Tina.

The Twin Towers Tribute show - complete with a poster of Tina with her legs as the World Trade Centre and a plane flying towards her - has been mildly controversial and he has been surprised how many people aren't ready for the joke.

"A lot of the time it takes people ages to warm up to the irony. I did a TV gala thing in Australia and there was a guy heckling saying, 'Get lost, you American bitch'. That was a bizarre compliment.

"I've been aware for a long time that Tina pushes all the wrong buttons: drag, country music, Americans ... People don't like any of those things," he laughs.

Green says his comedic archetypes are Barry (Dame Edna) Humphries and Steve (Alan Partridge) Coogan and he has a roster of five characters, so he isn't a drag act but someone who works in character-based comedy.

He's also very funny, both as Tina and himself, can sing powerfully as Tina, and the Twin Towers show skewers the shallow and self-serving sentimentality the event engendered, especially among the rich and famous who publicly paraded their grief.

"I'm sorry that you're hurting," Tina C sings to those suffering in the Middle East, "but most of all I'm sorry that you're hurting me."

Tina C is a chintzy, slightly tacky but thoroughly believable creation from a man who has an ear for mimicking language.

He pulls out a spot-on Australian accent when telling of the perils of travelling with Tina C's clothes in a suitcase.

"I was invited to the Perth Festival two years and the customs guy pulled out fluorescent pink pants which matched the outfit and said, 'Why have you got these mate?'

"I said, 'Because they match the dress', which seemed perfectly logical to me."

* Tina C's Twin Towers Tribute, Wintergarden, Civic Theatre, Wednesday April 30 to Monday May 5, 7.30pm.