Renee Geyer - Hard woman / Tough life

By TIM WATKIN

When Renee Geyer sings, her voice is a mighty wind. So when she speaks it's surprising to hear an unlikely, husky squeak. Her voice, reflecting much of her character and life, is both potent and contradictory. You remember Renee. She sang herself up the charts in the 70s and early 80s with hits such as It's a Man's Man's World and Say I Love You.

What you might not know is that Geyer is an Australian Jewish woman who sings like a black soul diva. She was an attention-seeking rebel who nervously hid her face on stage. She became a celebrated sex siren while she was still a virgin.

That Geyer voice is tossing around these conflicting details of her life now because her autobiography, Confessions of a Difficult Woman, is coming out in New Zealand after selling 10,000 copies in Australia.

It is a thin book, written over coffee and chat sessions between the 46-year-old Geyer and journalist friend Ed Nimmervoll.

"The only way I thought that I could get away with this and not be slaughtered by critics was to write it as a conversation," Geyer says. "People who know me say the most endearing thing about the book is that it's like having Renee in the room and chatting to her."

Geyer was right not to try the literary route — there is no great insight or word-use here (indeed, she's in "starsville" when she's famous and "solosville" when she's single, and when someone dies they're "deadskie").

It's a simple array of snippets and once-over anecdotes. But there is frankness, a gracious acceptance of life's highs and lows and — if celebrities having sex and taking drugs still shocks you — the scent of scandal. "I just wanted to be really blatant about drugs and sex," Geyer explains.

So there are the stripped-bare stories of three near-fatal drug overdoses, six abortions and a collection of short-lived relationships.

"I've died three times," she writes. "Overdosed ... heart stopped beating ... blue in the face for 20 minutes ... had to be revived. That kind of dead."

Of the abortions, she says she was unlucky, with three of the pregnancies happening while she was using contraception.

"At the times I got pregnant I was not responsible enough to have a child. I regretted it every time I've had to do it, but I have no qualms about doing it."

What's refreshing about Geyer's approach is that she neither tries to glamourise her life of celebrity, sex and drugs, nor does she make hand-wringing apologies for her adult choices, seeking sympathy for having "survived" fame and privilege.

"It's not told like a heroic life, like I blew it but I'm good now, which I think is a bore. The book just tells the facts. If the book comes across that I'm a tragic old fart, then tell people that. Let that be the story. Let people read it and find out for themselves. But don't ask me to justify how I am.

"I'm not asking to be redeemed. I'm a hopeless nothing, but a very interesting hopeless nothing, I think."

Geyer insists there's plenty of humour in the book and her life, and there is. But there's also a tenor of tragedy throughout. The subtext of the autobiography seems to be Geyer saying, "It's been tough but it's been mine and I wouldn't change a thing."

At the outset we are told that her father, an unbending Hungarian, said when Renee was born, "Oh, it's only a girl." In reaction to a strict upbringing, she sought her independence and identity through that voice.

"I impress people with my voice," she writes. "There's never been a time that I haven't and that's the truth. I always felt like someone who has the Hope Diamond but has no idea how it got there."

Her parents had always called her ubermutig ("it sort of means overexcited, or acting up," in German). But when she first used that voice in bands, at age 16, she became terrified and turned her back on the audience.

"I loved the music and that's what put me on the stage, but the bits between were always very uncomfortable because I was a young teenage girl growing into womanhood in front of people ogling me on stage.

"That's full of contradiction. You want to be there, but you don't want to be there. You want them to look at you, but you don't want them to look at you."

She was still a teenager when her looks and soulful sound won her fame and a reputation as a vamp. But she was 20 before she first had sex.

The next couple of decades saw a growing list of lovers, but she says she was never quite comfortable with her wild woman image and has left much of it behind.

"I'm actually a very middle-class Jewish girl inside. I was always classed as raunchy so I went 'all right then, I'm raunchy.' I just went along with it."

She just went along with the drugs as well. "My reason was almost always to unwind. Fortunately, I've found other ways to do that."

Addiction was waiting, ready to pounce, but her voice came to her rescue. "My work ethic and ego saved me because I knew the one thing I could do better than most people was sing, and you can't sing that well on drugs."

But that voice, ironically, also undermined the very career it had crafted and saved. Her Moving Along album in 1977, recorded in Los Angeles with much of Stevie Wonder's backing band, was initially embraced by black radio in the United States under the misapprehension that she was black. Against studio advice, Geyer insisted that her face be on the album cover. The white woman was dropped off the playlists.

"My sound caused a lot of confusion. Black people were hailing it, but being white got in the way. And white people simply didn't know what to do with me because I sounded too black," she writes.

"I have always done my best to sabotage myself," she adds in person. "Not wittingly. But when the administrative forces get involved in the music, I've always rebelled. I regret it. But I can't change it."

As the song Paul Kelly wrote for her attests, she is a Difficult Woman, often described by a list of words beginning with B: bold, brassy, big and beautiful.

Whatever the reason, she has never achieved the commercial success in America that she dreamed of and the hits have dried up. Does she feel that she's had her day?

"I've never felt like that. I wouldn't keep coming back and doing it if I did. You know, when the musicians stop wanting to play with me and the music's sounding a bit naff, that's when I'll stop.

"I have to explain to you that I'm every bit as big as I could ever have wanted to be among my peers. I've worked with people from Sting to Buddy Guy to Jackson Browne to Bonnie Riatt. I've worked with amazing people who think I'm one of the best singers on the planet. To me, I think I've done pretty good."

Extend that working list to Chaka Khan, Joe Cocker and Tony Joe White and you realise that voice has impressed some of the best. And she's still going, with her 19th album coming out next year.

She laughs that when she turns 50 she will qualify for living legend status and a Tom Jones-like career rebirth.

"As long as I'm making records I'm in the game ... All I have to do is not cark it."