Category: Entertainment

“I never dreamed of being a pop star. I wanted to be singing on stage and playing piano. I never thought I’d be writing songs. But once things got under way all these things unfolded.”

Musician Judith Durham, who died in Melbourne on 5 August aged 79 from the chronic lung disease bronchiectasis, was always the last person to acknowledge the effect she had as a pioneering woman in Australian music.

Born Judith Mavis Cock in Essendon in 1943, she adopted her mother’s maiden name to perform as a jazz singer aged 18.

However it was a young Melbourne folk/pop band run by advertising agency workmate Athol Guy that would change her life, and the history of Australian music.

Two years after she’d joined The Seekers as a singer, Durham found herself on what was planned to be a 10-week trip to the UK by boat (they were the onboard entertainment). The trip lasted several years.

Their easy-listening sound soon charmed the Brits – drawn to Durham’s pure vocals and diction – and Dusty Springfield’s brother Tom offered to write a song for them. That track, I’ll Never Find Another You, hit No 1 in the UK in 1964. It was No 1 back home and reached No.4 in the US.

A steady stream of global hits followed – The Carnival Is Over, A World of Our Own and Georgie Girl – all written by Springfield, the latter peaking at No.2 in the US.

Journalist Lillian Roxon summed up the band in 1969 saying “If there hadn’t been The Seekers some shrewd manager would have invented them. One cuddly girl-next-door type and three sober cats who looked like bank tellers.”

Their achievements were remarkable – playing with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in London and being welcomed home with a show at Melbourne’s Sidney Myer Music Bowl in 1967 watched by a record-breaking 200,000 fans. They were the first Australian band to sell over a million records.

“When I began I don’t think it was even called a music industry,” Durham said in 2019. “It was just you sang and played a few songs.”

However four years after the Seekers’ breakthrough, Durham told her bandmates she was leaving for a solo career.

That fierce determination to do things her own way – as politely as possible – was a Judith Durham trademark.

She called The Seekers her brothers and knew how lucky she was they protected her and was proud they remained friends – working together on the anthemic 1997 hit I Am Australian.

Time had washed away any bitterness – the band had replaced Durham multiple times but the chemistry was never the same.

She would return to touring with The Seekers several times, usually to mark career milestones. In 2013, shortly after coming off stage in Melbourne on a Seekers reunion tour, Durham suffered a brain haemorrhage.

When it took her 15 minutes to write “soya milk” when requesting meals in hospital soon after the medical episode she realized she had a problem – treating it as another challenge in a life that survived a major car accident in 1990 and the death of beloved husband Ron Edgeworth in 1994.

She had to learn to read and write again – including music – and how to play keyboards again. That trademark voice was not damaged and a year after the brain haemorrhage she was back on stage, fulfilling her commitments in Australia and the UK – her unfinished business giving her motivation in her recovery.

Durham shared a specialist – Prof John Olver – with Countdown host and Australian music industry icon Ian Molly Meldrum, who had fallen off his roof and suffered severe brain injuries in 2010.

Durham had called Meldrum after he came out of a coma; after her stint in hospital the pair became phone pals.

“She really was the loveliest person you could ever meet,” Meldrum said.

“There’s a reason why you never heard a single bad word about her. And her comeback from her after the haemorrhage was truly remarkable.

“It really takes a lot of work and discipline to recover after a brain injury, but Judith was always very determined. And always so modest about her talent and success. ”

Jimmy Barnes once tracked Durham down because she’d met one of his heroes – Keith Moon of The Who.

Olivia Newton-John saw The Seekers playing at her school in the early days and was inspired by how she and Helen Reddy cracked the international market, noting “She was one of the first Aussie girls to make it overseas”.

Paul Kelly once asked Durham to come to his house to sing the Seekers’ Morningtown Ride for his daughters in their bedroom – it was the tune they’d sing as they were going to sleep as children.

“The songs become part of people’s lives,” Durham said of the request.

She could not believe Elton John once compared her to Karen Carpenter as having the “purest voice in popular music”, saying: “It’s mind-boggling. I’m in awe of all this. I really do find it very, very hard to think that people put me up at that level.”

Durham’s solo career, alongside that of The Seekers, was impeccably curated on CD and DVD – her longtime friend and manager Graham Simpson knowing the importance of protecting the legacy.

“It’s wonderful having all this stuff captured. Otherwise it’s all gone up in smoke,” she said.

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Durham got closure after a final solo tour of New Zealand in May 2016, happy the last time she’d perform on stage was up to her high standards. She knew that further touring could risk another brain haemorrhage.

She had battled the lung condition bronchiectasis since she was a child and it eventually curtailed her flying out of Melbourne, including to Brisbane in 2019 after she was inducted into the Honor Roll at the Australian Women in Music Awards.

Over the last few years, Durham had been composing music and contemplated writing her memoirs. She’d occasionally consult a book on her life by Ella Simpson wrote in 2004 to remember moments that had become hazy.

Durham had made peace with her place in an industry and when she spoke of death in 2019 it was never morbid.

“I look at death very realistically. We all should live our lives like we don’t have much time left. For me to live long enough to see how I’ve been a thread through people’s lives is wonderful.”

The musician John Legend said he was “hesitant” to publicly share images of his late baby son, Jack, who was stillborn two years ago.

The black and white photographs, which were posted on Instagram shortly after Legend and his wife, the model Chrissy Teigen, had suffered the stillbirth of their third child, were a way to reach other bereaved parents affected by this kind of sudden loss.

“I was hesitant to share it,” he explains in a BBC Radio 4 interview, “but I think Chrissy was really right. Way more people than anybody realizes go through this and they think they are alone.

“It was a really powerful, wise decision by Chrissy to share it.”

Legend says that some of the songs he has written since are about coping with loss and grief, “when you feel broken”, adding: “There’s no real comfort and you’re always going to feel that loss. It kind of spreads over time, so it doesn’t feel as heavy, but you’ll never forget it.”

Legend, who is presenter Lauren Laverne’s guest on Desert Island Discs on Sunday morning, might otherwise appear to have led a charmed life. At the age of 43, he is a rare recipient of not only two Emmy and 12 Grammy awards, but also an Oscar, as well as a Tony for his work on Broadway, an achievement that gives him the right to the prestigious acronym EGOT.

Musically talented from the age of four, when he began piano lessons in his hometown of Springfield, Ohio, Legend was also a gifted scholar who turned down a place at Harvard at 16 to become a student at the University of Pennsylvania, before then briefly becoming a high-flying management consultant, immediately earning more than his father’s salary.

His switch back to music soon resulted in a stellar solo career, following early work with Kanye West. In 2021, he was invited to play at the inauguration of Joe Biden.

But Legend, who was born John Stephens to working-class parents, tells Laverne his life has not been without troubles. Not only did he and Teigen lose a baby, he was also estranged from his mother, Phyllis, in his teens. The leader of the local church choir, she had become deeply depressed after the death of her own mother and descended into mental ill health and drug abuse.

“She fell out of our lives for about a decade. It was my entire adolescence into my early adulthood,” says Legend. A seamstress as well as a singer, his mother had home-schooled the young Legend and prioritized his religious education.

“It’s still emotional when I talk to my mother about it, because she feels such regret for being gone all that time,” the singer admits, remembering how hard it was for his siblings and his factory worker father, Ronald, while she was absent .

“During that decade she was gone from our lives. We had to figure things out.”

Legend also explains his “quite presumptuous” invented stage name. When friends started to call him “legend” because they felt his voice was channeling the great soul singers, I decided to run with it.

“You know what? Who knows what’s going to happen with my career but I’m going into it with the faith in myself and the belief in myself that it is going to work out,” he said. “And I’m going to try to live up to this name.”

Yot would be an understatement to bestow the cliche “long-awaited” upon King Stingray’s self-titled debut album. The Yirrkala band from north-east Arnhem Land have teased us with five singles. The first of them, Hey Wanhaka – which means “what’s happening?” – was released in late 2020; Get Me Out, Milkumana, Camp Dog and Let’s Go have all followed.

Adding to the considerable hype are the band’s bloodlines: the singer, Yirrnga Yunupingu, is the nephew of the Yothu Yindi leader, Dr M Yunupingu, while the guitarist, Roy Kellaway, is the son of the same band’s bass player, Stuart. Both also play in Yothu Yindi themselves.

The aforementioned five singles make up a full half of this album’s 10 tracks, with Get Me Out and Milkumana both nominated for Apra awards as song of the year. They have been all over the airwaves – and deservedly so. The fact that their self-described Yolngu surf-rock will already be familiar to many listeners in no way detracts from this sparkling record.

Indeed, it’s great to have them together in one place, fleshed out by five more songs that sit well alongside one another. Most bands would be proud to have a collection like this on a greatest hits album. But there’s no loss of continuity or context, with a natural ebb and flow reflecting this band’s relatively short existence.

It also highlights their deep roots. Yunupingu and Kellaway, brothers by adopted kinship, have known each other since childhood and play like it. They make everything sound easy – listening to the instantly appealing hook of Lupa, the opening track, and it’s hard to believe it hasn’t been a single, too. (It was a B-side to the limited seven-inch of Hey Wanhaka.)

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The emphasis is on Yolngu pride and uptempo, joyful celebration. Get Me Out, a song about getting out of the city and back to country, has an irresistible driving momentum. Where the Warumpi Band’s My Island Home ached with homesickness, Get Me Out captures the moment of “feeling the cool breeze on your face again” and the warm embrace of family.

Like Yothu Yindi, they can construct a perfect dance groove – Milkumana, which contains the nimblest of funk bass runs, could have appeared on Tribal Voice – and like the Warumpi Band, they can rock hard when they want to: Raypirri verges on heavy metal but the energy is all positive, lifted up by Yunupingu’s ecstatic vocals.

Sweet Arnhem Land, one of the new tracks here, is another highlight. It’s a perfect fusion of rock and manikay (traditional song), Dimathaya Burarrawanga’s shuddering yidaki playing adding weight to a basic four-on-the-floor beat. Life Goes On is an acoustic gem with beautiful choral harmonies, closer in sound to Elcho Island’s brilliant Saltwater Band than Yothu Yindi.

Regardless of their family connections, the one thing King Stingray doesn’t sound like is a throwback. This is not a revival act. Everything here sounds contemporary, by a band living their own dream, radiating with happiness and infectious enthusiasm. It’s happening.