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Canberra Today 15°/20° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

In the company of the star with soul

WHEN you sit down with singer Christine Anu, the conversation can go anywhere, and does. But she leaves you in no doubt that you’re talking to a star.

She’ll be here soon with her new show “Rewind”, dedicated to the great soul singer Aretha Franklin in her 70th year.

And though she has big shoes to fill, she is just the girl for the job.

“I knew I could sing when I was seven, the only question was how I was going to get into the music industry,” the multi-ARIA recipient tells me in a discussion interspersed with bursts of song that don’t faze patrons at Tosolini’s Civic café.

Though deeply influenced by her island origins, she’s glad she’s not, like her fellow-singer Deni Hines, the child of a famous parent.

“I knew I would arrive at my destiny,” she tells me. “I knew I would be a singer.”

Born in Cairns to a Torres Strait Islander mother from Saibai and a father from Mabuiag Islands, Anu says she had a religious upbringing involving music, such as Aretha.

Vocally self-taught, she also did martial arts from seven to 13 and values physicality.

“When your mind starts to dream, your body wants to follow,” Anu philosophises.

It was as a dancer that she first came to prominence, leaving home to study dance at the National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Association in Sydney. Dance taught her that “your body is your treatment, it tells the story”.

All the while she was listening to pop, jazz and soul, yet she “wanted to be unique”.

Anu’s singing career started as a back-up vocalist for songwriter Neil Murray’s group the Rainmakers. It was Murray who wrote, initially for the Warumpi Band, her trademark hit “My Island Home”, which was judged Song of the Year at the 1995 APRA awards and was the song she chose for the Sydney 2000 Olympics Closing Ceremony.

“It wasn’t so much about getting there, as staying there,” Anu says, so she diversified into acting, with screen roles in “Dating the Enemy”, Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge”, “The Matrix Reloaded” and in 2012, in the Australian sci-fi television series “Outland”.

On stage she took big roles in “The Little Shop of Horrors”, “Rent” and “The Sapphires”.

She relished playing her first non-singing stage role in 2011, in Jane Harrison’s play “Rainbow’s End”, but reports that it was a bit disappointing for her fans – “we’ve been waiting for you to burst into song”, they’d complain.

Anu has been reflecting on what happens to the human voice as you get older. Encouragingly, she has observed, Judith Durham is approaching 70 and she’s still going strong. And “Aretha’s still giving it her all… the important thing is the ability to communicate with your audience,” she says.

So what will we see when she does her Aretha songbook here?

See? Oscar-winning designer for “Priscilla Queen of the Desert”, Tim Chappel has made the costumes for her show.

She’ll be backed by two guitars, a rhythm section, keyboard, trumpet and Women of Soul – Miss Min and Evie J Willie – as the Franklinettes.

But it’s what we’ll hear that will hit home, with numbers such as “Respect”, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” and “Chain of Fools”. She’s kept Aretha’s arrangements, but adds: “This is my interpretation and I own it.”

“Rewind – The Aretha Franklin Songbook”, Canberra Southern Cross Club, dinner and show 6.30pm, show only 8.30pm, June 15. Bookings to 6283 7288.

PHOTO: Singer Christine Anu… “When your mind starts to dream, your body wants to follow.” Photo by Silas Brown

 

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Helen Musa

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