If the Australian music industry is not exactly female-friendly today, when Chrissy Amphlett began it was quite deliberately hostile and patronising.
That was certainly the case if you didn’t play the compliant girl, the playfully sexy tease or the coolly distant older sister type. Amphlett was none of those: on stage and on record she was volatile, aggressively sexual and never the victim. Those were perfectly normal aspects of rebellious male stars but not for women.
In a country where record companies were all but 100 per cent male, tour managers and roadies were men, radio hosts and journalists were pretty much bloke central, people knew how the world worked.
It’s not that other female singers weren’t strong or that there weren’t other women fronting bands – the likes of Wendy Stapleton and Renee Geyer were out there doing that. But Amphlett was dangerous and fearless and confounding because she didn’t follow the rules.
Of course, she was beset by doubts, like anyone, had more than enough demons and later revealed how much it took out of her to put on that front night after night.
But in the big beer barns and the testosterone-fuelled venues where sexism was a given and aggression never too far away, she stared down the blokes, shut them up and then fired them up anew, making them clamour for the front positions as they mixed up fear and attraction, admiration and confusion.
Would we have had performers like Suze DeMarchi of Baby Animals and Adalita, Sarah McLeod and Super Wild Horses without Chrissy Amphlett Yes, probably. Eventually.
But without her smashing down of walls which looked unbreakable until she marched through them, it would have been much tougher.
Chrissy Amphlett turned the male-dominated world of rock on its head by being scarier than her male counterparts.
It’s worth noting that while several Australian female artists have thrown themselves at the US market in the past decade, they’ve failed to make a serious dent.
But the Divinyls’ I Touch Myself can still be heard on American radio – and in the imaginations of men and women who were seduced, aroused or horrified by that song’s brazenness. Chrissy Amphlett would have liked that result.
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– Sydney Morning Herald
