Paula From Tasmania

BY PAULA XIBERRAS

IT’S HAMILTON THE MUSICIAN!

I recently caught up with one of Australia’s stars in Hollywood, Nicholas Hamilton. Nicholas is best known for the two ‘IT’ movies. He’s also acted alongside such Hollywood stars as Nicole Kidman, Joseph Fiennes, Hugo Weaving and Jessica Chastain. As well as acting, Nicholas is a talented songwriter and musician and calls himself an actor-musician, saying each form of expression is equally important to him. Nicholas comes from a musical family with both his parents and his brother involved in music. Nicholas is back in Australia to visit his family after COVID’s exile and also take advantage of the thriving music and film business in Australia at the moment. His new single ‘In Line’ tells the story of his move to LA for an acting career as a ‘terrified’ eighteen year old, setting out alone. After a scary start, Nicholas has become independent and disciplined, the latter evidenced in his writing with staff writers in LA. Nicholas talks of the dystopian feeling of arriving back in Australia for his fourteen days of quarantine but speaks well of the hotel and the good food.

‘IN LINE’ IS OUT NOW.

WHAT’S UP WITH YOU’RE SO VAIN

Aussie band, songwriters and song interpreters Chocolate Starfish have a new single and new album out. I spoke to band member, vocalist Adam Thompson recently about the new single and album. The band’s interpretive talents turn to a re-creation of 90’s hit, 4 Non Blondes song ‘What’s Up’. It was in 1994 that Chocolate Starfish did a unique cover of another of their favourite songstresses, Carly Simon’s ‘You’re so Vain’. The band were living in LA in the 90’s when the song was released in Australia and played on MTV. Adam has been a big fan of Linda Perry from the 4 Non Blondes (so called because they didn’t fit the California blonde stereotype). Adam has long fantasised Chocolate Starfish singing with 4 Non Blondes. While the pandemic was frustrating in some aspects it did afford the band time to nurture their new songs and arrangements including ‘What’s Up’ says Adam.

BOTH ‘WHAT’S UP’ AND THE NEW ALBUM ‘BEAUTIFUL ADDICTION’ ARE OUT NOW.

CATHY’S SANITY, OR SHOULD THAT BE SANITISE, IN TIMES OF COVID

It’s been a while since I have called Cathy Kelly and not surprisingly, when I did make contact recently she is full of that same wit and humour. Cathy tells me the COVID experience has taught her some useful skills, in fact she’s been watching ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ with particular attention to the doctors’ hand washing routine, declaring that she could give them instructions on the proper way to sanitise!

I have missed Cathy’s quick wit and wry observances. Observances that make her a consecutive number one author in Ireland and around the world. While Cathy’s new novel ‘Other Women’ features women and fashion, Cathy herself is not a fashionista. This was proved recently she tells me, when she wore jeans and a jacket for her speech at a children’s charity event, where glamorous clothes were almost essential. Sometimes clothes in the novel are metaphors. For instance, the main character Sid, says Cathy, wears a ‘metaphorical armour of independence to protect her from the slings and arrows of past painful events’. Guarded against romance she is navigating what she tells herself, a relationship, she wants as a friendship, with a man luckless in romance. The other women in the story are Marin, happily married with two children but feeling low self- esteem, buoyed by filling up empty spaces in her life with clothes, then there is Bea, a single mum. We haven’t seen Cathy in Australia for a while but that might change soon. The last number of years she’s been raising her twin boys, but now the boys are preparing for college life, well-equipped by mum with the talents of ironing and cooking. Cathy may have been away from Australia for a time but she has kept up to date with Aussie authors, naming Kerry Greenwood’s ‘Miss Fisher’ and the novels of Jane Harper as favourites, as well as fellow Irish/Australian authors Berr Carroll and Monica McInerney.

NEW-REAL PLASTICITY

Sydney duo Plastic Face have a new single written, produced and mixed by the guys themselves. Called BACK2TOKYO, it’s described as Lynchian, a reference to Twin Peaks creator David Lynch, and indeed he would be proud of the video by Sean Donovan who has had a ten year career as a set decorator before moving on to his own films like Headless Chicken. The theme of the song is how we fall into our old, sometimes not so good, habits instead of moving forward and perhaps the perils of those old habits which might prove to be toxic. The video is set in a creepy house illuminated by lights and candles, with a witch doing card readings as a man lies tied to a bed, and then the final macabre image of the witch dragging something large into the backyard. The guys say the song’s video is up for interpretation. I recently spoke to one half of the duo, Will Coleman. The guys are inspired in their music by an eclectic mix, relationships, films, books and almost anything that can ‘spark’ a song. While a lot of material these days is formulaic, the guys, who live far apart, are originals who used the experience of COVID to send ideas back and forth. The fact that the duo maintain a sense of mystery and safety behind their masks, says Will, aligns with the benefit of masks used to combat COVID. In a time when masks have been used for protection as well as a feeling of safety, so too the duo says wearing a mask allows them a sense of safety and confidence.