Broad Appeal Of Conway's Festival

The Age

Monday August 20, 2007

Craig Mathieson

DEBORAH Conway is not one for sitting still. On a comparatively mild Queensland afternoon, the singer-songwriter is in a minivan driving back to Brisbane from Gympie, where she and a group of fellow composers, including Hoodoo Guru Dave Faulkner and singer Kev Carmody, conducted the latest in a series of workshops for the Queensland Music Festival.

"I feel like an old hand at it now," Conway says. "I've gone from workshop virgin to workshop slut."

She is looking forward to the latest instalment of Broad, the touring festival of Australian female performers she put together in 2005.

"It's fantastic that we've been able to do it for the third year in a row," she says. "This is my dream turning into a reality. Broad has become a fixture on the Australian musical calendar."

Conway is the one constant on the Broad bill. She envisaged the touring show as a way of breaking down some contemporary music barriers. She always starts the selection process, for example, by choosing a country singer.

"The idea is to find people from as (many) different genres as possible. So much music is prescribed - radio formats are more and more restrictive in the format they focus on. If you go into a record store, everything is categorised. If you go to a live gig, the support act is just like the headline act that comes on after them.

"Everyone is fearful of bringing variety to music, so I want to fly in the face of that and have an R&B singer yodelling on a country piece or a rock'n'roll chick doing something avant-garde."

For this year's Broad, Conway is joined by Nashville alt-country artist Anne McCue, indie minimalist Sally Seltmann (aka New Buffalo), R&B belter Jade MacRae and West Australian newcomer Abbe May, whom Conway describes as being "a 1930s K.D. Lang". Backed by a band that includes RocKwiz guitarist James Black, they'll perform short individual sets as well as a joint session of original compositions adapted for the line-up and newly arranged covers.

"It's the best chick band you could dream of," Conway says. "Everyone is giving it their all but they're subsuming their ego into the betterment of the whole as well. Personality-wise, all the cards are in the air."

Participants from previous years have influenced Conway's songwriting. In 2005, she put down her plectrum after experiencing the finger-picking guitar style favoured by Clare Bowditch and Sara Storer. Last year she took her ears back to the possibilities of harmonies after she sang alongside Kate Miller-Heidke and Killing Heidi's Ella Hooper.

"Collaborating sets your mind thinking in different ways and that's always a welcome avenue for a songwriter," Conway says.

This year's input will probably be reflected on Conway's next album, the follow-up to 2004's Summertown.

Conway spent most of the '80s in Do-Re-Mi, whose 1985 hit Man Overboard remains an iconic single. She has subsequently assembled five solo studio discs, mostly in the company of Willy Zygier, the multi-instrumentalist with whom she has three daughters. Not that Zygier gets to join the Broad touring party.

"I can get another guitar player but good babysitters aren't easily found," Conway says.

Broad, Athenaeum Theatre, Collins Street, Thursday and Friday.

Book at the Athenaeum on 9650 1500 or Ticketmaster on 1300 136 166.