theaustralian.news.com

Lady screams the blues
Iain Shedden
10sep05

FOR someone whose name is associated with subjects such as mortality
and genocide, Diamanda Galas has an acute sense of humour.

“I’m able to take myself beyond the parlour room of my own insanity,”
Galas declares with a deep, rasping laugh, “whether it’s sadness or
happiness or whatever.”

The 49-year-old singer – although singer hardly does her justice – is
a one-off. She has been described as a vocal terrorist, not to mention
a political animal with a stage presence (think a deeply troubled
Morticia Addams) capable of wringing any number of emotions from
herself and her audience during a performance.

Consider that the two most famous and recurring themes in her oeuvre
are AIDS and the genocide of Armenians and Assyrians at the hands of
the Turks, and it’s clear that her art stems from a lot more than her
voice and piano.

A Californian of Greek descent, Galas has spent the past 20 years
confronting her audience with death, injustice, caustic humour and a
voice that can stretch across four octaves and scare the hell out of
you in all of them. Her avant-garde style calls on blues, jazz, opera
and more. She can silence a room with a scream that sounds as though
it comes from the deep recesses of her soul.

Her latest show, Guilty Guilty Guilty, which makes its Australian
debut in Brisbane on October 13, is subtitled “a program of tragic and
homicidal love songs and death songs”, which could be seen as light
relief from her normal agenda. That’s certainly how she sees it.

“There’s a lot of humour in that concert,” she says. “Some of the
songs are very funny. I’m glad that they have that side.”

The song list includes Hank Williams’s aching I’m So Lonesome I Could
Cry, Johnny Cash’s Long Black Veil and one of the staples of her blues
repertoire, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s I Put a Spell on You.

The show contrasts with her scheduled performances at the Melbourne
Festival on October 7 and 10. The first show there is Defixiones:
Order From the Dead, the latest episode of her Defixiones
work-in-progress that is dedicated to the victims of Armenian,
Anatolian and Pontic Greek genocides between 1914 and 1922. She will
perform it for the first time in her adopted home city, New York,
later this month.

Her last Australian appearances four years ago included Defixiones,
Will and Testament and La Serpenta Canta, the latter an eclectic
selection of songs that included a melodramatic centrepiece, the
death-row blues 25 Minutes to Go.

Wherever she travels, her long-term dedication to the fight against
AIDS and her obsession with the genocide issue are never far
away. They are part of her.

Growing up in a Greek Orthodox household in San Diego accounts partly
for her interest in the genocide of her ancestors and others in that
region. It is a part of history that she says is little known and she
has done everything in her power to change that, both as a performer
and as an activist in the media.

“I show a tremendous amount of anger,” she says. “To articulate these
things is hard. They are difficult to explain. Things that are
happening around the world, commercialisation and invisibility that
certain people are given in some cultures. I get extremely angry about
it.”

One can sense that anger welling up inside her as we speak. “There’s
a lot of history that deals with genocide of the Greek, Armenian and
Assyrian population at the hands of the Turks,” she says. “That’s
something that is very, very remotely recognised, if at all
recognised. Many people have fought for a greater recognition of the
Armenian genocide and they have been extremely powerful fighters.”

She says that the process of writing Defixiones only heightened her
passion for the cause. “When you’re dealing with these subjects you
end up becoming absorbed by a great deal of history, a great deal of
common events. You end up working in a lot of different
languages. That takes up a lot of time.”

What also took up a lot of time before Defixiones was her work in the
battle against AIDS. She lost her brother, artist Philip-Dimitri
Galas, to the disease. She has the phrase “Everyone is HIV+” tattooed
on her hand and several of her recordings, such as the landmark Plague
Mass and her 1992 recording Vena Cava, are informed by her knowledge
of the epidemic and by her role in campaigns to help end it.

These issues are the cornerstone of her life and career, but they are
not the sum total.

Galas may not have been destined to be a political activist, but there
was every chance she was going to be a musician. Her father was a
professional musician and she began her career playing piano in his
band. She had a formal music education too and studied improvisation
and visual-art performance, but she cites her early experience with
her father as crucial to her musical development and her taste for the
blues and jazz in particular. The attraction of the blues, she
explains, goes way beyond its recurring themes of love and death.

“I’ve been playing the blues for so long, I didn’t even have a chance
to be drawn to it,” she says. “I was playing it for money in my
father’s band when I was 13. He taught me how to play and that was a
very important part of my education. He played New Orleans music for
years. That’s a pretty basic grounding.”

That grounding wasn’t going to be enough, however. Even while she was
becoming an accomplished pianist as a teenager, her sights were set on
being a singer, though her father was against it.

“That was something that filled my father with trepidation,” she says,
“and he was right. He considered singers to have insane
lifestyles. It’s a difficult profession because people encourage
singers to sound like idiots and push them to present themselves and
to make a show and take credit for doing things they don’t do: like
music written by other artists. Plus my father didn’t want me to be
thought of as a sub-par musician, which in many cases singers are.

“But I wanted to do it because I wanted to be the leader of a band. I
wanted to do it because I had been inspired by people like Ornette
Coleman and by instrumentalists like that who were doing interesting
things. So I started studying voice a lot and going to teachers and
doing improvisation because I wanted to learn the instrument in a way
where I could master the musical aggression.”

There is no question that she has succeeded. The combination of her
emotional and musical ranges makes for rare and spectacular
theatre. The subject matter often fans the flames.

“Some people say that I’m fascinated by things that I am afraid of,
but many people do that,” she says. “Some of them go into the
military. Some of them go into the movies, some of them go into
deep-sea diving and some of them go into music. I have the opportunity
through my work to address things that keep me awake at night.

“What I’m talking about are timeless subjects like mortality. I can’t
seem to come to terms with that very well like some people. It’s
something that makes singing and performing and composing a great
gift.”

Subjecting your mind and your lungs to such an emotional kicking night
after night must take its toll, one would think. If it leaves
audiences exhausted and exhilarated, isn’t it even more confronting
for her? She says that when she gets on stage she is hoping “to be as
honest as possible, and I hope that I’m going to be able to discover
something new on stage every night and be at one with my
material. That’s why a performer prays and hangs around the
material. So that she can be free on stage and be able to feel the
things that are severe and such important subjects to (her) craft.

“You certainly don’t want to feel as you do when you’re sitting in
your living room having a coffee or something. You want to feel as if
you know as much about life in that moment and convey that in the
limited time that people have come to see you.”

If her music defines her as an artist, her appearance has led to less
sophisticated assessments of her as a celebrity. Terms such as
“daughter of darkness”, “gothic diva” and – a particular pet hate of
hers – “bride of Satan” paint a superficial picture at best.

Of the latter, she says she is “absolutely appalled. It’s so old. That
is the oldest quote in the book. They keep putting that out. It’s 20
years old. I just laugh at it. If they want to think that, then
fine. But as years go on, it gets so tiresome.”

She finds it particularly galling when such perfunctory descriptions
blur her art. “It matters to me when they say that and I’m doing
something to do with genocide or something, because it dismisses the
seriousness of its intent and the research that has gone into it.”

Her music is not for the faint-hearted, then, nor could it be
described as mainstream. She has been conspicuously absent from the
pop charts throughout her career. “A lot of today’s pop music is so
simple-minded, it would be impossible for me to play it,” she says. “I
would be asleep. I would say I have wasted my life.”

Nor does she subscribe to the conventional methods of the mainstream
recording industry.

“I’m not in the studio 24 hours a day the way people in pop music
(are),” she says. “I go in for a limited time and I do a lot of really
weird shit, and I have a record company that puts it out anyway. I
don’t get paid a lot for it, either. I sell records at concerts and
that helps me. I decided to make the money while I was alive rather
than when I’m dead.”

Diamanda Galas performs at the Melbourne Festival on October 7 and 10,
in Brisbane on October 13, in Adelaide on October 16 and in Sydney on
October 21.