Sister Singers

29 October 2014 | 2:51 pm | Michael Smith

"It just felt like hanging out with my girlfriends, talking and singing songs."

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"The idea had been building for a while,” Katie Noonan begins, “and the name, Songs That Made Me, came early too. I really liked that name – the songs that made me as a person, as a musician and as a woman – and I really wanted to create a format, a platform that could be an all-female concert, focusing on female musicians who write as well, so I wanted this to be about the songwriting process and who influenced them as songwriters.

“And I liked the idea of it being multi-generational as well, so there’s very much a young, up-and-coming vibe and established artists and then my peers and people I look up to. So we did a national tour last year and just felt so great, and it was an all-girl band. People really seemed to connect with the intimate, social nature of the event – it just felt like hanging out with my girlfriends, talking and singing songs.”

Earlier this year, Noonan, along with Olivia Newton-John, Megan Washington and more, was involved in a breast cancer awareness campaign based on the Divinyls’ hit, I Touch Myself. That prompted the idea of making Songs That Made Me a fundraising project for gynaecological and breast cancer research and awareness. The result is the CD featuring 15 reinterpretations of “songs that made them” by Noonan’s “dream list of women”, among others, Ainslie Wills, Kylie Auldist, Angie Hart and, of course, Noonan herself.

“And it was quite collaborative,” Hart, who takes on Cyndi Lauper’s version of Prince’s When You Were Mine on the album, chips in. “There were a lot of people in the studio at the same time, so people were hopping on each other’s tracks and it was really lovely to have an actual collaborative feel and have it genuinely be a ‘womanship’, a fellowship.”

"It just felt like hanging out with my girlfriends, talking and singing songs."



So, for instance, Hart and Noonan join Auldist, Conway and Wills on a version of The Pretenders’ Hymn To Her, while Noonan helps out on Anna Coddington’s take on Terence Trent D’Arby’s Sign Your Name.

“And then there’s Renee Geyer,” Noonan adds reverentially, noting that of all the contributors, Geyer is the only one directly affected, currently in remission, by breast cancer. “The queen! She paved the way, her and Chrissie Amphlett, and Deb Conway were the three kind of badarse chicks that I remember really looking up to growing up… and Angie! More when I was a little bit older, with Frenté.”

Accompanying the release of the CD is a national tour that features Noonan, Hart, Pool and Buckingham, though depending on the night and the city, audiences can expect to see at least one of the other contributors joining in.

One hundred per cent of the monies raised by the sale of the Songs That Made Me album will go to the Cancer Council’s Pink Ribbon campaign.