Deborah Conway: Only The Boney.

Deborah Conway plays the QPAC Forecourt on Friday, the Troccadero, Surfers Paradise on Saturday and the Great Northern, Byron Bay on Sunday. Only The Bones is in stores now.

If ever an artist was due a best of collection, Deborah Conway is certainly that artist. Since scoring a hit with Man Overboard as part of Do Re Mi in the 1980s, Conway has put together a fine collection of albums, never afraid to take each successive release in directions not even hinted at with her prior works. Her best of album Only The Bones, gives a chronological run through of the highlights of her extensive recording career.

“I had a lot of time on my hands while I was doing the Patsy Cline tour, and I was up in Brisbane sorting through a bunch of CDs I brought up form Melbourne. I don’t usually get a chance to listen to anything, and believe me, when I do I don’t listen to my own stuff,” she laughs. “There’s a lot of things to listen to.”

“I guess I was looking more at what we’d done as singles, or potential singles had things gone that way. Things that I liked, or that had warn the test of time.”

Do you have to look at things that you think people are going to want to hear rather than what you’re preferences would be?

“I suppose so. I don’t know if it’s selfless, because this is a pretty self-interested exercise. A lot of people would only be really familiar with a lot of the tracks from early in my career that gained a lot of airplay, but wouldn’t know about a lot that came after that. The range of this record is quite vast, and having all those tracks together is a real journey. It starts in one place and ends up somewhere quite different. A lot of people tell e they love my music, but I dot think they know much of it past String Of Pearls, which is not really typical of what I do. It was ten years ago.”

“This is running chronologically, so I think yo can see the steps that I took to get to each record and each level. That’s the sense of the title as well, it’s like an archaeological dig, there’s a sense of getting through the different layers to the bones of it all.”

Only The Bones: The Best Of Deborah Conway is subtitled with …Plus Sixteen Other Songs. Nice bit of self-deprecation there…

“When we were thinking of the title we were tossing around Greatest Hits Plus Seventeen Other Songs. I said, ‘hang on, there’s been two hits…” he jokes. “That’s how we came to that. It wasn’t going to go on, but someone will get a laugh out of it. There are only two sort of hits on the record, Man Overboard, and It’s Only The Beginning were hits, and the rest kind of were not.”

“It’s not a dig or anything. I don’t personally think it’s an inditement of the songs. With Man Overboard and It’s Only The Beginning I ran with the zeitgeist. I was plugged into what radio was at the time. It was just an accident, and then I wasn’t. How many times have you bought a record on the basis of a single, and the found it’s not the great track on the record? They were things radio couldn’t play because they were too long or too noisy or whatever. It depends on if you believe the commercial valuation of something is the only valuation it has.”

Do you push yourself to re-invent yourself as an artist and try different directions with each passing album?

“There’s no pressure. I think you don’t have to do that, but it’s something that I d because I get restless and I get bored. It’s not a pressure situation. I think it would be harder to go, ‘that was a really good record, let’s do that one again’. For me it would be a difficult situation to do the same thing, but different enough to justify it’s existence. This way I don’t have to do anything, which is good.”