Published: 4 April 2019
Last updated: 5 March 2024
Words of Men, her latest album with husband and fellow musician Willy Zygier, reveals both her concern about modern values and her playful side: in Fallen Star, she sings as the Devil, who wants to live among his people but travel first class.
Conway has never played nice, never conformed to any stereotypes in either sound or image. The gritty realism of some of her lyrics makes me think of her as the pop equivalent of writer Helen Garner, another outspoken voice expressing uncomfortable ambivalences.
Conway can’t remember ever not knowing her heritage. “There was always a Friday night Seder at my grandmother’s house. We didn’t keep kosher but my parents warned me when we went to other people’s houses that there might be ham. Woohoo, I thought.
“So when I was eight I piled my plate with it at a buffet but I had been so well conditioned that it tasted disgusting.
“However,” laughs Conway in that hearty, throaty way that gives a hint of what her pipes are like at full throttle, “I must admit that when I moved out of home, I ate bacon.”
Food is important to her and Pesach her favourite of the holidays to celebrate. When I call to speak with her, she is midway through making challah. Conway has no false modesty, describing herself as a “good cook with a touch of the Masterchefs”.
She acknowledges that Willy is the better of the two but adds proudly “I am the baker of the family”. The Melbourne couple have three grown up daughters who sing back-up on their latest album.
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Recently, Zygier gave his wife a DNA test as a birthday present. While many discover ancestry they never suspected, this was not the case for Conway: the genes confirmed what she already knew, albeit to an augmented degree. “I am 97 per cent Ashkenazy, and Willy is 99 per cent,” she says, clearly pleased with the definitive result.
Although Conway is a non-believer, (‘I don’t believe in God, I believe in Jews and their history’) the Torah has been an important source for her songwriting, most profoundly in her 2013 album Stories of Ghosts. “Exodus is probably the most resonant story for me and so relevant today when we need to be thinking about who we enslave and who enslaves us. It is massively applicable to modern life.”
She says, somewhat cryptically, that “Willy and I have always thought of ourselves as Jewish and musicians but never as Jewish musicians.” A fan of klezmer, she loves the way the Melbourne community “with its endless appetite for intellectual complication” embraced the Shir Madness Jewish music festival she and Zygier initiated in 2015 in both Melbourne and Sydney (with its clever tagline ‘Jewish Music Beyond Belief’).
“Eventually we discovered that we simply could not maintain the energy required to keep it going and handed over to younger blood, but I am delighted the event will take place this year on September 8th at the Melbourne Recital Hall.”
The latest album, partly written during an intensive residency at the Bundanon arts colony near Nowra in NSW, was originally intended to be called The Ten Plagues but Conway and Zygier decided that sounded too grim.
“Anti-Semitism from people who don’t want the best for the Palestinians is fuelling the campaign. It is vindictive mischief. There is so much bullying and ignorance about it.”
Some of the songs with titles like I Need to Complain and Yours with Disgust express varying degrees of anger and frustration at the state of the world. Others like There’s A War That’s Coming, are mournfully philosophical, in the vein of Leonard Cohen, with its ironic lyric “a house where there’s no battle is not complete” and chorus of “who do you think is coming? Who do you think is winning?”
Once asked to stand for the Greens, Conway firmly declines to discuss politics, but will say that, as a Zionist, she feels the BDS (Boycott Divestment Sanctions) movement has as its objective the eradication of the state of Israel. “Anti-Semitism from people who don’t want the best for the Palestinians is fuelling the campaign. It is vindictive mischief. There is so much bullying and ignorance about it.”
She is unafraid of being controversial, serious and intense. It has got her into trouble, (as one of her lyrics says: “a casual remark can earn you the mark of Cain”) but she is defiantly curious and opinionated. A voracious reader, she’s just finished Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s monumental The Gulag Archipelago. And so politics creeps back into the conversation.
“These are frightening times and the twentieth century is littered with bodies that went down the road of Marxism. There are still people peddling it today. We see films and read books about the Nazi regime all the time, but there is bugger all about the communist regime,” she says, citing the film The Death of Stalin as a recent exception and favourite.
When it comes to lighter material, she enjoyed The Marvelous Mrs Maisel and After Life, the new series by British misanthrope Ricky Gervais.
Because when all is sung about the dreadful state of the world, what else can you do but laugh?
Deborah, Willy and their band will embark on a national tour of concert theatres in May and June, performing Bitch Epic& The Words of Men in their entirety.
Bookings: www.deborahconway.com
LISTEN: The Words of Men
