“Music is Essential for Living” A Keynote speech by Gordi
Delivered at the One of One International Women’s Day Breakfast, Sidney Myer Music Bowl, March 5th, 2021
(Photos byTanya Voltchanskaya)
12 months ago, the earth seemed to halt on its axis. I was at the BBC studios in London and scrolling through Twitter, saw the US had closed its borders. I made a few frantic calls and was on a flight home from Heathrow 6 hours later. The year I had been dreaming of utterly evaporated and, for the first time in my life, I had nothing to do. The two industries I work in would be the hardest hit by the pandemic — in very different ways.
Music, to me, is like breathing. My love for it was gifted to me by 3 very strong women — my mother and my two grandmothers. I grew up on a farm outside a town called Canowindra, in country NSW, on a property my Dad’s family have lived on for 120 years. My Dad’s mother (my grandmother who we called Armah), lived a literal stone’s throw away. I recall sitting in the front seat of her car, not being able to see over the dashboard, as she drove me to school along purple-dirt roads, singing ‘You Are My Sunshine’. My mother, Helen, is a piano teacher — she and her 9 brothers and sisters were taught the piano by their mother (my grandmother, Bernice) and were essentially Australia’s answer to the Von Trapp family singers.
My mother and my grandmothers showed me that music is innate, that melody and harmony are expressions of self, that lyrics are stories and etch themselves so deeply in our minds. I bet everyone here has been alarmed at their retention of lyrics they didn’t know they knew — whether it be RnB Friday deep cuts or Andrew Lloyd Weber reprises.
On my 12th birthday, my parents gave me my first guitar as well as a CD they’d bought from Sanity — it was ‘The Sound of White’ by Missy Higgins. With the release of that record, a new generation of songwriters was born. ‘The Sound of White’ was so significant for so many young Australian women, and it was life-changing for me. A month later I had moved away to boarding school and was sleeping in a 26-bed dormitory, my discman clipped to my bedrail and ‘The Sound of White’ drowning out the sound of heavy traffic — and with it the deep desire that is songwriting began coursing through my veins.
In parallel, I developed another interest. I was in a year 9 science class and Mrs Vink was teaching us about the concept — “practice makes perfect”. Simply, it is the pathways in our bodies made up of neurons and synapses becoming more adept at recognising the same signals. So, by the time we’re strumming what was once an impossible chord progression for the 10,000th time, our brains and our hands are like — we got this. I decided then that I wanted to learn everything I could about the human body, so I set my sights on a medical degree. As I was finishing school, I found myself at the obligatory career counsellor session. I expressed my interest in studying medicine as she read through my subject selection — music, drama, history, English. She proceeded to laugh me out of her office, telling me I needed to sort out my priorities and that I’d never have the career I wanted if I continued on my current path. Needless to say, I took her advice with a grain of salt.
In 2012, 8 years after I was given ‘The Sound Of White’ on CD, I saw Missy Higgins play the Seymour Centre in Sydney. The show was electric. I was so moved and felt such a deep connection — to what, I couldn’t describe. I distinctly remember walking along City Road after the show thinking — I want to make people feel like that. So, songwriting became my religion. Unfortunately, I was one year into my medical degree when I had this great epiphany and rather than study, I began playing shows in any venue that would have me.
As a result, my time at university was anything but smooth sailing. I used to have a little sticky note above my desk on which I had written “anxiety robs capacity”. As my music career slowly escalated and the course became more and more demanding, I often experienced moments of total panic. I constantly felt like I was on the start line of a hundred-metre sprint and the gun was about to go off. Playing music was costing me much more than it was making, and I didn’t have time for another job. I used to think about how long I could survive off one Woolies barbeque-chicken. I failed multiple exams throughout my degree. At the first exam resit I attended, a classmate told me a joke that I took very literally — what do you call the person who comes last in their medical class? A doctor. And that doctor is me.
By the end of 2014 I had saved up enough youth allowance cheques to record a song. I uploaded it to Triple J Unearthed and it was added to Triple J rotation. That week was pivotal — partly because my music was played on the radio for the first time, but mostly because I met two people that would have a significant and immeasurable impact on my life. The first of those people was Linda Bosidis — Linda, whether she knows it or not, has been a guiding light for me. I have the utmost admiration and respect for her.
The second person I met that week was Michael Gudinski.
When I was writing this speech at the start of the week, I had a line about how Michael Gudinksi would have you believe that if it weren’t for him, I would’ve quit medical school. Whether that is true or not is beside the point. I cannot begin to capture the loss of MG. I cannot comprehend it. The grief feels like a heavy stone. I know there are so many people in this room to whom he meant so much, and you have my deepest sympathies and condolences. Everyone has a story about MG. Mine have become like a carousel in my mind. I think about him showing me the number of red wine bottles he drank during lockdown that he had assembled in the shape of Australia, calling me before the ARIAs to say I won’t win but not to worry because that’s not what matters, I think about him sitting on our couch before Christmas asking Alex and I what our plans are for the future. For someone with such an astonishing past, Michael was always thinking about what was ahead. More so than any politician, he put our industry back to work and rebuilt it with such force and compassion when we were at our most vulnerable.
We’ve spent a lot of the last 12 months talking about what is essential. At the peak of the second wave here in Melbourne, I began picking up shifts in hospitals that were dramatically understaffed. The first hospital I worked in had patients spilling out of the Covid ward into the palliative care ward, which was not equipped with the resources to manage the very sick. I saw a man who had been silently going into acute renal failure for 24-hours, but the hospital was so overrun and short-staffed that no one had noticed. I had to tell a man that he had incurable, rapidly progressing cancer without his loved ones by his side because of the visitor restrictions in place due to the pandemic. I walked through my front door every night and scrubbed every inch of my skin, fearing that I had brought the virus home with me.
Health is essential — of course it is. But what is essential to survival and what is essential to living are two very different things. Anyone who lived in this city last year knows that simply existing is not enough to sustain us. We desire to be moved, to feel the subs like a heartbeat in our chest, to hear a voice that takes us to a higher place, to be connected to something we are incapable of describing.
MG called me last Monday — he said, “Enough of this medicine bullshit, get back to writing songs.” At the end of the call, he said “Now you listen to me. Good things take time, ok?” Rebuilding our industry is going to take time. Who better to lead the way than the people sitting here in this space today? No one is as capable of adapting and growing and pivoting and striving forward like women in the music industry — we have built our careers on it. It is our great privilege to gift our communities what is essential to living — music.
