Our Life in Music and Together — Vika and Linda Bull.
This is a transcript of the keynote speech, delivered on International Women’s Day, at the One of One Breakfast on March 8th, 2019, at the Esplanade Hotel, St Kilda.
VIKA
Good morning everyone.
Both Linda and I are honoured to be here this morning at the resurrected Espy for the third ONE OF ONE INTERNATIONAL WOMENS DAY BREAKFAST.
Before we begin, we wish to acknowledge the Bunurong, which is part of the Kulin Nation, the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet today. We pay our respects to their Elders — past, present and emerging.
Linda and I have been asked to talk about our life in music and — as we’ve done most things in our lives — we’ll do this TOGETHER.
I’ll tell you about our early life and career and Linda will tell you about some of the highs and lows we’ve experienced along the way.
As kids we grew up in Doncaster. Dad is Australian and our mother is Tongan. She arrived in Australia in 1959 at a time when immigration to Australia was strictly limited to Europeans under the White Australia Policy.
The policy prohibited, what it referred to as — ‘alien coloured immigrants’ — so mum had to get special permission from the Australian and Tongan authorities to settle here.
When our parents met and married, mixed marriages were not common and there weren’t many half caste kids around. Believe it or not that’s what we were called, and we even referred to ourselves that way. We are constantly being asked where we come
from. Everyone used to always ask if I was Greek and if Linda was Chinese. My nickname at school was coke. We’ve been referred to as boong and nigger in the playground. We’ve had to go in the back door at our own gigs because of the colour of our skin and we’ve been spat on and completely ignored in queues but our fiercely independent Tongan mother and our gentle greenie father taught us from an early age how to stand up for ourselves and to not take a step back when you know you are being treated unfairly. I once punched a kid for calling me a racial slur and put him in sick bay with a suspected broken nose. While upon reflection I should have used my words like I’d been taught, when his mother arrived at school even she privately confessed that she knew that he was in the wrong.
Our parents have taught us many valuable lessons. Some we have regrettably ignored but others we have taken on board. The ones that have stuck are…
If you want to know something, don’t be afraid to ask and there’s strength in numbers, so stick together. And stick together we have done working together now for over 35 years. We believe it’s our bond as sisters that has sustained us.
Our early musical influences were our family, the church, tv and radio.
Tongans by nature are fun. Always laughing, always eating, always singing and always praying. The church played a big role in our lives, it was where we learnt how to sing because the Tongans’ are great harmonisers. Everyone sung, it was expected. The church choir was our teacher. The first song we ever sung in public was in church, a song hand-picked by mum called ‘Everything is hunky dory children of the Lord’ and some of our first memories included our mother teaching us to harmonise.
Mum has a beautiful voice, one we love listening to but she only sings for Jesus! On long family drives she would listen to us singing along to the radio and critique from the front seat. Linda hold your note! Vika take the high part, Linda you the low, Vika cut your note off! It’s advice we still use to this day. She was fundamental to us becoming singers.
Dad had a big part to play as well. A big music fan himself he loved listening to the Tongans’ sing and made sure we went to church every week. He’d suffer along with us because Church went for hours but it was worth every minute just to hear those beautiful harmonies.
Then there was Countdown. We loved Countdown. Every Sunday night we’d turn on the ABC and sing along to all our favourite bands. We loved ABBA, Cheetah, Renee Geyer, the Divinyls. We learnt their songs and sang them in our Doncaster bedroom, hoping that one day we could be like them.
Then we left school and left home. I got a job at The Black Cat Cafe in Fitzroy where my musical tastes grew! Every shift we’d play Aretha, Etta James, Ruth Brown, Dinah Washington. It was a magnet for musicians, artists and creative people. In early 1984 I joined girl group called Sophisticated Boom Boom, named for the song by The Shangri- Las. We were three women up front singing all the classic girl group hits from bands like the Shirelles, The Chiffons, The Ronettes, it was great training. Then Linda quit uni, joined me in our own band The Honeymooners and we were off!
Peter Luscombe back then the drummer for The Black Sorrows gave us our first big break recommending us to Joe Camilleri as backing singers. If ever we were going to be needing each other it was now because we were young and green and unbeknownst to us things were just about to take off in a big way.
Joining the Black Sorrows took us from our lounge room into pretty much everybody else’s. It was a sudden and shocking rise. One minute we were playing to 50 people at the local pub and then after the release of Hold On To Me in 1988, to stadiums and stages all around the world. What started as a 6 week tour turned into 6 years of constant touring 6 days a week. It was where we got our rock and roll training, touring the Australian Pub scene, a tough male dominated environment.
We had to learn fast because Joe, bless him, decided to put us up front. We thought geez we’re the upfront backing singers now so what the hell are we gonna do, we fell back on what we knew best, Tongan dance moves and harmonies which was a risky move in a rock band be we figured it was better than standing there staring at our feet and it worked. Touring that relentlessly was tough but it was where we cut our teeth. We worked hard on our sound learning how to sing to an audience and then bingo! We hit the jackpot because we met Vanetta Fields. Vanetta sang on most of the Sorrows albums. She was an original Ikette, one of Ike and Tina Turner’s backing singers and had sung with The Rolling Stones, Boz Scaggs and Aretha Franklin just to name a few. What an Angel sent from heaven she was. Sassy, relaxed, professional, an incredible singer and an incredible woman. She took us under her wing and really showed us how to sing, be quick, be good, be in tune. Vanetta was really the key. Teaching us to be professional backing singers. We were new to the industry, we had never sung on records before and there she was an Ikette teaching us to sing.
We idolised The Ikettes, The Raylettes, The I Three, Darlene Love, all of those legendary female backing singers who paved the way for people like us.
We were becoming road dogs, eating roadhouse food, drinking truckloads of wine out of plastic cups, peeing by the roadside while the band looked the other way, trying to condition our minds and bodies to go the distance every day. We thought we were tight before but these years on the road made us even tighter and even tougher.
LINDA
The Sorrows introduced us to a whole new world. Not just the music but also the business of it. We watched and listened to their stories about who to avoid, how to manage money and how to survive in a very tough industry. We were still only 20 and 21. It turned out to be invaluable advice. We were very lucky to have this band’s support, but it wasn’t just them it was their wives too. Incredible partners at home holding down the fort, managing their own demanding careers, children and households. Women like Mickey Camilleri, Fran Tate, Tania Jovanovic and Diz Randell,
the wives of The Black Sorrows. The respect and trust they showed us a young working women meant the world to us. On our first international tour with Joe, Mickey sent us each a rose. When we arrived at our hotel in LA it was there on the pillow with a little note, “Put your best feet forward girls — go find your place in the world.” We were very touched by that.
The meteoric rise of the Sorrows meant that suddenly we had a profile. We were unaware of the impact we were having when we appeared on tv. Performing regularly on Hey Hey it’s Saturday, video clips on MTV, and appearing on Rock Around the World with Basia Bonkowski and Rock Arena with Suzanne Dowling two very rare female hosts. We didn’t think there were a whole lot of mixed-race kids out there taking notice, particularly young girls. We have recently been very moved by a story Mojo Ju Ju told us of her first time seeing us on telly and how that made her feel. To think that we have had an impact on others in a positive way means a lot, thanks Mojo!
Having a profile and two top ten hits with Chained to the Wheel and Never Let Me Go made the record companies take notice. A very long two-year negotiation between Sony Music and Mushroom Records began. We were holding out for the right to own our copyright after 25 years which was unheard of in its day. Eventually Mushroom won. Now after all these years we have our copyright back and we continue to have a very long and wonderful association with Mushroom Records and Premier Artists, particularly with Frank Stivala who has never given up on us.
By the mid 90’s we were working our arses off. We’d left The Sorrows and Paul Kelly our dear friend and mentor produced our debut album which thanks to Mushroom and Paul went double platinum. We added management and were touring the world ourselves, doing an album at Peter Gabriel’s studio in Bath, a duet with Iggy Pop, sessions as backing singers, opening for Billy Joel, Sting and Joe Cocker and travelling to Tonga to sing for The King. Life was crazy, we needed to slow down a bit so Vika found a solution, pregnancy!
We had made a decision to have children at the same time so that we could still have a career together. It’ll be easy we thought, we’ll just take the kids and the grandparents on the road. We weren’t expecting the attitude in the industry at the time to be so negative. We were told it could end our careers, we wanted to put the brakes on but not that much!
We looked at our peers and only Deborah Conway had children at this point, and she was still successful. Lucky for us though Janet Dawes was heading up Mushroom in those days. She was a mother of small children herself and therefore supported out position. She was very good to us, so Vika thought ok I’m having a baby. Mafi’iolani was born and then my little Tapi, then Kikilove seven years later. Three beautiful girls. It was the best decision we have ever made.
It’s no secret, becoming a mum regardless of your experience or background is not easy. The pressure to bounce back was also weighing on us both musically and physically. We were still signed artists and had obligations to fulfil and incomes to earn. There was no such thing as maternity leave for self-employed singers, so we hit the road, with two babies. But you can’t take your kids on tour forever, so we changed our lives for them.
We opened a kids shop and Vika not suited to retail shall we say took a job as a legal secretary. Both being married, Vika to our drummer and me to our manager at the time we all sort of worked together, but this is when thing went off the rails.
Delegating the control of key aspects of our career to the wrong person nearly destroyed us both as artists and more importantly as sisters, causing a rift that very nearly tore us apart. For the first time in our lives we had stopped communicating and working together. We hurt each other and we hurt our mother who had sacrificed so much for us only to have her two daughters nearly come undone after a lifetime spent together. Fed up she stepped in with Dad and they did what they do best, told us to ‘cut it out’ and in her words, ‘not to leave the room until you sort it out.’ We did. I realised I
had made a huge mistake. I underestimated the strength of our bond and didn’t trust my instincts but rather made decisions based on obligation. I took my hands off the wheel and my foot off the brake. Vika and her husband John never gave up. They stuck by me and the kids. Ever so slowly we regained our composure and have tried to undo some of the damage that was caused. It’s taken 7 years.
But then 3 years ago something remarkable happened. We asked a fabulous woman, Lisa Palermo, to be our manager. The first gig Lisa got for us was singing in front of 100,000 people at the AFL Grand Final in 2016. Not a bad effort. She is just a perfect fit for us and we adore her, she has turned our careers around.
VIKA
So after 35 years we feel we are just hitting our stride. We have never been in a hurry to get to the top that has never been a goal, longevity has! We are about to record our first album in 18 years. Through all this we’ve learnt to be honest with ourselves, work as hard as we can, to take on only what we know we can handle, to take full responsibility for our decisions both good and bad and to most importantly get the job done and to enjoy ourselves.
We have been very lucky to have had such a strong community of wonderful people around us. We have spent most of our adult lives working in a male dominated industry and most of those men have been nothing but staunch.
LINDA
We need champions and advocates and Vika and I have had lots of those, male and female. Going forward we need more role models, women who are authentic, women who are powerful, women who are just very good at what they do. We will be very lucky if we can do that for someone going forward. That’s what we strive for. The boundaries are shifting in our favour. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting there.
As Kurt Cobain once said…’the future of rock belongs to women’ it does because we have the desire and the courage to take that future into our own hands.
Thank you
Friday 8 March, 2019
