Chrissy Amphlett is a legend in the world of Australian music - and now, for the first time, she tells her own story. From growing up in Geelong, Victoria, to being the lead singer in the iconic band The Divinyls, to living in New York and mixing with the likes of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, she has led an amazing life. In this book she tells of life on and off the road - and gives a unique account of a woman surviving in a male-dominated and drug-fuelled industry. Yet not only did she survive, she captivated her audiences with her empowered on-stage performances. From fury to soulful, brash to lecherous, Chrissy Amphlett's voice and character mesmerized all those around her. She talks of the early days when she was breaking into the music scene; of being arrested for busking when a teenager travelling in Spain; of how her angry and provocative stage act drew on her childhood and background - she wanted to shock and, above all, be in control. And she tells of what it was to be at the top, in those years of success and excess, both in Australia and in the United States. Chrissy has always lived life on her terms no matter what those around her wanted.
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'By performing a feminist textual analysis of these two autobiographies, I examine the nature of the intersections between the putative liberations for women afforded by punk and post-punk music, and autobiography as a textual performance of the self. In addition, a reading of these autobiographies enables me to address questions of national context. I argue that, in an echo of Julian Temple’s ferocious documentary of the Sex Pistols, The Filth and the Fury, the characteristically punk thematics of filth and fury enable these autobiographies to narrate the narrators’ rejection of, and consequent sense of monstrosity in relation to, conventional Australian femininity and the rock industry. Filth, in terms of abject and excessive elements, personae, and processes characterising the punk self, and fury, as this subject’s central type of affect, are means to articulate the making and unmaking of the female musician’s self as monstrous. Analogous to their stage work, Amphlett’s and Horne’s textual selves recruit and exploit a typically masculine set of codes to perform a novel subject of music: the female post-punk singer. Both Amphlett and Horne thereby write in a fraught space—an industry just starting to admit women in less conventional terms—to write a liminal self: one partly created by myths—some self-created, others externally imposed.'
'By performing a feminist textual analysis of these two autobiographies, I examine the nature of the intersections between the putative liberations for women afforded by punk and post-punk music, and autobiography as a textual performance of the self. In addition, a reading of these autobiographies enables me to address questions of national context. I argue that, in an echo of Julian Temple’s ferocious documentary of the Sex Pistols, The Filth and the Fury, the characteristically punk thematics of filth and fury enable these autobiographies to narrate the narrators’ rejection of, and consequent sense of monstrosity in relation to, conventional Australian femininity and the rock industry. Filth, in terms of abject and excessive elements, personae, and processes characterising the punk self, and fury, as this subject’s central type of affect, are means to articulate the making and unmaking of the female musician’s self as monstrous. Analogous to their stage work, Amphlett’s and Horne’s textual selves recruit and exploit a typically masculine set of codes to perform a novel subject of music: the female post-punk singer. Both Amphlett and Horne thereby write in a fraught space—an industry just starting to admit women in less conventional terms—to write a liminal self: one partly created by myths—some self-created, others externally imposed.'
