Here With Me, Eternally

On The Passing Of Idols and Love That Never Dies

This week we lost Olivia Newton John.

A strangely melancholic feeling sits heavy in my chest and all I want to listen to is Olivia singing Xanadu. Or anything she wants. All my little girl dreams have risen from the ether to surround me, of wishing I could grow up to be like her, to sing like that, to be empowered and awe inspiring like Bad Sandy in Grease or glittery and goddess-like like Olivia in Xanadu - I can’t remember her character name or even the story line but that iridiscent song and her look are burned indelibly into my mind. Like many little girls of that era, I treasured a pair of op-shop found slinky black ‘Grease pants’ - the founder of Spanx, born around the same time as me, recently purchased these actual pants - that Olivia had to be sewn into - at auction for one hundred and sixty thousand dollars. I still feel her new found bad girl power with me whenever I slip on a pair of Candies, still my favourite style of shoe.

Oh Sandy

I pretended I didn’t like the goody-two -shoes version of Sandy but I did. I loved the white nightgown and the drama and the romance of ‘ Hopelessly Devoted To You’ and could hardly keep my intense emotions from spilling over while singing along with it most likely loudly and out of tune. Olivia represented a whole realm of possibilities - you could be a very good girl with an even better inner bad girl within. I was never the wholesome type, more a raggedy little dark haired witchy weirdo type than a cleancut pretty blonde but she gave me a sweet vision of what that could be like, and it was fun to imagine myself as all the Olivias.

Oh Candies you know how to get me…

When we lose our idols, a small part of ourselves goes with them. But likewise, a small part of them lives forever through us. These are important relationships we have with those that inspire and excite us, even if they are infinitely one-sided. Love is never given lightly. And love doesn’t die, even when the object of our love dies, so it takes us a while to adjust to loving the stardust or the particles of spirit that remain. We feel slightly foolish for feeling sad about the loss of someone we never really knew, but maybe what makes us sad is the loss of the dreams we invested in them, maybe we feel robbed of the selves we identified with in them, that they carried for us.

I always had a thing for Elvis, and I read all the trashy bios by the wives and girlfriends and inner circle and the liner notes and magazine articles and considered myself quite the Elvis connossieur, but when I found myself reeling at the end of reading Peter Guralnick’s epic Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley (straight after finishing its predecessor Last Train To Memphis, in a one-two Elvis-shaped sucker punch) just before soundcheck in Thessaloniki, Greece, the full force of the tragedy of his death hit me so hard in the chest it knocked the wind out of me and I just wanted to throw myself on the floor sobbing like a baby. It was ridiculous, he’d been dead twenty six years already. But the book had brought him back to the land of the living so tangibly I couldn’t help it. Guralnick said his aim was ‘to allow the characters to breathe their own air’. Mission accomplished.

I know a girl who couldn’t stop crying when Princess Diana died and confined herself to bed for three straight red-eyed days. Sometimes the shock of the loss really hurts.

Like a million other girls, Veronica Spector was my teenage idol. You can read more about that love affair here. Many years ago, I went looking for her on Instagram, and found that she had set up one up but was shocked to see at that time, she had less than a couple of hundred followers. I followed and posted her a heartfelt message of love, feeling kind of silly about it, and much to my surprise she not only followed me back, but often left little comments and hearts and flowers on my posts over the years, which never failed to literally blow my mind. I soon discovered Ronnie was like a permanent ray of sunshine on the Internet, following and leaving supportive, positive comments for an extraordinarily wide range of female singers, replying to fans’ messages, buried deep in the comments, turning up in the strangest places.

She knew how important the connection between artists and fans was, and between artists and their idols. She talked often of how she owed her voice to Frankie Lymon and she posted about her gratitude to Amy Winehouse for ‘making me believe that what I did mattered’ and to all the workers in song who collaborated with her throughout her career. At her induction into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame in 2011, Ronnie stated 'All my life, all I ever wanted to do was to sing rock’n’roll’. It’s the pureness of her absolute love for what she does that forges that intense connection people have with her, myself at the top of that list.

Photo by Michael Ochs

Last Christmas I sent her a message saying that I felt conflicted about loving listening to her on the Phil Spector Christmas album and wondered how she felt about that. Amazingly she replied soon after, and said to please keep listening, which I what I thought she might say, because she genuinely loved to be heard and that fact that Phil Spector couldn’t silence or erase her was a source of great pride and joy to her. She went out of her way to make sure everyone felt seen and heard. Before she died, she requested that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to local women’s shelters or the American Indian College Fund. She saw people and she wanted to give them what they needed, whether that was the simple beauty of her voice or something more tangible, like recognition.

I felt a sense of her loss deeply, and personally, like a weight I couldn’t shake, a fence I couldn’t jump over. My love for her was an intrinsic part of what made me who I was. I think thats how we all feel when we lose somebody we don’t know in the real sense of the word, but we know them in deep ways that we feel in our souls, that we’ve kept in our hearts like a permanent light.

There’s been a rollcall of them that have hit a sad nerve for me in recent years; Betty Davis, David Bowie, Charlie Watts, John Prine, Prince. Of course it’s easier to process when someone has lived a good, long, full life and we have so many moments we’ve spent with them to treasure. Most of them they weren’t even there for really, but if their records were in your ears or your heart or your hips at a formative time, they become enmeshed in our memories.

So long as we remember, their light never really disappears. Shine on you crazy diamonds.

A million lights are dancing and there you are, a shooting star, an everlasting world and you’re here with me, eternally…. (lyrics from ‘Xanadu’)

PS I’m sending this missive out into the world a little early as I am hitting the road with my band this morning and leaving my laptop behind. If you happen to be in Canberra, Australia, we’re at Smith’s Alternative tonight… beautiful Beechworth tomorrow…. Melbourne on Sunday… and in between we’ll be taking turns blasting music by artists we love in the car, filling up on all the inspiration we can.