Now I Can Dance

by Tina Arena

  Turning sixteen a week and a half later seemed to seal the deal: I was no longer that little kid on TV. I was back to just going to school, back to being Pina (or Peen, as my sisters and old friends still call me).

  But I’d walked away from YTT with two incredibly valuable gifts. The first was a trade: working on the show had been a wonderful apprenticeship and I came out of there a seasoned professional. The other thing the show gave me was a regular salary, even if I’d never seen much of it – Mum and Dad, always looking to the future, had put most of it away.

  They’d certainly never used the money I earned to buy me loads of material things: my sisters and I were far from spoiled, and Mum still made lots of our clothes. But at sixteen I was beginning to discover all those things money can buy – movies, clothes, records, stuff. It occurred to me that I could be using the money I’d earned from YTT to get myself some of those things sixteen-year-old girls think they need. I remember one day having a fight with my mum about that: I wanted the latest Fabergé stretch jeans and she wasn’t going to waste money on them.

  ‘Well, I’ll use my money!’ I said. ‘I earned it. I can spend it how I like!’

  Mum wasn’t having any of it. We were in our blue Ford Falcon (god, I wish they’d kept that car!), so without another word she drove all the way to Brunswick. She stopped in Albion Street in front of a fish and chip shop with a little Victorian house attached. ‘See that on the left?’ she said, pointing.

  I nodded, having absolutely no idea what we were doing there. Was she mad? All I cared about was getting a pair of expensive jeans.

  ‘Well, that’s what your money’s bought. So stop whingeing!’

  Mum doesn’t mince words.

  I was speechless. And I realised, maybe not at that moment but soon after, just how lucky I was. I knew there were not many sixteen-year-olds who owned a house.

  So YTT had given me much, and I’d be forever grateful. But what now? I had no plan except to finish school. Dad and Mum were very firm about that – they weren’t going to let me quit, that’s for sure. In fact, Dad had always quietly hoped that I’d go to university. That was a big thing for people of his generation – they wanted their kids to have all the opportunities they’d never had. Mum and Dad would have been happy if I’d pursued another career.

  But I knew what I wanted to do – I wanted to keep singing. In fact I think I needed to sing, especially back then. Singing was just about the only way I could express how I felt. Working as a professional performer for so much of my childhood had given me immense discipline – I’d learnt to work hard, fit in, follow direction and behave appropriately. The downside of that was I didn’t know how to let loose, be myself, or express my own feelings. I didn’t even know what they might be. Singing was my outlet.

  My parents were prepared to support me as I followed that dream, but their primary concern was that I concentrate on school, especially since neither had any illusions about the music industry. ‘It’s a dirty business, Pina,’ my mum told me more than once. ‘There are pitfalls.’

  I didn’t have illusions either. And when it came to pitfalls, well, they were looking more and more like craters. I’d begun to work it out while I was still on YTT: in many people’s minds I’d always be Tiny Tina Arena, the smiling poppet on TV with the big voice. It was the main reason I left when I did.

  So I knew it was going to be tough. What I didn’t realise was just how tough. I’d made a lot of friends and contacts in the music business through YTT. But now, when I started to ask around, I constantly came up against the same thing: no one could see how I’d be able to break from the past and launch a career as an adult performer. I began to feel like I was cooped up in a pigeonhole with no escape hatch.

  But it was early days, and I wasn’t going to give up so easily. While I was still at school I started playing music with Greg Petherick, the YTT floor manager. He was interested in songwriting and producing and he’d come over to my place and we’d play around with song ideas. Greg was a funny, sweet guy and he and I were great mates. Mum and Dad liked him a lot but they weren’t that keen on my spending so much time on music at that stage – they were worried it would distract me from school.

  But for me it was the first time I’d given any thought to writing songs rather than just singing them. Singing was how I communicated, and now I was discovering that it was possible to write your own songs. A little candle was lit in my head. Maybe one day I could too.

  Greg was the first person to believe I had a future beyond Young Talent Time. Finally, we had demos of some original songs that might be the start of an album. Greg shopped the demos around, but still no one was interested. Greg changed tactics, keeping my identity a secret until his record company contacts had at least heard the songs. But as soon as he told people who I was, that was the end of it. ‘Tina who? You mean Tiny Tina Arena?’ they’d say, shaking their heads. ‘Maybe she should change her name,’ someone suggested.

  Greg knew a lot of people in the music business (he ended up helping to launch Kylie Minogue’s music career, demoing ‘The Loco-Motion’ then passing it on to Mushroom Records), and finally he put me in touch with Brian Cadd. Brian’s an Australian music legend. As well as having several hits in the 1960s and 1970s, he ran his own record companies and penned hits for countless Australian and international artists, including Cilla Black, Glen Campbell, Gene Pitney, Wayne Newton, Bonnie Tyler, and the Pointer Sisters. Oh, and the Little River Band, Joe Cocker and Ringo Starr. Not a bad track record. Brian had moved to America in the late 1970s but he’d come back to Melbourne for short stints to set up a new record label, which he called Graffiti Records.

  I knew all about Brian. He knew a bit about me. But he’d been living in LA since the mid-1970s so while he knew what I’d done and what I could do, he hadn’t been in Australia during those years I was on YTT so perhaps didn’t have such a fixed idea of who I was. He liked my voice and he liked what I could do. He also liked the idea that he could launch his new label with an artist like me, someone with a profile.

  I was the first artist Brian signed to Graffiti. The label was so new he didn’t have a logo. Nancy, my older sister, who by this time was working as a graphic designer, designed the label for him, and we all thought it looked cool – white graffiti-style type on a red background.

  Brian had hooked up with some great songwriters and musos during his time in LA, so rather than choose one of the originals Greg and I had been working on, we trawled through cassette tapes of demos Brian had, looking for a good song. Soon I thought I’d found it – a brilliant song called ‘How Will I Know’ by Shannon Rubicam. I just knew it was a winner and was excited about it, but when we enquired it turned out that Arista boss Clive Davis had the song on hold. In early 1985 it was released by Whitney Houston and became a world smash hit. C’est la vie!

  Instead, we settled on a song Brian had bought the rights to, by American songwriting team Pam Reswick and Steve Werfel. I’d never heard of them or met them. But I liked the song.

  It was called ‘Turn Up the Beat’, a piece of rocky pop in a similar vein to Kim Wilde’s ‘Kids in America’ (though more upbeat), which had been a big hit in Australia a few years earlier. I liked it because it was up-tempo and fun, a song about how sometimes music is more important than just about anything else. It appealed to my inner rock chick and would be a chance to say, ‘Hey! I’m here, I’m all grown up and I’m ready to take on the world!’

  We recorded the song at Armstrong Studios and went for a live rock sound. The B side was a song Greg had written called ‘ Dreamer’.

  Brian had big plans for the single as it would not only launch my solo career but also launch his label. We decided to shorten my name to just ‘Tina’, à la ‘Madonna’. It seemed like a good idea, as they always do: I guess we thought it would help me shake off the Tiny Tina Arena label, and get people thinking about me a bit differently.

  Brian had what I thought was a great idea for the clip. It was made
to look like a live performance with a bunch of hard-rockin musos (well, except for the marimba player!) and a huge crowd getting down to the beat. I strutted and bopped around the stage, my name in huge neon letters behind.

  It wasn’t a bad first effort, but it didn’t chart and plans to make an album were shelved. I think I was the first and last artist to be signed to Graffiti, apart from Brian himself – he put out a couple of his own records on the label after mine.

  Around the same time I hooked up with a guy called Fab. Suddenly, I was not only juggling school and music, but a new boyfriend. Mum and Dad mustn’t have got a wink of sleep during those last two years of school. Fab (short for Fabio) was a handsome, strapping Venetian, loud, funny and fun. I’d hear Fab coming long before I spotted his hotted-up car rumbling down our little street, his subwoofers booming U2’s ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ or Simple Minds’ ‘Love Song’. Fab introduced me to English and Irish rock and pop. He loved his food but I could still eat him under the table – we’d go out to Enzo and Mario’s in Keilor Road and eat a pizza each for entree followed by a big bowl of pasta each. Tortellini with cream and mushrooms was my favourite. I’m sure we made our mothers proud, at least in the food department.

  That said, Fab’s mum Narcisa, like all true Venetians, wasn’t easily impressed. ‘Don’t expect me to speak English or Sicilian. In this house we speak Venetian so if you want to understand anything you better learn it,’ she said to me by way of greeting when I finally plucked up the courage to meet her. She was speaking in Venetian, which is so different to Sicilian I had no idea what she was saying. Afterwards, Fab translated and eventually I did what I was told and learnt Venetian. Anything to keep Narcisa onside!

  Months after ‘Turn Up the Beat’ came out I graduated from high school. I’d just turned eighteen, was at last an ‘adult’, but in many ways I was very naive. I’d had a traditional upbringing, and I’d been too busy working through my teen years to ever really rebel against my parents or teachers. I’d just tried to do what was right. But what was right now? I felt lost. I knew I could sing, I knew I had a voice, but I had no idea what to do with it.

  No one else did either, it seemed. Still no record company was willing to take me on. I guess after the failure of ‘Turn Up the Beat’, they figured I wasn’t much of a commercial proposition.

  That summer I went with Fab and some friends down to the Mornington Peninsula. Years earlier, Mum and Dad had bought a beach shack for not much at all down at Rosebud, not far from Sorrento, and while I was growing up our family spent part of every summer there. As we girls grew older we began to go down there with our cousins and friends, sometimes just for the day. We’d take our music and books and hang out on Sorrento Back Beach. In the days before we had boyfriends, we’d perve at all the blond, tanned surfer boys – who didn’t? – dreaming that one of them would walk up and ask us out. It never happened, and we envied the blonde, tanned girls in their string bikinis who carried the towels, bought the Chiko Rolls and waited patiently on the beach for those boys to come in from the surf.

  For me, Sorrento represented the innocence of being a kid, when anything seemed possible, but that year it felt like my childhood dreams were slipping away forever.

  When the summer break was over I had to decide what I was going to do. I’d had a shot at launching a solo music career and I’d landed on my arse. I felt like I was still dragging Tiny Tina around like an old stuffed toy. Perhaps it was time to let those dreams go, and move on. I knew that it would make things easier for Fab and me – he was set to study architecture at RMIT and so would be tied to Melbourne for at least the next few years. If I quit music I wouldn’t have to travel. We could spend as much time as we liked together.

  Then my good friend Julie Field called, all excited. ‘I’ve got a job! With an insurance company. I start next week! Peen, why don’t you try? We could work there together.’

  I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t that I was work-shy. I’d been working since I was eight. But it was so far removed from what I’d been doing and what I’d dreamt of. Still, over the years people had told me I wouldn’t know what it was like to work in a ‘proper job’. Maybe they were right, I thought then. Maybe I should give nine to five a try. I had nothing on the horizon and no idea what else to do.

  I applied for the job and they hired me.

  CHAPTER 5

  Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough

  I lasted three months at the insurance company. Having a nine-to-five job to go to every day was fun in the beginning, but I quickly found out it wasn’t the place for me. Maybe it was having to start from scratch – it didn’t take me long to find out I was a much better singer than I was an office worker.

  So I was back where I began and desperate to get work, but this time in the only profession I knew – music. In my family no one sits around doing nothing. I was still living at home but now I was out of school I was determined to be financially independent.

  I decided I’d get whatever singing work I could. Someone suggested I try to get some work in jingles. It paid okay and it was a job. The best-known jingle writer in Melbourne at that time was Mike Brady. He’d written ‘Up There Cazaly’ to promote Channel Seven’s Australian Rules football coverage. He’d then released it as a single and it went to number 1 on the charts. (In later years he wrote ‘Lucky You’re with AAMI’, among many other well-known jingles.) After the success of ‘Up There Cazaly’ Mike had recorded Joe Dolce’s ‘Shaddap You Face’, and when no one else would release it Mike did. It also went to number 1, both in Australia and the UK, and charted all around the world. Jingles were Mike’s bread and butter, and he agreed to give me some work.

  Loud, hilarious and smart, Mike was fun to work with, even if singing jingles didn’t exactly knock my socks off. There was Ollie’s Trolley chicken, Movieland, Haymes Paints. But I needed the money – every bit I earned I planned to reinvest in my career.

  Mike’s musical arranger was a guy called Ross Inglis, a highly talented musician and songwriter with a great feel for pop music. Ross also happened to play lead guitar for a band called Network, who had a regular gig at the Grainstore Tavern in King Street in Melbourne. Ross was supportive and sweet, and we got on well.

  The Grainstore was a happening place back then, and Network were a brilliant nine-piece with a hot brass section and a percussionist. They could play just about anything you threw at them.

  Mike suggested to Ross that they give me a go as a guest vocalist. I love performing live and I love rock ’n’ roll so I jumped at the chance. I went down to a rehearsal and we tried a bunch of songs and it worked well. We had a bloody great time together.

  The first night was brilliant: the place was thumping and the band was rocket-tight. I remember singing ‘Rich Girl’ by Hall & Oates, Aretha’s ‘Freeway of Love’, the Jackson 5’s ‘I’ll Be There’. Van Halen’s ‘Dreams’ literally rocked the building’s foundations, which was disconcerting, to say the least. And when we played ‘Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough’ the place went off.

  When I first started singing with the band, the guy who booked the entertainment, Peter Hoyland, was so worried I’d turn people off, he tended not to mention that I was appearing, even though he knew I was up to the task. And it was true. When people came through the door they’d ask who was guest singer. When they heard it was me, they’d laugh. ‘What, Tiny Tina from YTT? We’ve got to see this!’

  But those punters came back, week after week, and from the stage I could see them start to come round. I remember one Friday night we were about to start a song when some drunk screamed out: ‘Show us your tits, Tina!’

  I’d always been pretty timid on stage and off, and once I would have just ignored him. But that was the first time I grasped the advantage of being the one behind the microphone. ‘Not until you show me your little weenie first!’ I replied, smiling sweetly.

  The guy turned around to his mates and they all yelled ‘Ohhhhh!’ But it changed the tone of proceedings and
I think that was when the audience began to realise I wasn’t Tiny Tina anymore. I began to realise it too.

  Those nights at the Grainstore were the start of a change of attitude, I’m sure. Week after week the place grew fuller and fuller until it was jam-packed. It was a lot of fun and I learnt so much – how to handle and work a raucous audience, and how to stand on my own two feet.

  Fab and Nancy and our mates would come along and we’d hang out together before and after the show.

  That’s what I did for most of 1986 – jingles and live work. As they do, one thing led to another. I got a call from Harley Medcalf, an Australian music promoter who’d toured countless great artists, including Elton John, Rod Stewart, Queen, Bob Dylan, Dame Edna and many more. He was touring Lionel Richie, who had just had a worldwide smash hit with his album Dancing on the Ceiling. In the States, the support act had been Sheila E. Harley was looking for a support act for the Australian shows and he offered me the gig.

  I was grateful to Harley for showing confidence in me and giving me such an opportunity. I’d always loved performing live, and the last few months working with Network at the Grainstore had reignited that passion. And this was going to be huge: I’d be performing in stadiums and the largest concert halls all over the country.

  The only downside was I’d be away from Fab. He’d be in Melbourne working and studying. He was cool about it – he knew how much the job meant to me – but it was the first of many separations and we felt it.

  The Outrageous Tour, as it was called, kicked off in Melbourne in January 1987 with shows at the Sports and Entertainment Centre. When we turned up for that first gig we were bowled over by the scale of the production. The crew was the size of an army; the gear filled a fleet of semitrailers, the members of the band were too numerous to count and the entourage even larger. It was the height of the 1980s, and Lionel was an international megastar, so the whole production was lavish, with no expense spared – quite an eye-opener for a girl from Moonee Ponds. That tour was the first time I’d ever seen, let alone tasted, Evian water – bottled water hadn’t made it to Australia by then. Lionel had brought in crates of the stuff and he and his band and friends drank it constantly. (It must have made an impression on me, because I still love Evian water.)