Only Olivia

Ed - Radio Times is a long running UK TV listings magazine

By Colman Andrews

Next week, to the squeals of delight from discerning people over the country, that paragon of all that’s tasteful, Dame Edna Everage, makes an all too-brief appearance in The Barry Humpheries Show - just one of the glittering spectaculars in BBC2’s autumn variety season. Future stars include Johnny Mathis, Marti Caine, Glen Campbell and Jack Jones. Des O’Connor has his own series. Marvin Hamlisch wrote the score for films like The Way We Were and the latest James Bond movie, The Spy Who Loved Me - plays his music in a Royal Albert Hall concert with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, And a band of a rather different sort, that of James Last, also plays his own particular brand of music.

The season starts as it means to go on: Only Olivia on Friday features the songs of Olivia Newton-John, who talks below.

This is the only place where can relax, smiles Olivia Newton-John, and do what I want to do. The place is her home of 18 months her ranch - which is more correctly a rambling, Californian-style house-and-grounds in the Malibu Mountains near Los Angeles. It is nothing at all like a ranch in the sage-brush-and-cactus sense. There is a stable, with five horses (and dogs and a cat nearby), there is also a swimming pool trimmed neatly in brick, a lush patch of lawn and a tennis court. Well-kept beds of roses and geraniums alternate with local grasses and barbed carpets of iceplant and the Pacific Ocean is visible in the distance, through random stands of Sycaramore, spruce, eucalyptus and oleander. A small motor-boat perches on top of a hill above the house, in someone’s front yard, as if stranded by a flood.

The house and its surroundings typify what American colour supplements call Californian living - as does Newton-John who’s idea of a perfect day at rest: “I just like to invite my friends over, ride horses and play tennis.” But she does not, have much time for such uncomplicated pleasures these days. She is, after all, by anybody’s reckoning one of the most popular performing artists in the United States today.

The sweet-voiced, doll-pretty singer was born in England, but raised in Melbourne, Australia. Her grandfather was famous, in quite a different way. He was the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Born, one of the pioneers of quantum theory. Her father was Master at Ormond College in Melbourne and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne.

Olivia herself avoided higher education. She preferred to sing. When she was 15 her brother-in-law let her perform at a coffee bar he owned, and she was soon enjoying precocious success as a folk-singer. At 16 she decided to pursue her career in England She made her first recording in London, a version of Bob Dylan’s ‘If Not For You ‘. It sold well, and other records followed. She became a regular guest on Cliff Richard’s television series, and, in 1971 and 1972, was voted Best British Girl Singer by the readers of Record Mirror.

But, at least until her latest tour several months ago, Olivia Newton-John has enjoyed only modest popularity here in recent years (her single, Sam is the first real hit she’s had in the UK for some time). She has had a dozen smash-hit singles and albums in the United States, received scores of top awards and honours from the American press and recording industry, and done madly successful tours of Japan and Australia. But she has seemed, at times, almost reluctant to perform for British audiences.

“I have been nervous on stage in England,” she admits “I don’t really know why. In the past, maybe my songs weren’t right. And I suppose I felt funny because I’d never had a hit record there. Now it’s different. And, anyway, I’m much better than I used to be. I’m much more adventurous.”

Newton-John is so adventurous, in fact that her hottest project is a film and one in which she sings a brand of American 50s-style rock ‘n’ roll that is as far as can be from the mellow folk, country and pop idioms in which she gained her fame. The film is Grease, based on a Jim Jacobs-Warren Casey musical that is one of the longest-running plays on Broadway today. The co-stars are Stockard Channing and American television star John Travolta, and the cast includes a host of names from an earlier era of American entertainment, like Joan Blondell, Eve Arden, Sid Caesar, Frankie Avalon and Ed Kookie Byrnes. Grease is a spirited evocation (and an affectionate parody) of American high-school life a generation ago. That might I seem like a strange choice for Newton-John’s first major film appearance, considering the singer’s age, style and geographical background. Her only other role was in an ill-fated English film called Toomorrow, intended as the launch vehicle for a Monkees-style operation built around a clean-cut pop group in which she was the lead singer. But her reasons for accepting this part were simple: “I looked at a lot of scripts, and Grease was the first one I liked.” Being in the film has a specific purpose, besides the obvious ones, she adds: “I hope to keep growing in all kinds of ways, and hard as I’m working on Grease it is also a chance for me to get some distance from the other aspects of my career. It’s sort of a breathing space, so I can figure out what I want to do next.’

Meanwhile she says, “making a film is great fun. It’s a great atmosphere, just, like being back in school. It’s very different from doing concerts or recording sessions, where you have to concentrate all your energy into a short period of time.”

And her role in Grease? “I’m playing the Sandra Dee type,” she answers. Then she grins. “You wouldn’t guess that, would you?”