Songs From The Heart
After a series of setbacks, Olivia Newton-John is ready to take on the world again with a new album and TV series. Darren Lovell reports.
WHEN Olivia Newton-John opens the door to her hotel room overlooking the Brisbane River, there’s no mistaking who it is she still looks like the girl from Grease.
In some ways, time has been kind to Olivia but it has also dealt a hand of cruel twists and turns.
A failed business, breast cancer, the death of a parent all stressful encounters high up there on the Richter scale. But Olivia can still smile and that smile still beams.
She is coming out the other side of a very difficult time in her life and she hopes all the pain is now behind her.
“It’s gone,” she says, referring to her breast cancer. And with it has gone the fear she endured for nearly two years after her diagnosis on July 3, 1992 - the day after her father died.
“I was going to write a book about it all,” she says, sitting now and looking comfortable.
But she didn’t write a book. Books aren’t Olivia, so she penned an album instead and called it Gaia One Woman’s Journey.
Olivia's journey
“It’s my first outing as a singer/songwriter and so it’s about my feelings,” she says. “And they are feelings of pain and sorrow and of fear - mostly the fear of not waking up in the morning to see husband Matt and daughter Chloe.”
“It was a way of feeling myself writing everything down was a catharsis for me.”
“I was going to write a book about my experience because I wanted to help other women who had gone through it, as people see me as some kind of role model. It might encourage other people to get through it, to show them that they can deal with it.”
“But I started writing songs just for my own benefit and it evolved into an album.”
“These songs just came to me. I would wake up in the middle of the night with these songs in my head and write them down. I would take a little tape recorder with me everywhere.”
“I think the environment helped my creativity down there (in Byron Bay), but I can write anywhere. I wrote a single in my car one day. I was just driving along when I got this song into my head, so I pulled out my tape recorder and started to sing in the car.
“I really like writing. It’s a real creative process I enjoy a lot. Maybe at a later date I would like to write a book, but I think I said a lot in the music and by talking about it.”
Olivia began writing when her chemotherapy treatment started a treatment she says scared her more than the cancer itself.
She had not planned an album but when she showed her songs to some friends they encouraged her to to put them all down on CD and share them with the world.
But Olivia decided that if she was to record the songs, she was going to do it her way and that meant financing the project herself.
“It was scary,” she says, “but I wanted to keep control over the album and that was the only way to do it. It was a risk but we sat down, worked out a budget and did it within that budget.”
“And I wanted to make this album whether it was a success or not. The album is about all different kinds of things and the messages are all positive.”
“The songs all have a positive message to them. There are some about love it’s a whole spectrum of things.”
Olivia is an Australian superstar and that’s why her story of the fight against cancer has graced so many magazines around the country.
A1 46, her career spans 23 years and that has seen the English-born woman who grew up in Melbourne and now lives on a farm growing avocadoes and custard apples behind Byron Bay.
With a string of hit singles including I Honestly Love You and Physical and, of course, her unforgettable performance in Grease, offsetting the more forgettable film effort Xanadu.
But her dream run almost came unstuck. You could hardly blame Olivia if she was a little punch-drunk after being hit with crisis after crisis.
She says it was her faith in Buddhism, her love for husband of 10 years Matt Lattanzi and daughter Chloe, eight, and her ability to write down her thoughts and feelings that has seen her withstand it all.
Among her setbacks, Olivia experienced a financial disaster when the Koala Blue chain of stores she started with friend Pat Farrar went into receivership, owing $9 million. The stores opened in Los Angeles in 1982 when Americans began to embrace all things Australian. Koala Blue sold everything from Vegemite to Australian leisure wear. Around 60 stores opened across America when suddenly, in 1991, the business collapsed.
But it took her encounter with cancer and the devastating LA fires to prompt Olivia and her family to move back to Australia, away from the world of Hollywood and back to a more earthy life-style.
“Coming back to Australia has been part of the healing process,” Olivia says.
“I really wanted to get out of the Hollywood environment; I wanted to be in a place where there was no pressure, where I thought I could do it myself, without any expectations from anyone and away from everyone.”
The end result is Gaia, which means Mother Earth, and the album is a result of all those feelings, frustrations, loves and good times.
But the funny thing is, says Olivia (laughing as she does so often during the interview), when she returned to Australia she had no desire to work-blaming work and stress for the cancer.
But for someone who really didn’t want to work, Olivia hasn’t stopped. She has completed a series of environmental shows for the Nine Network called Wildlife, has lent her singing talents to Farmhand and written a new album.
“When the producers approached me about the television show I said no, because I didn’t want to work,” she says. “Then one day I was driving around in the car listening to the radio when on came this story about the whales and how the Japanese and the Norwegians were going to ignore the ban on whaling. It upset me so much, I rang up the producers and said that I would do the show.”
“I took the show on because of my concern for the planet, basically, and it’s been great. We’ve done a lot of travelling, through Central America and all around Alaska it was great.
“I met some incredible people on this show, because they were all my kind of people, people who cared about animals and all were trying to do something to help in their own way and they were all inspirational.”
“I think Australia is one of the last places on the planet that has a chance of not ruining itself and now we seem to be following in the footsteps of all the places it should be learning its lessons from. Australia really should find it’s own identity.”