Live review: Alannah Myles at Shellharbour Workers Club, Wollongong, August 1990
By STEVE MASCORD
“WHAT’S WRONG, haven’t you ever seen a woman climb a speaker stack before?”
Alannah Myles’ feet are dangling somewhere left of stage, 10 feet above the head of the nearest punter. She’s wearing black velvet and proceeds to sing about it.
Not that she need sing at all, for every member of tonight’s sold-out crowd knows the words and has no interest in hiding that fact.
There is something disturbingly unlikable about Alannah Myles, and I can’t quite figure out why I was ready to hate her almost as soon as her dates were announced.
I have no huge aversion for her music, she’s hardly painful to look at and she’s had three or four hit singles.
But when the Canadian AOR-stress teased, “This dress is creeping up – you might see my crotch”, most of the macho surfie types here just gaped in stunned speechlessness!
Yeah, it’s her cockiness that we would have taken her a lot more hate, isn’t it? It’s OK for guys to tease 16-year-olds with Spandex pants and naughty songs – but a girl?
Huh, she must be talentless!
Mind you, it beats me how she is regarded as a ‘serious female singer/songwriter’ by the same people who merely snigger at the sea of other – actually quite good – commercial rock in the marketplace.
Her songs are entertaining and, in the cases of “Black Velvet”, “Lover Of Mine” and “Just One Kiss”, a tiny bit inspired. But the fact remains
that if Alannah Myles was a bloke it would have taken her a lot longer than one album to go Platinum with her particular brand of playlist-friendly corporate rock.
But I can’t remember seeing a frontperson grin so often, and the kids liked her so much I almost think AOR could be bigger than boogie in Oz if only it was given more exposure. Although, on second thoughts, let’s be glad it isn’t Alannah Myles’ music may be disposable, her image may even be more than a little contrived, but she enjoyed herself tonight and so did I.
This review originally appeared in Kerrang! on November 17, 1990
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