Reddy or Not, Helen’s Coming Home.

On the eve of her return to Australia, Helen Reddy talks to our Coral Drouyn.

It isn’t easy being born into a “Showbiz” family. There’s always the assumption that you will follow suit, even while your parents say things like “be a doctor”… “study hard”… “don’t go in the business”. They say it….but they can’t remove it from your genes.

When Helen Reddy was four, she was a stooge for her variety act parents – Max Reddy and Stella Lamond. She would sit in the audience until her dad Max would say “Now we need a little girl from the audience to help us…what about YOU little girl?” Helen would go up on stage in all innocence as a volunteer and when Max asked, “Have you ever seen me before, little girl?” she would dutifully reply, “No Daddy.” It got a laugh, that’s what she was there for; that’s how it is in Showbiz families. By the time Helen hit her teens, her half-sister Toni Lamond was starring in The Pajama Game and Helen had found her voice and was doing singing gigs every weekend.

We all know the story from there; the failed marriage when she tried, in vain, to walk away from showbusiness, even though it was in her veins; the Bandstand talent contest that she won which gave her the chance to go to America; being stranded in a strange country unable to work, with her little girl in tow. Having no money for food, and relying on ex-pat Aussies to help out; playing club gigs in Canada for years. The determined and stoic Helen stuck it out, no matter what life threw at her. Some would call it stubbornness or, even worse, arrogance. Those people don’t come from show business backgrounds. The simple truth is the show must go on, ALWAYS – there are no exceptions, no excuses, especially not in the hungry years. She couldn’t come home, not until she’d made it. Some people, who could never understand, thought she had turned her back on Australia, but nothing was further from the truth. “I still feel 95% Australian,” she says. “You can’t escape your heritage, your bloodline, and why would I want to? I came home last in 2002 and stayed ten years. I just didn’t make a song and dance about it.”

And then, right at the time the Women’s Movement started its second front, Helen co-wrote a song that changed everything, not just for her, but for women everywhere.

“I am woman, hear me roar
In numbers too big to ignore
And I know too much to go back and pretend
'Cause I've heard it all before
And I've been down there on the floor
No one's ever gonna keep me down again.”

She didn’t write it to be an anthem, or a commercial success. She wrote it because it was a way of saying, without asking for sympathy, “I’m here, I’ve paid my dues, and I’m not going away.” It was Serendipity.

Helen says that if she’d known what the song would become she might never have written it. “I would have been terrified,” she says. “I don’t think I could have handled the responsibility of it beforehand if I’d known it would mean so much to all women everywhere. I’m not the type to rant, or cry in public. The song was a way to show how I was feeling. I didn’t know millions of other women felt that way too.”

It might have been a flash in the pan, but it wasn’t. Hit after hit followed; I don’t Know How to Love Him, Angie Baby, Delta Dawn, Ruby Red  Dress (how many times does she sing “Leave Me Alone”?)….so many great songs that formed part of our growing years. And there was “Pete’s Dragon”…our Helen a “Movie Star”, and her own TV show, and appearances in musicals. But the bubble burst, as bubbles always do. For ordinary people that means getting on with “life” but when you’re born into Show Biz, that IS life; there’s no question of anything else.

For ten years Helen Reddy didn’t sing a note, not even in the shower. “Too painful,” she says. “If I had started again, I wouldn’t have been able to stop.”

Instead she helped look after sister Toni who had been ill, and blended into the background, not easy to do when you’re Helen Reddy. It took a duet with Toni on her sister’s birthday to change everything.

“It was weird when I heard my voice,” she says. “I hadn’t heard it for so long and it was like meeting a stranger and having a sense of déjà vu. Like coming home and finding someone you don’t know living in your house. I had to make friends with my voice all over again….it’s good to know we still like each other.”

These days Helen lives on her own in Los Angeles with a rescue cat she found on her doorstep. “We give each other space to do our own thing. But we love each other – no judgements or conditions on either side.” But now she is coming home again for her first concert tour in many years. “Is it okay for a woman of…shall we say…advanced years, to be excited and nervous at the same time?” Yes it is….it’s a very human way to feel.

Helen Reddy was born to sing – it’s not something she really had a choice about. It’s not just in her blood, it’s in her soul. You can hear it in her voice too, that ability to connect to someone else’s pain. I remember, left alone with my two kids some 40 years ago, how I would play her record and sing “You and Me Against the World” to my kids. Somehow it got us through the hard years. I don’t feel any need to rush up and hug her, I think she’d hate that. But I can say, “Thank you for the music, for being a voice for women.” In fact, that’s something we can all say.

Helen Reddy in Concert – Hamer Hall, Melbourne on April 5, The Concourse, Chatswood on April 7, Enmore Theatre, Sydney on April 11,  Concert Hall, QPAC on April 13, Festival Theatre, Adelaide on April 15 and Crown Theatre, Perth on April 17.