Clare Bowditch - long live the Queen

"If we're all princesses, who's going to be the queen?'

 Ms Bowditch asks this question on the title track of her latest offering, the sublime Modern Day Addiction, and, after seeing her in action last night, I can't help but think it is rhetorical. As she commanded the stage at the Forum, Melbourne Cup eve, flanked by the sweet voices of three diminutive princesses, fluttering about like handmaids to the high priestess of cool, I had no doubt about the answer to that question.

I must admit to a bit of a mad crush on Clare Bowditch. I don't want to be her lover, however. I'd just quite like to be her. No actually, I totally want to be her. I have only seen her play three times, but for a non-gig going person such as myself, that's a pretty impressive record. The first time was at the Corner when she and Libby announced their respective pregnancies (CB had twins on board). Being privy to that moment was intimate and lovely, made even more so by the fact that I too had a bun in the oven, and I was overwhelmed with a sense of enduring sisterhood with the fecund CB. Another element was added to that insiders secret last night when CB shared with us that it was at the Forum 8 years prior she had stolen her way into the venue to tell the unsuspecting Marty, quietlty swigging his beer and watching a gig, that she was with child.

The second CB gig I attended was also at the Corner. This time I was there with a group of women, nearly all of them mothers, and one of them heavily pregnant, and whilst the music was as brilliant as ever, and CB rocked my world, the weariness of knowing I had a nearly 2 year old waiting at home for me and, the total lack of seating at the venue, the impossible exhaustion brought on by one glass of wine, meant that I looked up at the masterpeice of a woman rocking out on stage through a misty eyed veil of nostaligia for my youth. But! Knowing she had 3 wee ones at home made me determined to endure to the very end. I remember thinking how nauseatingly young the crowd appeard to my aged eyes, and how terribly enthusiastic they all seemed to be about being up so late.

I learnt something that night. Mothers can and do rock. CB was further secured in my mind as Goddess.

At the ARIA awards in 2009, Clare turned up in this little number...

I got it. Michael Dyer wrote in The Age recently about this number...

"SHE used to be such a nice, straight, modern pop star. Remember the 2006 ARIA Awards? There was a Clare Bowditch for the whole family. Cheerfully pregnant and pure of voice between that nice Kasey Chambers and straight Bernard Fanning; gratefully collecting her best female artist trophy to the pleasing acoustic strains of a heartbreaking ballad. For a minute there, Australia had her safely pegged. Then she went weird.

 

Last November, Bowditch rolled up at the ARIAs wearing several pairs of sunglasses at once, a voluminous frock of plastic bin liners and the commercially questionable legend "BIGGER THAN THE $$$" inked across her bosom."

Happy to let the other girls look pretty and vacuous, CB was in fact subverting, self-promoting, playing, messing, taunting and gimmicking all at once in bin liner couture. Don't box her in.

Last night, in a not overly crowded Forum, I saw another moment in CB's evolution. The crowd was older, perhaps evolving as she is, perhaps just a broader mix as CB's profile as a political, social and cultural activist increases (in fact Catherine Deveny was making out with her boyf right in front of me - a sure sign of being culturally significant?). And CB, whilst ever the raconteur, was more contained, self-sovereigning - she didn't need us, the crowd, to feed her energy. She has the wattage to power the entire planet. And it appears effortless. The planets, the others on stage, talented and terrific in their own right, can only orbit around her formidable presence.

Great at banter and witty repartee, it seems Clare Bowditch can hold her own in rhetoric too. Long live the Queen.